Luvvies, don’t you just love them? OK, don’t answer that. It may be my imagination playing tricks on me, but there seems to be more purveyors of “the craft” than ever before, largely, I suspect, due to the explosion in streaming platforms. And, let’s not forget the social media monster, giving actorly types the perfect stage to offload their deepest thoughts and restless creative angst.
So I couldn’t resist a chuckle when I read about Scots acting legend Brian Cox’s admission that his role as media mogul Logan Roy in Succession has affected him so much that he now has to fight the urge to constantly swear.
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Now, I’ve never met him, but I’m willing to take a punt and suggest the gruff Dundonian wasn’t exactly unaccustomed to dropping the odd F-bomb prior to landing the part, but I’m also prepared to accept that playing a brutish billionaire by day is bound to leave the swear jar at home overflowing with dollars by the end of the week.
Although Cox’s tribulations are trivial by comparison, he wasn’t the only star in recent weeks to have allowed the professional to stray into the personal. Indeed, Will “Muhammad Ali” Smith’s initial justification for thumping Chris Rock centred on his portrayal of Richard Williams, another “fierce defender of his family” the actor’s mangled thought process reasoned.
Ay, there’s the rub, to keep the thespian theme going, for, you may ask, is it not an occupational hazard that any “great actor” will be so subsumed in the character that it is impossible not to “live the role”? So-called “method” actors litter Hollywood, with famous luminaries of the Stanislavski system including De Niro and Pacino, who are prepared to go to exceptional lengths to ground themselves in real experiences.
Indeed, Daniel Day-Lewis pushes the theory to the extreme – spending three days in solitary confinement without any water for In the Name of the Father; refusing to go anywhere without his wheelchair during the filming of My Left Foot; learning to use traditional mining gear for There Will Be Blood, to mention just a few examples of his dedication.
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But not everyone is convinced. The Office’s Martin Freeman described Jim Carrey’s Man on the Moon portrayal of the late Andy Kaufman “narcissistic” and “highly amateurish”, adding he should have been fired for such “self-aggrandising” indulgence. Carrey, who spent four months never breaking character and insisted on being called “Andy” off-set, said Kaufman spoke to him “telepathically”.
Playwright and director David Mamet doesn’t pull any punches in his blunt and unsparingly honest guide to acting in his book, True and False. In it he said: “The actor does not need to ‘become’ the character. The phrase, in fact, has no meaning. There is no character. There are only lines upon a page. They are lines of dialogue meant to be said by the actor. When he or she says them simply, in an attempt to achieve an object more or less like that suggested by the author, the audience sees an illusion of a character upon the stage.”
But it is to one of the most famous off-camera interactions in cinema history that I leave you to draw your own conclusions on the matter. Facing a gruelling scene for Marathon Man in which his character hadn’t slept for three days, Dustin Hoffman told co-star Laurence Olivier that he, too, hadn’t slept for 72 hours in preparation for his performance. “My dear boy,” replied Olivier, “why don’t you try acting?”
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