Chris Parnell’s Yassified Movie Poster Is Weirding Everybody Out

We all love Chris Parnell, thanks to his work on Saturday Night Live, his vocal performance as Jerry Smith on Rick and Morty and, of course, all of his free medical advice from 30 Rock. After years of reliably hilarious performances, Parnell is now taking a slightly more dramatic turn in the upcoming dramedy In Fidelity, which is all about a married couple who decide to “test the romantic boundaries of their monogamous relationship” with an open marriage. 

While the movie won’t be released until November, the promotional push for In Fidelity has been turning heads on social media, and not in the best way. Specifically, everyone is pretty weirded out by the character poster featuring, as critic Charles Bramesco put it, “smooth Parnell.”

Others noticed that “Smooth Chris Parnell” works perfectly when copy and pasted into one particular Michael Jackson song.

Okay, there’s a lot to unpack here. First of all, Parnell has seemingly slimmed down a bit, and his hair is grayer than back in his Dr. Spaceman days. Even a few months ago, people were taking notice of Parnell’s “silver fox” status. But his real face clearly looks nothing like the face on the poster. The botched yassification seemingly caused some fans to mistake the actor for Game of Thrones’ Aiden Gillen and Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn.

Even aside from the fact that the face on the poster doesn’t look like Chris Parnell, it also just doesn’t look human. Like, what’s going on with his eyes? Those eyes don’t even look like they belong to the same face.

Giving Parnell’s mug the airbrushed Heavy Metal cover art treatment is especially odd considering the movie it’s promoting. In Fidelity seems as though it’s very much about an aging couple taking stock of their lives, and is presumably targeted at older audiences. So why CGI Parnell’s wrinkles away when his age is inexorably tied to the premise of the movie? 

This graphic technique wasn’t reserved purely for Parnell’s poster either, his co-stars also received uncanny valley-esque digital makeovers. Even Willow Shields, who plays Parnell’s 24-year-old daughter, even ended up with a poster that makes her character look like a haunted Hot Topic mannequin. 

In Fidelity is hardly the first movie to release a horrifically photoshopped poster which, in the industry, is known as “The Travolta Technique.”

Incidentally, the movie’s primary poster features a much more realistic image of Parnell. 

To be totally fair, we haven’t seen In Fidelity yet. So for all we know, the ending contains a surprise twist in which it’s revealed that Boomer polyamory inexplicably causes all of the characters to contract that Benjamin Button disease. 

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