11/22/2023 0 Comments Villain eyes sketchonty nose sketchBut I look like Chet Baker now.” (Camp later clarified that he loves Chet Baker and was not trying to insult him.) The best character actors take ordinariness and make it highly specific. As Camp told me when I interviewed him and his wife, fellow character actor Elizabeth Marvel: “I played a lot more leads when I was younger. A superficial scan of this list will quickly disabuse readers of such a belief, though there admittedly often is an element of an actor’s face that marks the person as a character actor, a seasoning you won’t find on the CW. There’s a long-held notion that a character actor is someone who’s simply not attractive enough to be a lead, an idea so ingrained that it even made its way into the Wikipedia definition. Then there are the philosophical questions: Is a character actor someone who disappears into a role, like Bill Camp, or someone who has a distinctive presence, like Colman Domingo? Yes and yes. A character actor is someone who is known for small parts, but with the abundance of cable and streaming projects, many of them now occasionally work as co-leads, albeit in little-discussed series. (Frequently they’re not even the fourth-, fifth-, or sixth-billed in the credits, either.) Except that sometimes, aging stars will do their best work in character roles, while other character actors turn out to be stars-in-waiting. The most obvious definition is that a character actor is not a lead. We’ll be showing our appreciation with a week’s worth of articles devoted to hard-working bit players, beginning here with the results of an industrywide survey we conducted to answer one simple question: who are the most memorable character actors working today? To find out, we polled nearly 60 directors, showrunners, casting directors, and critics - and when we tallied the results, 32 names had emerged from a field of more than 300 suggestions.īefore we get into the list, some housekeeping: What makes an actor a character actor? Try to pin it down, and you’ll go mad wading through counterexamples. That’s why this year more so than ever before, as awards season trains its spotlight once again on actors who are accustomed to such gold-tinted attention, we felt it was vital to properly recognize those ubiquitous yet under-acknowledged performers whose regular appearances on our devices were one of the few joys we were afforded during lockdown. When your social circle has shrunk down to your immediate household, the glimmer of recognition that comes from spotting a familiar face in a movie provides more dopamine than it probably should. In the era of Peak TV and the subsequent streaming boom, character actors are working more than ever before - and since many of us have little else to do but stare at our screens, it’s precisely these performers who have filled the gap left by our secondary bonds. These were not deep relationships, but even so, there was a comforting familiarity in encountering the same faces on a semi-regular basis.įortunately, while those people who played such treasured peripheral roles in our lives have for the moment (a year and counting) gone away, we’ve been able to turn to the people playing treasured peripheral roles in entertainment to pick up the slack. People like your roommate’s high-school friend, the neighbor who took the same subway line, the co-worker you always saw in the kitchen. Photo-Illustration: by Vulture Photos by Shutterstock, HBO, 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures, Netflix, Newmarket Films, A24, New Line Cinema, FX, Sony Pictures Releasing, Paramount Pictures, Gramercy Pictures, Sony Pictures Television and Focus FeaturesĪs many have noted, a small but significant loss we’ve all faced during quarantine has been the disappearance of the casual acquaintance.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |