At this point, we all expect Madame Tussauds to release a number of botched wax figures on an annual basis. For several years now the haunted wax museum, which has locations across the globe, has unveiled dozens of sculptures of celebrities that look like they were created from memory.
Its latest masterpiece is a wax figure of Nicki Minaj, released in Berlin this week, which made an unfortunate attempt to depict the rapper from her 2014 video “Anaconda.” It fails (see above). TMZ claims that the Berlin figure is actually the same statue that was unveiled at a Vegas museum location in 2015, but that one — which Nicki Minaj was a fan of, and shared widely at the time — seemed to bear a much more accurate resemblance to flesh-and-blood Minaj:
Perhaps it is the same one, and was damaged in transit and then retouched by someone who has never heard of Nicki Minaj? That said, a fully messed-up statue from Tussauds is on brand: Consider Beyoncé’s disastrous tribute from 2017, or Naomi Campbell’s, which looks more like a retail-store mannequin. And lest we forget it, Ben Affleck’s unsettling wax likeness, which shows him gazing off sadly into the distance:
To be fair to Madame Tussauds, all of these figures bear a vague resemblance to the celebrities in question, but in the way that C-list actors portraying them in a Lifetime movie do. Like, you can see it, but something is off. Very off.
