Watch Wil Smith in the first season of “Fresh Prince.”
Watch Wil Smith today.
See the difference?
What isn’t so difficult is acting what you know. Like Snoop Dogg playing a gangster in Baby Boy or in Training Day. That requires more of comfort in front of the camera rather than acting skill. Snoop Dogg looks good in these roles, but he really isn’t acting. I would imagine that it does take some skills to play yourself for the cameras, but it wouldn’t be anything too extraordinary.
What is really difficult is to disappear into any type of character. To play a gangster one day and a school principle another. The next step is to have the skills to make your character appealing. You would not only have to be convincing playing a pirate, but also entertaining to watch. That is what I think separates real actors from the amateurs, and they aren’t divided among A lists and B lists.
Chi McBride is not on the A list, but he is a great actor. Every time he appears his character is always interesting and always different. So real acting, playing someone else, is difficult.
I’ve worked on a few low-/no-budget films. It’s often hard to get decent actors (or even warm bodies) for such projects. What I’ve found is that you can tell the actors are acting. So far, except for the old super-8s, I haven’t been the director; so I haven’t had much input as to how the actors should act. In my mind the actors should be the character. Maybe not ‘method acting’ per se, but I think it works better if the character is adapted to the actor rather than the other way around.
One time I had some input was when an actor was supposed to look nervously behind him. It looked so fake I couldn’t stand it, so during a brief respite I told him that he’s in a strange place and that he’s nervous. He thinks he hears something. What would he do if it wasn’t a movie? I showed him how I would do it. He practiced a couple of times, and did it on the next take – which was used in the movie. (A cameraman doing this on a ‘real’ film would get him yelled at. But in this case the director was my best friend.) Basically, using unknown/inexperienced actors, the problem I see is that they try too hard.
Of course, I’m not an actor. As evidence I present myself in this no-rehearsal, one-take eight-second clip.
There is a quite famous story from Stanislavsky “An Actor Prepares.” A woman (I actually think it was his wife) was practicing a scene in which she “looked for a lost brooch” whihch was supposed to have great personal significance in the scene. She was being very fake and “overacty” about it “Oh where is my brooch O where? O where?”
Stanislasky said to her: Stop. Find the brooch or you’re out of the troupe.
She said: hahaha there is no brooch, this is a play
He said: I’m serious: find the brooch or get the F out.
She: but…
He: find it.
This time she really looked for it.
Hello Again: I’ll remember that. 
I think everyone can to a certain degree, it’s hard to act well in all formats.
Have you ever seen an actor do a great dramatic role, but even with good material, they are horrible at comedy.
Some actors/actress have what I would call “range” and can do lots of different kinds of acting.
Also material helps. For instance, Jerry Seinfeld is a marginal actor. But the way his show “Seinfeld” was written it works. Because Jerry’s character was written so there wasn’t much depth to it. Because the material was well written AND written to suit Jerry’s limited experience it worked well.
One of the most remarkable things I noticed is Old Time Radio. I listen to it and some of the best movie actors are HORRIBLE at it. Others like Ronald Reagan, Rita Hayworth and Jane Wyman to name three were fantastic. Others like Clark Gable and Gary Cooper were awful. I can’t believe the difference.
So it also depends on the type of acting. Acting in a movie is much different than before an audience. And acting before a live radio audience or on stage, where there are no retakes, is different than an audience where you CAN do retakes. I am amazed how easily people like George Burns and Jack Benny could take ANY error, no matter how glaring and turn it funny.
Also looks do matter. To go back to radio, there was a very popular radio personality called “Fred Allen.” He was FUNNY, very funny. But when you look at him do material on TV he isn’t funny. I don’t know why, but the same thing funny when you don’t look at him, comes across a smug, self-righteous and arrogant when you look at him.
Stage actors have to do the exact same thing eight times a week and make it look fresh every time. Barbra Streisand quit stage acting because the routine of it bored her to tears.
For kids it is all about finding the kids with the right talents. My daughter’s manager auditioned kids by having them say “I love Cheerios” - that was enough to weed out 95% of the kids lined up. He specifically did not want her to take acting classes, since at 9 (when she got her first job) it is all natural.
It is all about charisma and presence, and the ability to turn on when the camera starts to roll.
What is difficult is repeating lines, and having to have the same work ethic as an adult. My daughter thought that one of the best things about acting is knowing that all those people and all that money on a set depended on her. She loved it.
People who are going to become famous have a whole other level of charisma and talent. One kid in her TV show has gone on to become quite well known, starring in a couple of movies. She had more charisma than anyone else, so I’m not surprised.
BTW, stage acting and film acting are totally different. Some of the greatest stars of Broadway are mediocre in front of cameras., and vice versa. Stage is about projecting, film is about close up work.
And more more thing about acting that is difficult: rejection. Even good actors only get about 1 in 15 jobs they audition for. I don’t know any other profession where rejection is such a part of life.
My sister and brother in law are actors, and it’s a fucking tough job with long hours, unpredicatable pay, and a surprising amount of physical effort involved. Both are professionally trained and will tell you it was worth it.
Yo, holmes, smell you later!
Acting’s a bit like writing in that most people can learn and train but there will always be those who have that certain je ne sais quoi… and those who catch a lucky break. Also, like writers, talent’s often in the eyes of the beholder. Appropriately enough, it often takes a great actor to make a screenwriter’s words shine, and great writing can make a mediocre actor come across looking great (and, usually, much, much smarter).
Also, actors are very, very tiny.
Hell no. Shirley Temple was doing it at the age of 4.
I THINK Bette Davis said that first…
One of my favorite examples of the distinction between good and bad acting is a scene in The Mask. Stanley Ipkiss walks into the bank the day after the Mask robbed it, and his manager greets him with the line “Ipkiss! We have a crisis on our hands, and you stroll in over an hour late?!” When I took beginner drama way back in high school, we would say lines with the exact same inflection the manager uses. It’s hammy and sounds fake, as if the actor hasn’t learned how to control his voice yet, and it marks the actor as mediocre at best. Jim Carrey and Richard Jeni weren’t even hugely talented actors back then, and there’s simply no contest. (May Jeni rest in peace :()
Just TV actors. The ones on movies are really big. Until the movie goes to video, when they have to shrink them digitally.
Not no but fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck no. I am not a career actor but I have taken many acting classes, private and small group lessons, done a few movies, plays, etc, so I have a lot of experience around actors and very very raw wannabe actors. First of all most dialogue is absolutely atrocious. Most writers are story people and either don’t think they need someone to polish their lines or unless they have a studio budget, can’t afford it. So that’s roadblock #1. Roadblock #2 is that most people just cannot act naturally when people are watching them or when they are repeating lines that someone else wrote. To say a line convincingly, you have to really understand what it means (usually), and that is far too much to ask of most people who want to be actors.
Explanation of that last line: The stereotype that actors are dumb has some truth and some error in it. Most people who want to be actors are incredibly dumb (IME - - there are exceptions - - that included me at one point in my life so take from that what you will :p); most people who make it and become successful/renowned actors are above-average intelligence and higher (with obvious exceptions.)
I think it really depends on the person. To some people, acting seems to come naturally - putting themselves in someone else’s shoes to the extent that they become that person isn’t very difficult for them. For others, just reading the lines is an effort; putting their own personality into them is harder; putting someone ELSE’S personality into them is impossible. Then there’s the repetition. And then there’s the repetition. Did I mention the repetition?
A friend of mine showed me a great 5-6 minute clip a few months ago which showed two actors in a weekly evening drama filming a scene. It was a very quiet, close, intense, emotional scene. And they did it over and over and over and over and over. They used the same inflection, they used the same gestures, everything was identical each take - and each time you could still feel the nervous energy and sensual tension between the characters. And when they broke it was GONE.
That’s some difficult shit.
Then imagine being an action star, or just being in an action movie. “Okay, run from there to there, and you’re terrified, so you’re going all-out.” Say “there to there” is about 80 yards. Then do it again. And again. And again. And again. And again. Still all-out, still terrified, and you’ve already sprinted 400 yards in the last 20 minutes. And you’re in a three-piece suit, holding 30lbs worth of various props.
Yeah. Acting’s hard.
You’ve said what I wanted to.
Nowadays there seems to be a hell of a lot of "actors"who are basically either playing themselves in everything they do or if they do adopt a different character then their own they play that self same character in everything they do.
A true actor should be able to alter their body language convincingly,their accent and actual voice when the part demands it.
I have in the past seen an actor under half a ton of makeup and wearing a wig and immediately recognised who they are because,put simply they cant really act,just speak lines.
There are two kinds of actors: Those who basically perform the same role all the time, and those who can act. Eddie Murphy is Eddie Murphy playing someone. Dustin Hoffman is an actor.
Sometimes at work we make two lists of performers and actors.
I think it’s largely a matter of self-consciousness. The more aware an actor is that he’s acting, the more stiff he comes across.
A common urban myth, quite untrue. Actors cover the same bell curve of height as everyone else.