A little while ago I found a website called 'tall tales & short stories' and it featured an interview with Mortal Engines author Philip Reeve.
The article was six years old and the site is now defunct but I did copy Reeve's thoughts on Hester Shaw and her scar with the view to using it somehow one day.
So here we go...
The interview reveals quite the insight into why Reeve did the role reversal that many books and film shy from. That role reversal being making the female lead quite genuinely ugly.
Let me repeat that for you. Ugly, disfigured and NOT PRETTY.
Name a famous movie or book in the last 10 years where the main character is truly hideously ugly.
I will wait.
If you found one, good on ya. Maybe Aileen Wuornos in Monster?
One example. Yippe Kay Aye.
In a modern media landscape entirely obsessed with flawless aesthetics, a protagonist whose face is a literal map of her trauma is revolutionary. Her disfigurement is not a quirky character trait or a minor blemish. It is a daily, agonizing reality that shapes every single interaction she has. When Thaddeus Valentine murdered her mother Pandora for a piece of Old Tech, he didn't just casually scratch seven-year-old Hester. His sword strike severed her nose, destroyed one of her eyes, and left her mouth permanently wrenched open in a terrifying sneer. It is a level of physical trauma that completely isolates her from normal human society.
Regardless, Hester Shaw is the clear fan favourite when it comes to the Mortal Engines series. While part of her might want to live a happy, healthy life, the Hyde to her Jackal is that she is a murderous wee thing with a hair trigger for some good old fashioned ultraviolence.
Being raised by Shrike, a resurrected cyborg assassin with blades for hands, meant she learned to hunt and survive in the harsh Out-Country rather than how to process her emotions. Imagine being a traumatized child whose only parental figure is a towering, undead machine incapable of shedding a tear. Shrike did not teach Hester how to heal. He taught her how to hunt, how to scavenge, and how to weaponize her hatred. This brutal environment forged a young woman who viewed her own survival as the absolute only metric of success. She doesn't hesitate to kill to protect the few things she cares about.
When she finally encounters Tom Natsworthy, a sheltered London historian, their dynamic is entirely dictated by her physical and emotional walls. The red scarf she wears is not merely a fashion statement or a dust filter. It is a profound psychological shield. When Tom eventually buys her a replacement scarf, it represents one of the most poignant moments of acceptance in modern fantasy literature. He sees the monster she believes she is, and he actively chooses to stay.
And she's a bad mother...
As we see later in the series with her teenage daughter Wren, Hester's deep-seated self-loathing and raging paranoia make it nearly impossible for her to show normal maternal affection. She is constantly terrified of losing Tom, which twists her priorities into very dark, obsessive places. She will sacrifice the world to save him, even if it means alienating her own child.
She has also bad typing skills.
There, I said it. For those who know the lore from Infernal Devices, Hester literally bludgeons a man to death using a heavy Old Tech typewriter to protect her family. She is a woman of sheer, brutal willpower.
For decades, the dedicated Mortal Engines community has produced incredible fan art that honors Reeve's original, brutal description. These artists understand that smoothing over her jagged edges does a massive disservice to the fierce, unyielding survivor she was written to be.
So with that in mind, here is what Reeve said of Hester's scar after this interview question:
The main female character, Hester, in the Mortal Engines series is facially disfigured which I find an interesting, but welcome, choice for a female lead. Was this a conscious decision made at the outset of writing the first book or did it evolve along the way? And what prompted this decision?
Reeve's answer:
Women warriors are a bit of a cliche in Science Fiction and Fantasy, and they tend to be very glamorous or at least good looking.
But it struck me that people who live by their wits in wastelands tend not to be that glamorous or good-looking, and who cares about beautiful people anyway?
An artist's impression of Hester So I decided right from the start to make Hester ugly, and I liked the idea that the hero would slowly fall in love with her anyway, which is far more interesting than having two gorgeous people seeing each other across a crowded room and falling in love.
Then it seemed to make sense to give Hester a scar, which she's received at the hands of the villain, so there's her initial motivation, revenge, right there on her face; she's like Captain Ahab with his missing leg!
But I didn't want it to be a little cosmetic scar. The Hollywood way of dealing with facial disfigurement is always to have somebody who's a bit messed up seen from one angle but is still gorgeous from most others.
So Hester's scar is really grotesque; I didn't want her to be pretty from any angle!
I think in the first book my idea was that actually, under this hideous exterior, she's lovely and sweet, but when I went back to write the sequel I thought that someone who had been through what she has, and looks as she does, probably wouldn't be sweet and well-adjusted, so she goes further and further off the rails as the series progresses, though I hope she remains sympathetic, and even attractive in a Ripley-ish way (Tom Ripley, that is, not Ellen*).
When the first trailer came out, we raised concerns that the trailer shows Hester with two eyes. We now know that Reeve's honorable vision of a key female character has been trumped by Hollywood's needs for beauty and marketability. It's actually stirred quite a few people up!
*As in Ellen Ripley from the Alien films.
When Hester was just seven years old, Thaddeus Valentine broke into her home to steal a dangerous Old Tech computer brain (the MEDUSA weapon) from her mother, Pandora Shaw. After murdering Pandora, Valentine slashed young Hester across the face with his sword to permanently silence her, leaving her for dead in the out-country.
In Philip Reeve's original novels, the sword strike was utterly devastating. Hester is described as having a horrific, jagged wound that severed her nose, completely destroyed one of her eyes, and left her mouth permanently wrenched open in a terrifying, toothy sneer.
The film's producers and director Christian Rivers made a calculated Hollywood decision to soften her appearance to appeal to a wider cinematic audience. Instead of a missing nose and eye, actress Hera Hilmar sports a prominent, but far less gruesome, jagged red scar running down her cheek and jawline, allowing her to remain conventionally attractive.
Warning: Spoilers for both the Mortal Engines film and the original book series below. Tread carefully across the Great Hunting Ground!
For years leading up to the film's release, many passionate Mortal Engines fans speculated that Hester Shaw would not have her truly horrific, face-destroying scar in the Hollywood adaptation. In Philip Reeve's original novel, Thaddeus Valentine's sword strike didn't just give her a cool cheek scratch. It was a brutal attack that cleaved away her nose, destroyed one of her eyes, and left her mouth permanently twisted into a grotesque sneer.
When the very first trailer came out, we were collectively nervous. Even though Hester had a red scarf covering her face, she clearly had two fully functioning eyes. Also, why does she have a red scarf before she meets Tom? In the deep lore of the books, he gave it to her much later as a profound moment of bonding, specifically because he recognized her deep self-consciousness about her deformity.
Many fans thought this extreme physical disfigurement was a key pillar of the character. Indeed, it brilliantly turned the tired cliche about the young adult heroine always being conventionally pretty completely on its head.
Turns out, in the Peter Jackson produced cinematic universe, Hester's scar 'tis just but a scratch' compared to how it is vividly described in the novel.
Author Philip Reeve, who masterfully created the character, was quite clear on her scarification and his creative motives when he said:
"But it struck me that people who live by their wits in wastelands tend not to be that glamorous or good looking, and who cares about beautiful people anyway?
So I decided right from the start to make Hester ugly, and I liked the idea that the hero would slowly fall in love with her anyway, which is far more interesting than having two gorgeous people seeing each other across a crowded room and falling in love.
Then it seemed to make sense to give Hester a scar, which she's received at the hands of the villain, so there's her initial motivation, revenge, right there on her face; she's like Captain Ahab with his missing leg!"
Because of this fearless, raw depiction, Hester Shaw became quite the iconic, if not a cult figure, for those that love the Mortal Engines series. She isn't a typical noble hero. She is driven by feral survival instincts and deep-seated rage.
I love her for the simple, unhinged reason that she literally killed a man with a heavy Old Tech typewriter in Infernal Devices to protect her family. She is a ruthless force of nature.
But, let us face reality. There is a massive amount of money to be made with a big budget Mortal Engines movie, and Hollywood studio logic dictates that you cannot sell a massive tentpole film with an "ugly" woman as the romantic lead.
You apparently just can't, even though Charlize Theron literally won an Oscar for playing a physically transformed, ugly serial killer in Monster.
So enter Hera Hilmar, an apparently lovely lass and a talented actress deemed worthy of playing Hester Shaw (though there has been absolutely no mention on Twitter about her lethal typewriting skills).
So director Christian Rivers and Peter Jackson sat down and probably went, "We can't make bank with our lead looking like a horror movie victim. We need some eye candy, right? So what if we just heavily toned down that scar?"
And the producers started laughing all the way to their bank.
Then they officially published the promotional pictures of Tom and Hester.
And the loyal fan boys and fan girls absolutely lost their minds. They went, "You completely ruined it, PJ" (literally, I saw much more colorful versions of that sentiment trending on Twitter). To the hardcore readers, erasing the severity of the scar felt like erasing the severity of her trauma.
Sure, I have tweeted some of that exact sentiment myself and loudly wondered about what a grittier adaptation could have been. But then I was sitting down with a nice hoppy home-brewed beer after emptying the dishwasher, folding some towels, and I thought: why does a physical scar really matter to her core identity?
I mean really?
Hester has a million deeply ingrained psychological reasons to hate herself and the world. A scar on her face is but one physical manifestation of her pain.
If the central idea of Hester's character is that she is completely 'broken' internally, then it doesn't matter exactly how she looks on the outside, what truly matters is how the movie sets up how she feels. I think I would be pretty pissed off if my parents had both been murdered in front of me, and I then had to spend my formative years wandering a wasteland being raised by a kind of zombie cyborg called Shrike that used to be a man and currently has hands for knives. For the record, Shrike is basically the complete, terrifying opposite of C3PO.
That trauma is reason enough to be the wildly unhappy, moody and even murderous Hester Shaw we all adore.
Surely?
So, this Mortal Engines fan has decided to get with the program and simply accept that Hester will not have a grotesque scar in the film.
And you know what? I am going to guess that the Mortal Engines book has sold, say, 400,000 copies globally. I really have no idea. Let us say 10,000 of those readers REALLY CARE about the accuracy of the scar.
OK?
Those 10,000 purists are going to bitch and moan exactly like those Star Wars fans did about The Last Jedi. No matter what the filmmakers do, they will complain.
But if Peter Jackson and Christian Rivers want to make 500 million dollars bank on this film, they have got to get bums on cinema seats. The vast majority of those bums will not have read the book, they will not care about a missing eye they never knew existed, and they will simply enjoy a visually spectacular film where the giant city of London runs around on tracks trying to eat other smaller cities.
So no gruesome scar for you, just a beautifully realized, bad ass Anna Fang instead.
So, let us just hope Hera Hilmar's Hester has a really, really good bitchy resting face, because that is the true spirit of Hester Shaw.
In the novels, Hester uses a red scarf primarily to cover her horrific facial scar and hide her disfigurement from a world that judges her. It is later given to her by Tom Natsworthy as a sign of affection and acceptance, cementing their bond.
Hester's scar was inflicted by Thaddeus Valentine, London's Head Historian. When Hester was a young child, Valentine murdered her mother, Pandora Shaw, to steal a piece of dangerous Old Tech, and struck Hester across the face with his sword to silence her.
In Philip Reeve's books, Hester is described as missing her nose, losing an eye, and having a twisted, sneering mouth. In the 2018 Peter Jackson produced film adaptation, the filmmakers significantly toned down the violence of the injury, leaving actress Hera Hilmar with two functioning eyes and a more visually palatable jagged scar across her cheek and chin.
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| An artist's interpretation of book Hester Shaw's scar |
