Good Acting
Someone in an interview recently asked me if I’m a good actor. I can answer that question, but what is my answer worth?
“Are you a good actor?”
“Yes I am. I’ll pinky swear to it. I’ll get my mom to sign a note to that effect. Oh, I promise promise promise I’m good.”
It means nothing. Because anyone can say they are an actor and if you’re going to say you’re an actor you might as well say you are a good actor.
If you said you were a lawyer I could say “Did you pass the bar exam?” and if you said no I could say “You’re no lawyer! You’re a student of law! Oh, now I’ll never get my kid back!”
If you said you were a doctor I could say “Well, do you have an M.D. and a license to practice medicine?” and if you said no I would immediately say “Then sew me back up. This operation was a mistake.”
But if you said you were an actor I could say “Have you ever been in anything I’ve seen?” and then you could say “Did you see My Rawhide Summer?” and I could say “No, what is that?” and you could say “It’s a movie” and I could say “Was it in theaters?” and then you could get a little annoyed with me because why am I busting your chops? and then you could say “Uh, no. I mean, it was in one theater” and then I could say “Oh, like a student film?” and you could sigh like a really long exhausted sigh and say “Uh, not quite” and then I could say “Did I piss you off or something? I’ve just never heard of your movie. The title makes it sound like it’s a porno by the way.” and then you could say “It is a porno! It was a very limited release gay porn film!” and then I might say:
“You’re not an actor! You just have sex on film!”
But I’d be wrong. You are an actor. That counts.
Some readers might say “Well, I don’t consider a guy who made one porno film a good actor because a good actor will be acting on Broadway or in a movie that gets wide release or at least be in some national commercial.” But what you’re really talking about there is success. You can’t equate success with good acting because many of the most successful actors are not GOOD actors. William Shatner, Vincent Price, Vin Diesel, Drew Barrymore. You can’t even call what they do acting. They’re Shatnering. Dieseling. Pricing it up. Barrymoring the hell out of us. But they’re not acting.
I’d love to see Vincent Price explain his acting style. ”I mug at the camera. Then I mince. Mug. Mince. Mug. Mince. My favorite lines are ones that rhyme!”
Drew Barrymore: “I just say the words in the line one at a time in the order they’re written with no thought toward what they mean or what the character is trying to do. Then I cross my fingers and hope people find me adorable.” And we do! It works! The woman is 35 years old.
Some actors are good in certain roles but bad everywhere else. Keanu Reeves is a deplorable actor in most films but he’s great in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and The Matrix. He’s basically great in any film where his main emotion is “WHOAH!” Keanu Reeves is a rich man’s Joey Lawrence. Lawrence just said “Whoah!” but when Keanu Reeves says “Whoah!” you feel, like “Whoah.” You know?
So the question “Are you a good actor?” is really not a good one, even if you’re just asking it to gauge someone’s reaction to the question. The whole enterprise of acting is so amorphous and strange you can’t really learn anything from the question.
I am put in mind of a group exercise we once did in an acting class I was in. This particular exercise is very representative of the kind of stuff we used to do in acting class. You were given a partner and you and the partner stood on opposite sides of the room facing each other. Without using ANY VERBAL OR PHYSICAL CUES the one partner was supposed to summon the other partner and have them walk across the room. The teacher was serious about this. He’d catch us if we were ‘cheating.’ ”Clare, I saw you look more intensely at Sarah. Remember NO verbal or physical cues.”
I asked “So we’re literally supposed to summon our partner with our mind?” and the teacher looked at me like I had just asked a rude question and then said “…Yes.”
My partner was doing the summoning. So I had to wait for her to NOT make a facial expression and then walk over to her when I thought she was mentally summoning me. Everytime I walked over there she’d go “No.” ”Hunh-unh.” ”Sorry.”
I was like “You’re not summoning me at all!” and she said “I did earlier but you missed it! You just stood there!”
And what were we even talking about? It was all MAGIC!
So I guess my point is that a better question than “Are you a good actor?” is “Are you good at magic?”
