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The best part of Masters of the Air might also be the worst: the Apple TV+ has a gargantuan cast of handsome, talented, young actors. It’s a show where Austin Butler goes shirtless to cool off in the heat of the African sun. Callum Turner gets to spend a sloppy, sexy night with Cold War standout Joanna Kulig. Oodles of strapping drama school graduates take to World War II bombers to fight Nazis. Nicknames like “Bubbles” and “Baby Face” are thrown at side characters with loving gusto. Everyone in theses planes, at some point, covers their chiseled cheek bones with oxygen masks. At a certain point, it becomes nigh on impossible to tell these dozens of hot young white dude actors sporting World War II regulation hair cuts apart. You start to find yourself spiraling, toggling between the insanely log cast list on Masters of the Air‘s Wikipedia page and multiple tabs open to Google Image Search for random actors’ names. Then, Apple TV+’s Masters of the Air offers you a reprieve: Saltburn standout Barry Keoghan and his weird little face show up and finally you can tell at least one of the guys apart from everyone else.
Much has been made of Barry Keoghan’s unconventional good looks over the years. There are Reddit threads and social media posts celebrating his status as a “weird face king.” It’s true. Barry Keoghan has a distinctive look that has hitherto landed him a series of unsettling roles in everything from The Killing of a Sacred Deer to The Green Knight. He’s also proven he has intoxicating charisma in projects like The Eternals, and the ability to expose heartbreaking vulnerability, as in his Oscar-nominated turn in The Banshees of Inisherin. And while a lot of the discourse following his leading man turn in Saltburn focused on another distinctive body part, Keoghan’s face is a potent weapon in his arsenal as an actor. It ensures that he never gets lost in a crowd. He pops. And that sort of face is exactly what Masters of the Air, and Hollywood in general, needs more of.
Keoghan plays Lt. Curtis Biddick, a real-life member of the 100th Bomb Group, a bomber unit in the Eighth Air Force during World War II. While early episodes of Masters of the Air focus intensely on best friends Major Gale “Buck” Cleven (Austin Butler) and Major John “Bucky” Egan (Callum Turner), Biddick quickly becomes tight with the confident airmen. Like them, he has a penchant for great flying, a slightly cocksure attitude, and total devotion to his crew. Unlike them, however, his face never gets lost in the crowd of handsomely anodyne-looking actors surrounding Buck and Bucky at all times. No, that’s because Barry Keoghan thankfully has a unique face.
The conventional wisdom is that people on television should be, well, conventionally good-looking. Masters of the Air sort of undercuts this assumption by hiring a ton of guys with cologne ad looks to play real-life servicemen. Are they easy on the eyes? Yes. Is it easy to distinguish who’s who, especially in tense aerial battle sequences? Nope. Which is why when you see Barry Keoghan on screen, a tiny valve of tension is released. You know exactly who Curtis Biddick is. Ergo, you are invested in what’s happening to his character rather than stressed out trying to remember who he is.
Hollywood needs more interesting faces like Barry Keoghan. They provoke intense reactions, which helps with storytelling, and stand out from a crowd. You remember Barry Keoghan in a way you don’t necessarily recall a guy who looks like another guy who might also look like a cloned version of his famous actor father. The oodles of handsome young actors in Masters of the Air might blend together in my mind, but I know and remember and am invested in Barry Keoghan’s Lt. Curtis Biddick now.
