When it comes time for a Hollywood actor to bear his chest, it's nowadays assumed he'll shave it all down. Blame on the MCU trend of super-cut action heroes having chests as smooth as action figures. But it's prevalent enough that when someone dares to go au naturel (say, Mark Ruffalo in his Avengers chest-out scenes), it doesn't go unnoticed. This may be why I couldn't overlook the chest hair on display in Haunted Mansion.
And it turns out, there's more to it than meets the eye.
In Haunted Mansion, LaKeith Stanfield (Sorry to Bother You, Jesus and the Black Messiah) stars as Ben Matthias, a skeptical scientist who is called into the eponymous building to capture evidence of ghosts. In his encounters with the house's living residents, a charming single mom (Rosario Dawson) and her shy son (Chase Dillon), Ben wears his heart on his sleeve. But beneath his low-cut shirts, he wears a proud carpet of chest hair. And Haunted Mansion director Justin Simien has thoughts on the matter.
SEE ALSO: Justin Simien defends his controversial 'Haunted Mansion' red carpet appearance"I, too, am obsessed with this particular topic — and specifically for Black men," Simien said in an interview with Mashable, when asked about the prominence of Stanfield's chest hair in Haunted Mansion.
"That's a look that comes out of the 1970s, the so-called Blaxploitation period," Simien explained, "but which is really just an independent experimental period of Black film where you see these men — their edges are not crispy, which is a Black phrase to talk about the edge of our hair. And they have what we sometimes colloquially call 'taco meat,' which is the little curlies [on their chests].
"That's a version of Black masculinity that I just feel attracted to personally," the Haunted Mansion helmer said, "but also that represents the way I find my own Black masculinity. And, yeah, I naturally just lean that direction. It wasn't a Trojan horse or anything, but it literally is a thing I think about a lot. Like, 'Why does everybody have to be all smooth and perfect and shaped?'"
Rosario Dawson, Tiffany Haddish, LaKeith Stanfield, and Owen Wilson in "Haunted Mansion." Credit: Disney EnterprisesSuch fastidiousness to look perfect wouldn't have been suited to Ben, a Black hero who is struggling with grief and isolation in the film's first act. While the Black masculinity presented in '70s films was an influence on Ben's look, so was Stanfield's own personal style.
"There's a casualness to taking up space that one finds in those '70s movies," Simien said, "that is kind of replaced by an anxiety about how one looks and being absolutely perfect that I just wanted to do away with. And LaKeith is already that — he already comes into the room with that natural style. And all I had to really do is kind of let him be him, let him be a co-pilot in terms of his look and his styling, and the rest of it sort of came together: the chest hair, tattoos, the beard, the whole thing without it all just being perfect, crispy, edgy, edgy."
Simien noted this aesthetic distinguishes Ben from the male characters in his Netflix spinoff series, Dear White People, "where everyone is just immaculately beautiful, cheekbones." For Haunted Mansion, Simien said, "It was exciting to put a different aesthetic of Black masculinity forth."
The movie's exploration of Black masculinity isn't only skin (or chest hair) deep. "If I'm being honest," Simien mused, "[Ben's story] really was a big reason why I wanted to do the movie." In Haunted Mansion, Ben — despite his early reluctance — begins to form a bond with Travis, the young Black boy who lives in the ghost-plagued home with his mother, Gabbie. With them, a heartbroken Ben might find a new lease on life.
"At the heart of the story," Simien explained, "is this guy who realizes that his best way forward is to be the kind of father figure [to Travis] that he never had or got to be. I thought, 'Wow, that's it. [With] a Black man at the center of that, and he has to feel his emotions and his feelings — like, that's radical without anyone realizing quite how radical it is.'"
"And, really, that is tied up in the chest there for me," Simien said. No pun intended.
See LaKeith Stanfield (and his chest hair) in Haunted Mansion, opening in theaters July 28.
