With the popularity of crime and hospital shows, there is now a huge demand for actors and actresses that can play corpses convincingly. That’s not easy. One twitch and the illusion is gone. (Assuming they aren’t actually dead. Some people would do anything to break into show business.) So, are there corpse acting classes now to go with stage fighting, etc. Are there actors who specialize in playing corpses?
Kevin Costner was a corpse in The Big Chill, and he seemed particularly wooden in some other movies I’ve seen him in.
There is “Dead Body Guy,” who has a website. I think his story was he wanted to be an real actor, but found it much too competitive, so he tried his hand at playing corpses. (Our company firewall won’t let me link to it directly, so I won’t try.)
In Six Feet Under (show about a funeral home), I believe they actually manufactured the corpses. Lord knows how; it was one of the extras on the DVDs I didn’t have the stomach to watch.
I have a friend who played a dead body onstage every night for weeks in a Chicago production of a Faulkner story (I think “As I Lay Dying”). She played dead onstage, while her pre-recorded voiceover narrated the play.
Playing dead on stage is not easy. I was in a production once (okay, I’ll admit it, it was in high school) where the character I played was blasted with a rifle. Having a flair for the dramatic, I flung my oversized frame through the air and landed on the stage with a thud that could be heard in the back row. I then had to remain motionless throughout the rest of the scene – about 15 minutes – while the soldiers who had “killed” me argued over divvying up the treasure I was carrying.
First you realize that the position you allowed yourself to land in is not terribly conducive to long-term comfort. Secondly your muscles begin to ache in the spots that hit the floor with the greatest force. Third, your nose inevitably begins to itch. Fourth, the sustained effort of remaining motionless under hot lights sends your sweat glands into overdrive, adding greatly to the itchiness. Fifth, you become acutely aware that members of the audience can see you breathing and that holding your breath for as long as possible doesn’t help. Sixth, your obnoxious co-stars start ad-libbing and it requires every ounce of concentration you can muster to keep from cracking up.
Yes, the glory days of high school theater.
Actually, as far as point five goes, I figured out a method for controlling breathing that worked extremely well. The trick is to push out somewhat with the muscles of your chest and stomach once you reach your “final” position. Then, when you inhale, you relax the muscles just a little. So even though your lungs are filling with air, there is enough room in your puffed-out torso to accommodate it. With a little practice, you can breath comfortably without any visible rise and fall of the chest. I had a number of people comment after seeing that particular show that they had been distracted from what the other actors were doing because they were waiting for me to breathe. Made great fodder for a verbal smackdown later on – “*You *have great acting talent? Dude, I was a freakin’ corpse and I upstaged you.”
Heaven forbid a corpse starts to corpse.
I’ll second Kizarvexius here- it’s really not easy. I just finished a run of Arsenic and Old Lace (A college production, which is not much above a high school one) where I was Mr. Spenalzo (the second body in the windowseat) and it’s hard to be carried, dropped, picked up, and finally dumped into a windowseat without moving a muscle. The actors even tossed me a little too far one night and I missed the windowseat entirely, which is great comedy but a nice bump on the back of my head, too.
A friend of mine was over from France, and watching CSI for the first time. There was a scene from inside the morgue locker where Grissom slams the door shut on the corpse inside, and the lighting switches to a blue (or was it green?) glow. My friend claimed that the corpse twitched when the door slammed, so I rewound the PVR, and sure enough, the actor visibly jerks at the noise. It was pretty funny.
God almighty, *does *it! I once played a corpse for a living history day at the museum in which I work. I swear, I probably go all day without scratching my nose, but the second the tourist groups started approaching the area where I could be seen, it would start itching madly.
I’d be a little upset were I a ticket holder. It’s like going to a musical only to find out that they’re using canned music. Or maybe this is kind of avant-gard art is above my head.
Marc
That would be dead ironic.
Are you using your diaphragm to breathe then? You have no direct muscular control over your lungs, except by contracting and expanding your ribcage and flexing your diaphragm.
I just learned that “corpse” was an acting term recently while browsing Wikipedia entries on Doctor Who episodes.
Hey, me too!
In the good old days of undergraduate repertory theater during the summer term at my university the people assigned to be “the corpse” would have what little fun they could by grabbing a passing actors ankle as they lay there stiffening. In, I think, Checkoff’s The Inspector General the favorite stunt was for the corpse to refuse to let go of the cord or scarf he had just been garrotted with. There was a fair amount of suppressed giggling on stage and in the wings.
Yes. I keep my stomach and ribcage flexed, and breathe with my diaphragm. As I inhale and exhale, there’s some give and take with the flexing of the muscles to prevent my chest from rising and falling. It takes a little practice, but the effect works well.
That has to be one of the worst jobs in history. You couldn’t fall asleep for fear of snoring.
Did she ask the director, “What’s my motivation here?”