Ron Perlman Cats

About

Ron Perlman Cats refers to a series of memes that revolves around cats that look like the Hellboy actor Ron Perlman due to the structure and shape of his face and expressions. Frequent posts referencing the similarities and meme genre as a whole involve photoshopping cat faces onto Ron Perlman's body to show how similar they are, among other memes and jokes, which have spread online since 2012.

Origin

As part of the early 2012 trend of Totally Looks Like, which came from the website TotallyLooksLike.com, Ron Perlman was matched with an image of a white Maine Coon cat. This image became a precursor to the genre and was posted on Twitter by user @Catz_R_cute^[1] on July 31st, 2012 (shown below).

In 1987, Ron Perlman starred in a TV show adaptation of Beauty and the Beast in which he played the role of Beast. As part of playing Beast, Perlman would undergo roughly four hours of makeup to make himself look half-man, half-Beast, which many speculate is why it's easy to see cats that look similar to him. This was notably highlighted in a TikTok by user @ahrman^[2] that was uploaded on October 23rd, 2021, which earned over 51,000 likes in two years (shown below).

Spread

Throughout the next few years, social media posts about cats that look like Ron Perlman continued to be made, often with either Maine Coon cats or reddish-orange housecats. It became so prevalent that a Fake Facebook Post meme began to circulate of Ron Perlman claiming that he knows he looks like a Maine Coon and to stop sending him a picture of a cat in a sink, which was reposted on September 25th, 2020, by Facebook user Cat Man Chris^[3] (shown below).

On February 2nd, 2020, Redditor u/The_Master_of_LOLZ^[4] uploaded a meme to the subreddit /r/okaybuddyretard that showed Perlman's head with his face missing, asking the viewer to fix the image by selecting one of the multiple different cat faces (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References