As one of the world’s top two soccer players, Cristiano Ronaldo has one of the most famous faces on the planet. He appears on underwear ads, video games, and shaving commercials across the globe, from the US, to China. In Portugal, he’s a demigod, but he’s even a draw as far away as Japan, where his ultra-recognizable face is used to sell dubious mouth-toning devices.
It’s a face that’s memorable to everyone, it seems, except the person who was recently tasked with recreating it in bronze. Ronaldo’s global success had inspired the renaming of an airport in his native Madeira islands — an event celebrated with a bust of Ronaldo’s head, commissioned to take pride of place at the airport itself.
I defy you not to feel better after viewing this picture of Cristiano Ronaldo alongside his portrait bust. pic.twitter.com/kBCc7RtoUC
— Tom Sutcliffe (@tds153) March 29, 2017
At least, it’s meant to be Ronaldo. The finished product makes the famously handsome man into something of a monster, squaring his head, shrinking his eyes, and inflating his bones to horrific levels. It looks like someone having a bad reaction to hair dye, or like the Goonies’ Sloth after some partially successful plastic surgery, and as is to be expected in these situations, the internet went wild.
IT trailer’s gonna give me nightmares pic.twitter.com/MRR2mJNLns
— nick (@nick_pants) March 30, 2017
The photoshops were almost immediate, depicting Calamity Ronaldo (as I’d like him to be known) as Batman’s Two-Face, Mass Effect’s eerily animated main character, Han Solo frozen in carbonite, BioShock’s Andrew Ryan, and as IT, the monster hiding in the sewers. Others went the other way, mapping the unheimlich contours of the bust’s face onto the real man’s real face, making his head lumpen and his eyes scream “kill me.”