Most Difficult 'Mundane Task' For Actors To Get Right?

Cafe Society
1

I say it’s pretending to wake up. I’ve rarely seen anyone onscreen convincingly get that somehow non sequitur-ish ‘Huh? What?’ aspect of being roused from a deep slumber. You can sort of tell that they’ve been conscious all along, if you know what I mean.

They also seem to think that it always takes longer to wake up than it really does, particularly in emergency situations. Most people I know can usually snap to in about a second, if they really have to; actors always seem have to be poked and prodded a couple of times.

Give it a try, though. Pretend to wake up. It’s actually more difficult than you might think!

2

Play dead?

I imagine it is really hard to stop breathing and suppress eyelid twitches, particularly if your “corpse” is being moved or prodded and poked at by the CSI team or whatever. And almost impossible to get the right degree of floppiness of limbs, slack-mouthed gape, etc.

3

Real dead people look waxy. They should nix the actors and make wax replicas.

4

Eating without having any actual food in their mouths.

It’s pathetic.

5

Drunkeness seems to be difficult for a lot of actors to pull off effectively. I think it has to do with the slurring,or lack thereof. Glazed eyes are also a bit hard to fake, I would imagine.

6

I’ve got no cite, because I read it 30 years ago, or more, but a collection of actors said drunk was the hardest.

Sorry, wish I had a cite. No internet, and I can’t remember specifically the source, and I’ve always been a consumer of more media than necessary.

7

Holding a gun. It’s immediately obvious if the actor/actress has never held a gun before the Armourer put one in their hands and the director yelled “ACTION!”; they tend to hold it awkwardly and uncomfortably, I’ve noticed.

8

Drinking coffee.

9

Or, as Mel Gibson noticeably did in Lethal Weapon, blink and flinch every time he pulled the trigger.

10

This is the first thing I thought of. Their cups are obviously empty.

11

I heard somewhere that the mistake many actors make is trying to act drunk, whereas an actual drunk person tries to act sober.

12

Sneezing. Hearing a fake “ah-CHOO!” totally takes me out of the scene. Hiccupping is another. (One of my few talents is being able to sneeze realistically on demand.)

13

Talking on the telephone. Relatively few actors can pretend to do this convincingly, and it’s most noticeable on television.

14

Acting high from smoking weed.

No, that’s not how adults act when stoned. That’s how teenagers act when they are smoking it.

15

Any kind of intoxication, really. They almost always overplay it.

A rare scene that does it pretty well is Vince and Mia’s date in Pulp Fiction. Vince is on heroin, and Travolta plays him as low-key and kinda distracted, not as a whacked out of his mind goofball (and he sobers up noticeably as the night goes on). Likewise, Mia is doing coke all night, but she’s just chatty and enthusiastic, not maniacal.

You can also usually tell which actors don’t smoke; they pay too much attention to the cigarette and it looks unnatural.

16

True, unless you happen to be the very wonderful and very funny Foster Brooks.

Another mundane task that never looks right is driving, in any scene involving back projection or equivalent. It seems that with all the advances in movie-making, there’s still no way to get it to look even half-way convincing. Maybe there’s no need.

17

I was going to say smoking in general.

It’s obvious (to me) when someone breathes in, and then exhales, a lung-full of smoke, it’s equally obvious when someone just takes a mouth-full and puffs it back out.

18

I think that generally acting surprised when you in fact exactly know what’s coming is hard to do, and separates the genuine actors from the day time soap ‘stars’.

19

That was Red Skelton’s contention when he created his famous “Guzzler’s Gin” bit.

20

I blinked and flinched every time I fired a gun. They do that.