What sort of background do you need to be an actor? These days, it’s not exactly required that you graduate from the Actors Studio (or from anywhere else), but when I look up the credits of even the lamest supporting actors in bad Hollywood comedies, they tend to come with a long string of professional experience (“After a four-year run on the popular Nickelodeon series, Allegra made her big-screen debut in She’s All That and went on to co-star in…”). As for indie-film actors, they often bounce back and forth between no-paycheck Sundance movies and big-paycheck schlock. So I was surprised when I got back to my room after seeing Douchebag, a bubblingly sharp and fresh and dark and winning comedy about a major, major a—hole, and learned that the movie’s mesmerizing lead actor, Andrew Dickler, started out as a film editor (he was an apprentice on Pulp Fiction) and since then has been…a film editor. Period. He has never acted before.
The thing is, he looks like a film editor, which grounds the movie, from its first funny moments, in a kicky, downbeat reality. The title dickwad, Sam Nussbaum, is about to get hitched to the very sweet and beautiful Steph (Marguerite Moreau). They live in Los Angeles, but Sam still favors the style of Seattle: He wears oversize grunge shirts, and he’s got one of those bushy postmodern hippie beards I think of as early-Spin-Doctors-meets-Zack-Galifianakis. (Read full post)
Movies starring real people vs. movies starring pixel people: the eyes have it
You might say, well, what about hobbits and Wild Things and Wall-E and blockheaded Carl in Up? They’re not real people, either, and you’ve written about how much you love them. And I answer yes, I do. But I invest my heart differently when a character is human. I don’t care who’s fictional, who’s actual, and who’s just vaguely based-on-real-life. I do care that we share common traits of heart and soul. I know myself well enough to know that I particularly crave knowledge of how others of my species maneuver their ways in the world. And with all props to Neytiri, her ways are from another planet.
For me, the absence of human identification keeps me at a distance. As I say, for me. How about for you?