‘UGLIES’ Exclusive: Laverne Cox Defends Her Character’s Cosmetic Surgery Mandate, ‘It’s A Reflection Of What’s Going On In The World Right Now’

The film stars Joey King, Chase Stokes, Keith Powers, Brianne Tju, and Laverne Cox. Based on Scott Westerfield’s novel of the same name, UGLIES introduces audiences to a futuristic world that imposes a cosmetic surgery at 16. The story centers around a young woman named Tally (Joey King) who is eager for her turn to receive her surgery and join the rest of society. But when a friend runs away, Tally embarks on a journey to save her that upends everything she thought she wanted.

BOSSIP spoke to Laverne Cox spoke about her role in UGLIES, Dr. Cable, who some might say is the villain of the project. It turns out that Cox disagrees.

“I think at the end of the day she wants to create a perfect society where everyone is equal, where no one is discriminated against because of the way they look,” Cox told BOSSIP. “Obviously her methods have some ethical issues but I don’t think I could play a character if I didn’t feel like what she was doing — if I don’t feel justified in it. Ultimately I [Dr. Cable] want power and control for sure and the fact that she’s chosen, of all the things that she could do, to create an equal society. It’s that she’s chosen beauty, that she’s chosen pretty and constructed this society around uglies, pretties, mid pretties, it speaks to the power of beauty. I think in our in our culture that consciously or unconsciously we make decisions about people based on how they look. Pretty privilege is real. There’s studies that show prettier people make more money, have more opportunities it’s just a real thing. So she’s just kind of acknowledging the world the way it is and finding a way to make it more equal. Obviously there is a resistance to that. There’s the smoke and she has to handle that and she goes about doing that by any means necessary.”

“In the book, Scott says she has these wolf eyes, so I thought a lot about wolves and how they are both predatory but very protective of their their cubs. We love doing animal work as an actor. Dangerous misinformation? I hadn’t thought about it that way. There is propaganda for sure. Yeah absolutely. That’s her world, that’s the world she’s created and is it misinformation? I think it could certainly be looked at that way but there’s a whole system in place that she’s created that places emphasis on love is that wrong? A homogenized society? Probably. Laverne would say ‘definitely,’ but from Dr. Cable’s perspective it’s about creating an equal society right? So in her mind and I’m the character so obviously it’s problematic to like make everyone the same and sort of control their minds in the process, that’s a deep problem, but it also is a reflection of what’s going on in the world right now. We have so much misinformation, so much emphasis on filters and beauty. People are literally taking their face-app’d versions of themselves to plastic surgeons, instead of taking a picture of a celebrity, they’re taking a picture of their filtered self in to plastic surgeons. So this is right now. I mean we’re kind of living that right now.”

Since UGLIES is based on a novel, we also asked Cox about the books that helped shape her when she was a young adult and she named many of the classics that she was taught in her freshman year of high school, Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitgerald and Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman as well as short stories by Salinger.

What books from young adulthood helped shape the person who you’ve become?