When I was in college I was in a musical, as part of the orchestra. One of the male leads was supposedly this great actor, drama major, very serious, all that–yet he refused to cut his hair for the role (a '50s setting). Between the opening night and subsequent performances, he got busted for pot, and his role was assumed by another guy, not an actor, but he had been in the orchestra and knew all the lines, and he said he could do it, AND he was okay with looking the part, i.e., cutting his hair.
The difference was amazing. Not just for his part. He made everybody in the cast better. This amateur, who wasn’t even a drama major, was so much better than the serious actor that it was probably really embarrassing for the original guy (I always wondered if he knew). Now, I think for me the first guy was kind of stagey and I guess that was okay, since it was on a stage. But the second guy made it look like a real slice of life.
That’s Allison Janney, who has an absolute boatload of acting awards and nominations :D. Which doesn’t mean you’re wrong of course - that is certainly a very broad role played for exaggerated effect. To some extent good acting is a little subjective.
What makes an actor good is if they can play a wide range of characters with vastly different personalities and personas.
I’m not sure who a good example of this would be. Maybe Samuel L Jackson. He can play an Uncle Tom character in Django unchained and then play a take no shit military major in the hateful 8. Totally different characters and he did both well (his hateful 8 character is one of my favorite pieces of acting). However in retrospect, his role in Django was still kind of authoritative. So maybe thats not a good example, he wasn’t playing 2 totally different characters in those movies. Someone who can play opposite ends of the spectrum is a good actor. Happy, depressed, authoritative, submissive, angry, peaceful, etc.
Christian Bale’s ability to do accents is uncanny. When you hear him speak in his normal voice you are surprised he has an english accent.
Excellent point, and it applies to all arts and sports.
There are things that a professions actor has to be able to deal with that most people just don’t understand. Leonard Nimoy once spoke about being cast as Spock. In the pilot, with Jeffery Hunter, he played the role in one way. When Shatner was hired, he had to change his approach to the role to mesh better with Shatner’s style of acting.
An amateur actor would not think of this, and may not be able to change their style to fit.
Sometimes a role calls for overacting. Sometimes it calls for the actor to play a type (even himself as a type). It’s up to the script and the director to determine how to do it.
Ultimately, good acting is the ability to tailor your reactions to match what’s needed in the work.
The best actors are the one that you have seen in many different roles and didn’t realize was the same guy. When you make the connection, you’re astonished.
Dennis Haysbert is one for me.
The thing is, there are actors, and there are players. One isn’t necessarily better than the other; they’re two different beasts and there’s a place for both of them.
Actors are people who transform themselves with each role. They lose or gain weight, they change accents, they do research on the person they’re playing (if applicable), they inhabit their roles. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Daniel Day-Lewis, etc.
Players are people who can recite their lines in a natural way, and they’re being funny or making you cry (although usually the former), but they’re not really expanding their range. They’re basically playing themselves, or a version we perceive as themselves, and it works because we like them, but they’re not portraying a character that’s too dissimilar from their own persona. Jason Segal, Kristen Wiig, etc.
If you can’t do either one of those, either transform yourself or sound naturalistic, then chances are you’re a bad actor.
Jason Segal is a wonderful actor. Fantastic. Kristen Wiig is better still. Better than 99.9% of actors, if not more. Again, you’re comparing a professional to other professionals.
If you want to know what makes a bad actor bad, you don’t start with Kristen Wiig any more than if I asked “what makes a bad hockey player?” you’d start with an NHL player.
Sigh. If I mentioned the other 99.9%, you wouldn’t know who I was talking about, would you? Of course I’m not talking about the hundreds of thousands of people who do community theatre, local commercials, etc.; I’m talking about “of the people who are famous, there are true actors, and there are people who fulfill their place in the world by making us laugh, but don’t do it by inhabiting the souls of different people”.
Plus, by your reasoning, no professional actor would be considered “bad”. I know plenty of people who find Nicholas Cage, Keanu Reeves, etc. to be stilted and wooden. Again, of course they’re better than the multitude of people we’ve never heard of who call themselves actors , but that doesn’t make them immune to criticism.
The one who didn’t convince me the most was the Spock actor. It made me appreciate even more what Leonard Nimoy could do (with just a raised eyebrow or the precise timing of how he delivered his lines).
The worst performance by a name actor I can think of would have to be Martin Sheen as Robert E. Lee in Gettysburg.
Check out some indie films, Christian or other ideological films or any fan-fiction on YouTube for examples of “bad acting”. Even the acting in the funny Kevin Smith classic “Clerks” was actually pretty bad (he cast his friends who were mostly not professional actors). Things I notice:
Looking stiff or uncomfortable
Flat or emotionless dialogue
Over acting or trying too hard to convey emotion or intensity
Inability to realistically convey the appropriate emotion for the scene.
Saying that some who doesn’t transform himself for every role is not a good actor is like saying that Jimi Hendrix was not a good musician because he was a lousy saxophone player.
In a normal conversation its easy to tell whether someone is just nodding and saying ‘yep, yep, uhuh’, or being really engaged, and most of that comes from non-verbal cues, like the movement of the eyes, little facial tics and so on. A good actor can persuade you, in a movie, when their face is blown up to the size of a houseboat that they are really, really concerned about that dinosaur escaping, or that the professor has shrunk his kids, again, or the hero’s journey has met a challenge. Even one with a distinctive face, say Gene Hackman, can make you forget its Gene and that he is not really the president or know how to drive a sub. Conversely a bad one will make you conscious that you are watching an actor in a movie on a set.
An actor friend said that for TV and movies the minimum standard expected of an actor is that they look like they absolutely belong where they are shown, because of their dialogue, their carriage and actions, clothing and setting [so a mix of actor’s skill and the other countless peple in the credits]. Good actors then are set apart in making it feel like you’ve been watching and getting to know them for a long time, rather than just the past half hour. In other words the difference between good and better acting is being able to communicate more about the character, which also gives insight into why they are doing what they are doing on screen.
Keanu Reeves isn’t the greatest actor who ever lived, and there’s things he can’t do, but he’s a first rate actor. Very few actors could have played Neo that well.
I seriously wonder if people even read anymore. Let’s go back and see what I said, shall we?
“…there are actors, and there are players. One isn’t necessarily better than the other; they’re two different beasts and there’s a place for both of them.”
Why you guys are interpreting that as me saying if you don’t transform yourself then you’re a bad actor, I have no idea. I said there is a place for both of them, and one isn’t better than the other. What more do you want?
If you seriously want to make a case that the third guy from the left in a sex comedy from the '80s is as good of an actor as Philip Seymour Hoffman, then go ahead, be my guest. I threw out those names as examples of people whose names I knew and you’re acting like I’m criticizing your uncle or something. I’m not going to sit here and throw my resume at you, but I do work on Broadway, and I worked on the upcoming Mamma Mia sequel film. It’s not like I’ve never spent time around actors. But by all means keep defending Keanu, as if I’m the first person who ever described him as stilted.
I think the essence of good acting is making it appear that what is happening is happening spontaneously, for the first and only time. Not as if you are remembering lines and actions.
In a really good, very brief book, A Practical Handbook for the Actor, based on the acting classes run by David Mamet and William H Macy, the authors state the actor’s job is to “find a way to live truthfully under the imaginary circumstances of the play.” And real actors have the time and skills to achieve this.
I always thought this anecdote, about the making of Marathon Man, from William Goldman’s Adventures In The Screen Trade says it all: