Before & After Pics Show Erin Moriarty's Face Transformation

When Erin Moriarty first stole our hearts as Starlight in the first season of "The Boys," the conversation mostly revolved around how naturally she fit the role. By season 3, that conversation had curdled into something uglier: a fixation on her face, proving yet again that there's a special kind of cruelty reserved for women in the public eye. Moriarty has been navigating that particular minefield for quite a while, and the vicious online vitriol aimed at her got so heated that she even found herself on the growing roster of stars Megyn Kelly has angered with her unsolicited plastic surgery speculation.

Looking at side-by-side photos, Moriarty has clearly changed over the years. The transformation hasn't been so drastic as to make her unrecognizable like some celebrities, but she does look different.

Vivien Killilea/Getty & Ron Adar/Shutterstock

Megyn Kelly chiming in on the discourse is actually more consequential than you might realize. When she called Moriarty's changed appearance a "sign of mental illness" on her podcast, the actress clapped back in a since-deleted Instagram post, and ultimately stepped away from the platform. "For a few months, I thought my career was over," she later told The New York Times. While the before-and-after photos aren't exactly emblematic of the most tragic plastic surgery transformations in Hollywood history, the drama may have done Moriarty more good than harm, and here's why.

The problem with this scrutiny is that many people don't know Erin Moriarty's struggle with Graves' disease; an autoimmune condition that can cause weight loss and other visible physical changes to your face and body. Of course, when you strip away the noise, it's true that comparative photos actually reveal some changes. Her more recent appearance shows sharper cheekbones, a much more defined nose tip, and notably different lips.

But the unrelenting criticism and harassment was apparently intense enough that Moriarty disabled her social media, and evidently feared for her professional future. By mid-2024, however, she had arrived at a point many fellow thespians reach after a sustained run of public punishment: Not giving it the power it once had over her, nor allowing the online trolls the satisfaction of a broken spirit. "I had left it on a note where I'd explicitly said that I had been heartbroken by the comments," she told The New York Times in the same interview. "Now, I'm not heartbroken. I'm galvanized."