I watched a TV episode the other day that had some really seriously terrible bad acting in it. Everyone else was pretty good, for the silly inconsequential show that it was, but this one guy was putting on an accent that wasn’t his native one, with a speech impediment, while playing a blind character. I think he had so many things to concentrate on he got a bit overwhelmed and managed to fail at all of them.
There are some actors who I think are just plain awful, but others think are really good*, so it’s not an objective measurement. Then there are some actors that most universally agree are very very good, such as Anthony Hopkins or Cate Blanchett, those kinds of people who are always at the top of lists and get all the recognition. It makes me wonder why don’t all actors just do what they do, but obviously it’s not anywhere near as easy as that.
Stiff, stilted performance. Earnest melodramatic over-acting. Performing inappropriately for the genre. Not caring enough to convey realistic emotion (“phoning it in”). Not reacting to what’s happening in the scene (“in the moment”). That’s all different kinds of bad acting.
And there is yet another level of filtering. Not only must the actor be good enough to get an agent, and be sent by that agent to calls, but he or she must also beat out all the other people auditioning for that role.
There are good actors and better actors. There are miscast actors. But it is unlikely that an actor who has made it to something we see in the movies or TV is a bad actor.
Not counting monster movies filmed in Wisconsin that you see on MST3K, of course.
Good actors do quite well playing to a type, and are often cast that way. And some actors do some things better than others - like accents. Like humor.
I think it would not be too controversial to say that Patrick Stewart is a better actor all around than Shatner. (Though Shatner is not a bad actor by any stretch of the imagination.) But Shatner does humor 50 times better than Stewart, and nearly any ending of TOS shows us.
If every actor could do any role, casting directors would be out of a job.
People should remember that what they see on the screen is what got selected by the director. That “bad” performance you see might be just what the director wants.
This is what impresses my about stage actors - how many times during the run of a play do they say and do the same things over and over? Yet when I show up at the matinee about 8 weeks after opening night, it doesn’t feel rehearsed or rote - it’s happening right then and there!! How do they do it??
Similarly, in movies, there’s the matter of multiple retakes for whatever reason. It really hits home for me when I see a blooper reel - people cracking up over and over at a particular point, yet in the finished product, it’s perfect. It amazes me.
And that’s why I’m not an actor. Yeah, that’s the reason…
Some actors don’t have the range to play emotional scenes.
Don’t expect Chuck Norris to play the supportive husband of a cancer patient. He just doesn’t have the depth to show that level of pain and despair.
I watched him every week on Walker Texas Ranger. The expression on his face almost never changed. Once in awhile he cracked a smile. That’s why the the relationship with Alex(the DA) was so bland and sterile. Chuck wasn’t capable of portraying a deep loving relationship. Watch him in scenes with CJ and then with Alex. Its no different! She’s supposed to be his love interest.
He did get better with experience. His acting in the 70’s & 80’s action movies is outright wooden and stilted. I remember renting 5 of them one weekend before a ice storm. I didn’t finish watch a couple. They were just so bad.
Seems like the answer is that with a bad actor you can, in some indefinable way, see that he/she is acting. You can see that he is repeating lines that he has learned, is looking in the direction he has been told to look and is speaking only when he is supposed to be speaking. A good actor doesn’t do that, he makes it seem as if he himself decided to say those words at that time in a perfectly natural way.
Which gives me the chance to state how crap of an actor I think Gary Sinise is, because every time I see his gurning face it just looks like he is acting. He looks like he has said his line and is now staring at the other actor waiting for him to say his line while pretending to look intense or interested.
I will presume that you have never watched Mr. Selfridge. When an actor’s portrayal of a character is so unbelievable and jarring that the viewer is constantly aware that he is watching the actor recite lines, and not a character living a part of a story, that is bad acting.
Yes, indeed. As mentioned before, I work on Broadway (as a musician, not an actor, but 99% of my time is spent dealing with actors), and for all of us, sometimes it’s hard to do the show the hundredth–or sometimes thousandth–time. The best advice I ever heard, and I repeat it to actors whenever I can, is, whenever you feel like you just can’t do this show again, just remember that it’s somebody’s first time seeing the show, and it’s somebody’s last time seeing the show. That usually lights a spark and they get over it.
In case it needs pointing out: being a good stage actor is not the same as being a good screen actor (though there is considerable overlap, and there are actors that are masterful at both).
Alan Swann (as played by Peter O’ Toole): “What do you mean LIVE? I can’t do it live! I’m not an actor, I’m a MOVIE STAR!”
But yes, there are distinct sets of skills that it takes to act vis-a-vis filmed/edited vs. on stage/live broadcast.
Of course, and it’s one thing to do humor and another to play comedy – having seen Stewart doing comedy on stage, he has it down, but he’s not going to be first choice to be in a movie/TV show as the guy who after some action sequence delivers a clever quip and puts on the sunglasses. No one actor is going to be able to play absolutely everything in a way the audience wants to see it.
That’s helped by having an everyman face. Fernando Fernán Gómez is considered to have been one of the best Spanish actors ever, but just being a redhead in a sea of black hair set him apart. He could do method, he could do hammy, he could do in your face, he could do subdued. But even in black and white he looked different enough to be easily recognizable.
In fact I understand where the OP is coming from. For me, I want to suspend disbelief; I want to go along with the story.
So a terrible actor, who delivers all their lines in the same wooden cadance, doesn’t especially bother me, within reason.
I’m not the kind of person who leaves the theatre saying “Geez, BlahBlah really stunk out that movie!” and I don’t tend to notice the difference between someone blending well into the role vs someone blending into the background.
But I do notice very good acting. Particularly iconic performances.
And let’s say I watch a movie with an extremely dull protagonist then learn that it was originally meant to be a role played by leonardo dicaprio, say. It’s clear to me that the movie has been greatly weakened by the lack of his presence even if I can’t articulate exactly what it lacked.
I felt that way about Joey King when I saw her first major film Ramona and Beezus– I felt that she very truly brought Beverly Cleary’s classic children’s literary character Ramona Quimby to life.
I also felt that way about Barry Newman in the 1974-76 NBC legal series Petrocelli– I felt that he really was playing Tony Petrocelli, a defense lawyer who was well and truly committed to getting his clients off.
The speech is “natural”, the humor is understated, the production is only slightly exaggerated, and it’s a spoof, which is the most difficult type of a difficult genre.