explain to me the concept of "chemistry" between two romantic leads

Cafe Society
1

I will read sometimes in a movie review (especially for romantic comedies) that the two lead actors have “no chemistry”. How can you tell?

I have seen movies that were described as such, and usually it seems to me that the fault is bad acting and/or a bad script.

One example that prompted me to start this thread: I was talking about the movie Six Days Seven Nights with Harrison Ford and Anne Heche, and I remembered that the movie review said that the lead actors had no chemistry.

So what are the things that you see in a movie that make you say “those two had bad chemistry?” Since chemistry is a science, I expect a scientific definition. “I know it when I see it” is not good enough. :stuck_out_tongue:

2

Either miscasting or bad acting is what I blame. For whatever reason, I’m not buying the relationship. That doesn’t mean somebody else might not buy it.

For instance, I was never convinced anyone could ever fall in love with Meg Ryan, so the only rom-com that ever worked for me with her in the lead role was the one where they didn’t meet onscreen at all.

I feel pretty much the same about Harrison Ford as a romantic lead.

Worst example ever: Richard Dreyfus and Amy Irving in The Competition, miscasting PLUS bad acting.

NOTE: This is not a scientific explanation, sorry. The scientific explanation goes that their pupils did not dilate when they looked at each other; a good actor would have been able to do that.

3

It is hard to quantify but I agree it’s a result of miscasting or bad acting.

Check out The Bodyguard with Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston, and then watch Mr. And Mrs. Smith with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Huge difference.

4

Ask yourself this question – “does it look like the characters want to sleep with each other?” Not so much in what they say or what they do, but how they behave when they’re around each other. How they look at each other.

If the answer is yes, they have chemistry.

5

“Chemistry” basically means two components interact with each other in a way that causes a reaction. In films, “chemistry” between two characters occurs when they play off each other in a scene and you (e.g. the viewing audience) experience some emotional response to their interplay.

“Having no chemistry” simply means that the two characters interact in a scene and you feel indifferent. You don’t care about them one way or another.

If you’re watching a romantic comedy scene (take “Annie Hall” for instance), and you laugh at Alvy & Allen bickering, that’s good chemistry because their antics amused you.

Even a strong negative emotion can be good. So, if you’re watching “Mad Men” let’s say, and you think “Good Lord, I HATE that Betty Draper! I just want to rip that frigid bitch’s head off!” that’s still good chemistry, because watching her bicker with Don provoked an emotional response from you.

No chemistry is when you watch, say any Nora Ephron movie, and after a scene in which Tom Hanks & Meg Ryan are looking at each other with goo-goo eyes and you think “I wonder if I should paint my living room ceiling beige?” (or what TV execs dread “I wonder what’s on another channel?”)

6

I don’t know whether it is bad acting or that it is so hard to hide it when you don’t enjoy someone else’s company.

You can see the lack of chemistry when two actors are working together. They are working at their craft but they are working apart. If you assigned two such actors the task of painting a barn you might come back to find them toiling away on separate sides of the thing, not having any fun at all.

Two actors with chemistry assigned the same task might be found working along side each other, talking, enjoying each other’s company and not making it so much work.

It’s less a romantic thing and more of an attitude.

7

We are subconsciously aware of much more than we can perceive on a conscious level. Just like you tell when a smile is real and when it is fake but you can’t explain why.

A corollary of that is that you cannot consciously reproduce all off the physical indicia of a particular emotion unless you are feeling the emotion at the same time.

That is what distinguishes a good actor from a bad one. The good ones are able to feel the role they are playing and are therefore able to convincingly reproduce the outward indicators associated with it.

Therefore, you will get “chemistry” between 2 actors when either

  1. They are both excellent actors and can feel the emotions of their characters or
  2. They are humping like bunnies.
8

You know it when you see it, is all. Casting, writing, acting - bad chemistry can come from any or all of these. For example, Ocean’s Eleven has great chemistry between all the guys and zero chemistry between Julia Roberts and either of the two men she’s supposed to be involved with.

For a brief lesson on chemistry in movies, see Out of Sight. Prepare an essay for Monday. :slight_smile:

9

Actually, in the second instance there’ll sometimes be no chemistry between the leads when the camera’s rolling. There are plenty of examples of real-life couples who, when they planned romantic leads in a movie, suddenly became distant from one another. It was like at a subconscious level they decided to hold things back so the general public wouldn’t get an intimate glimpse of their private lives.

10

I’ve been watching old X-Files episodes, and it’s no wonder I wanted Mulder and Scully to end up together even during the first season, because they had wonderful chemistry.

Take this clip from the first season episode “Darkness Falls” – how close they’re sitting, the way David Duchovny is speaking so softly and looking at Gillian Anderson with a gentle look on his face, the way he holds eye contact with her toward the end of the clip…that gives the conversation a very intimate feel. All of his attention is on her, in a relaxed and companionable way – they appear at ease with each other, and he in particular seems to be enjoying her company. All this adds up to great chemistry. (Also, in other parts of the episode, I noticed that he is often touching her affectionately on the arm or shoulder whenever he walks past her – that too is a great contributor to the sense of their closeness.)

I think that’s really the key – the actors’ attention. It’s like in real life – when you meet people who focus their attention on you so intently that they make you feel like you’re the only person in the room, as far as the other person is concerned, you tend to like those people. When you’re watching two actors, I think you subconsciously look for this kind of focused attention. If, through body language (or tone of voice, etc.), you get the impression that the two are distracted from each other or don’t feel in tune with one another, you don’t buy their relationship.

11

If you can recall the old Polaroid commercial with Mariette Hartley and James Garner. THAT is chemistry

12

Ayup, that was going to be my example.

13

Short answer: is it easy or hard for you to imagine the two characters, once having found a private space, suddenly destroying furniture in their efforts to make love?

Long answer:

That’s not a very good example. That particular movie (and maybe her volcano one) was complicated by her whole straight to lesbian (with a side trip to random drugged wandering) back to straight conversion thing. She didn’t have super wonderful chemistry with Ford, but their chemistry wasn’t horrible either, the reports of bad chemistry were IMHO contrived artifacts of the tabloid reports on her private life at the time. So let’s cross that off as a good example.

Let me offer up Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. Nay, Meg Ryan and pretty much everyone. While she does have pretty good character-to-character chemistry, such as enjoyable banter, you never really get the sense that when these two find some private time that there will be some broken furniture.

Ehhh… it’s quantifiable, but the quantity is in units of “amount of chemistry”. Maybe too circular for you?

Let’s start at the beginning: do you understand, not only intellectually, but also experientially, the concept of romantic/sexual chemistry? Or even other forms of interpersonal chemistry?

I tend to find that it’s a bit fuzzy… I mean, sometimes it’s obvious - you have very similar interests, or you are each other’s preferred physical type, or whatever…

But other times… it exists as a thing unto itself. There can be a person who I would rate as attractive physically and my type, and/or we have similar interests to talk about, or a similar intellectual background, or whatever… but yet, interaction feels awkward. But the there is someone who is outside of your normal physical, emotional, intellectual, or spiritual “type”, or alternatively, there is someone who you have just met, and couldn’t possibly know anything about yet, and still, you feel instantly drawn to them, and you get tingly feelings in their presence and hey maybe you even get a little bit stupid… I mean, how do you explain that? It might be ultimately explainable, but if so, it’s something subliminal and/or subconscious, and therefore not easily explained off the cuff or by a lay person from anecdotal experience.

Back to movies…

  1. Obviously there is the “real world factor” - whatever the actors are up to is affecting your perception of the characters in the movie. This can be either negative (Ann Heche is really a lesbian or is she?) or positive (Brad left Jenn for Angelina!).

  2. They do have chemistry, it’s just a different chemistry then the reviewer was expecting. There’s sexual, romantic, emotional, intellectual, conversational, spiritual, origin based, and many other types of chemistry. Although ultimately they all boil down to some kind of attraction or noteworthy compatibility.

  3. Sometimes, you’re right, it is the script. A movie with a PG13 rating and mostly dialogue and post sex scenes is going to dampen the feeling of sexual chemistry. Also, a very popular trope is to make the eventual lovers transmute conflictual tension into eventual sexual tension (I hate you! No wait really I want your body but was resisting it!) - however, if the conflictual tension overpowers the eventual sexual tension, or overly makes one of the lovers unlikeable, the eventual chemistry can be weakened.

Any questions?

14

Actually, chemistry provides several possible units: you have moles (which are a way to count units) and you have reaction ratios (which can even involve more than two reagents, people in this case).

15

Darn. I can’t watch that clip, and you described it so beautifully.

But yes: it’s those little bits of body language which cannot be forced on an actor. If you tell an actor to casually touch on another actor’s shoulder casually, it doesn’t work; they have to do it naturally. Perhaps some actors can get so into their roles that they can do this unconscious body language stuff.

Take an example: on Firefly, Kayleigh has chemistry with several major characters, including Inara and Mal, but not with Simon, who’s supposed to be her big love.

Several people I know IRL have said the same, so it’s not just me. That tends to be the way - sometimes there are outliers where people see chemistry and others don’t, but there’s more often a general consensus about who has chemistry with whom. (And yes, of course there will be people who disagree; I did say a ‘general consensus.’)

Hell yeah. I really cannot explain it at all, but it does exist.

16

Since many of the answers relate to believablity, does that imply that there is a third person (the viewer) in the equation. For example, if I find Meg Ryan appealing (I do physically, her characters’ personality frequently annoy me) could I see chemistry where Hilarity N. Suze would not and we’d both be correct?

17

Great example.

To me, ‘chemistry’ in this context simply means that the actors are believable as a couple. There are probably a lot of things – bad acting, bad scripts, bad casting – that can lead to it, but that’s the simple answer: ‘not believable as a couple’ = ‘poor chemistry.’

Hartley and Garner were so believable in those commercials that people really thought they were actually married. That’s chemistry.

18

On soaps, it’s a standard rule that if two actors show chemistry, the writers will make them a couple. In his book Eight Years in Another World, writer Harding LeMay tells of trying to find a woman for Mackenzie Cory and not succeeding till he and Rachel Frame had one scene together. She gave him a sultry look, he responded with a grin, and a supercouple was born.

19

The strongest chemistry is when the actor and actress are in lust in real life.
Romances on the set are legendary. That energy bores into the camera.

Unfortunately they can’t cast a film and demand the actors hook up. But, it’s pure gold when it happens.

Remember Mickey Rourke and Carré Otis in Wild Orchid? Those two were screwing their brains out in real life. Rourke claims the sex on screen was real (Carré Otis denies it).

Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn had a 20 year (perhaps longer) romance. It shows in their later movies.

20

Shoot. Try this link instead. I think it’s a great example because the conversation they’re having is all business, but the way they have it makes all the difference.

I agree with this too. Sean Maher had good chemistry with Summer Glau, though. But somehow the Kayleigh/Simon scenes didn’t come together as well as they could have.