When Oscar-winning actor Sir Mark Rylance observed that he, as a “temperamental, moody and difficult to understand” young actor, would not, today, get work, I thought: “Of course, because the world is now full of ninnies.”
“I remember when I first came into the theatre in 1980,” Sir Mark reminisced, “I feel like there were a lot more kind of oddballs and difficult people in the theatre. And I think on film sets too.
“Now I regularly, understandably, meet directors who only want people who are easy to work with. They don’t want anyone difficult, they don’t want anything like that. I think today I might have got a bad reputation and not been welcomed into work.”
And it’s true that tales of bad behaviour from film stars seem to have dried up. Who remembers Christian Bale’s minutes-long rant from the set of Terminator Salvation in 2009? Or Russell Crowe’s alleged telephone-throwing incident in a hotel in 2005? Those were the days!
Perhaps it’s because film sets have got wise to the leaky nature of sets, particularly with now-ubiquitous camera phones. Or perhaps it’s because having a reputation as being a bit wild now, as Sir Mark observes, really doesn’t get you the work.
Once upon a time, the world worshipped the masculine man, who perhaps drank shots and was moody and unpredictable. Think Oliver Reed or Richard Burton.
It was just a given that there existed brooding method actors, who might sulk in their trailers, Achilles-like, but who nonetheless had that indefinable charismatic thing that some people have that makes you want to pay to sit in a dark room and watch them pretend to be someone else.
But the world is so much less masculine now and we no longer value those things overtly. And so we want all our actors and artists to be nice. Talented? Yeah, OK. But mainly nice and cute and preferably they ought to be demonstrably kind to dogs.
But I’m wrong to think this is just because we’re all ninnies. Directors need agreeable actors for another reason.
Since the Marvel Universe swallowed Hollywood whole, most actors are grinding away under the total dominance of CGI over all aspects of film-making. Even The Little Mermaid – a rare release that is not connected to Marvel – is crushed by CGI. The film is unwatchable as a result. It isn’t the fault of Halle Bailey, who is doing her most charming best to be convincing as a little mermaid while wearing a motion capture suit (hair and tail to be added later), “acting” alongside things that aren’t there, or people in blue gimp suits. The results are visually flawless but as a piece of entertainment it is dodgy.
Javier Bardem, playing Poseidon, and Melissa McCarthy, playing Ursula the Sea Witch and singing a miserably bowdlerised “Poor Unfortunate Souls”, also cannot work like this and the whole thing is drained of spark and personality as a result.
So if you want to make it in this industry, probably unrecognisable even from 10 years ago, you need the patience of a saint and a high tolerance for the absurd. Can you imagine Oliver Reed in a motion capture suit? Or Kate Winslet?
Being an actor has always entailed some degree of humiliation, being hung upside down or poked about or fitted with prosthetics or endless other things I can’t even imagine. But at least if you were a bit grumpy about it or got drunk and kicked chairs about, everyone made allowances for that.
Now the requirements to be an actor are to be unrealistically, fiendishly nice, have a superhuman tolerance for the gym and just blandly accept that acting now means jumping from one blue platform to another, knowing that Venice or Prague or Mars will be filled in behind you. It’s adorable Tom Holland or that sweet, sexless man-doll Henry Cavill. Are they acting? Or are they stunt men with lovely manners?
I was thinking that at least we’ve still got Tom Hardy, perhaps the one wild man left, who has always generated on-set stories but also delivered out-there performance. But then I remembered that he’s knee-deep in that terrible, CGI-tastic Venom series. We’re doomed.
