Erin and I went out to dinner and we started talking about stuff like music, because of what was playing at the Applebee’s (forgive me, lord, for us going to Applebee’s, but there’s not a lot in this town and she had a craving for their mashed potatoes. I’d complain that so much of the food I have to go get is because my wife has a craving, but since I’m the type who never wants to pick a restaurant, I guess it’s only fair that I go to the ones she does). Things started out with Phil Colins and Genesis, then other singers who moved on from some success in their bands. And then to MTV coming about, and what we enjoyed of it (when it existed. I’d argue it doesn’t any more). And then we somehow slid into comedians from SNL talk (because of musical guests first), between John Mulaney and Bill Hader primarily. And then actors who leave shows or roles and doing things completely different, and how that works or if it even works.
I love talking with Erin about stuff. Which is, you know… good. I like my wife. I like when we talk.
But it finished off with us talking about actors who play a “type” of character, and then try to go against that type. It finished mostly because we got home and she’s in bed now watching something on Hulu or Netflix to fall asleep to, and she said to me, “Are you going to go upstairs to write,” which guilted me into doing that. And since i don’t have much else to talk about, I guess this is where I’m picking up.
So to me, there are a couple different kinds of actors. Successful ones I mean. And I’ll go off of leading men here because it’s easier to narrow down how male actors are. Women seem to have to jump through so many more hoops to be considered successful AND good AND bankable AND so on, I really don’t feel like adding to the conversations that already shit on them. Not that I’m here to shit on anybody, but if you talk about things as vast and based on personal opinions as films and TV, some of the stuff you say is going to inevitably come out as critical.
Just be glad this isn’t a podcast. It probably will be at some point, but you don’t have to listen if you don’t wanna. Granted, that presumes anyone listens at all, or that anyone reads this.
(I’m padding words.)
So in my mind, the two actor types as I see them are:
1) The Nicholson
2) The Depp
Now both of those actors are already divisive and are only my basis of naming because I associate them with the things I’ve seen them do. I’m not a film historian or even much a self-proclaimed “film buff.” What does that even mean? I’d look it up, but it may be a word that’s not even used anymore because I can’t think of the last time I’ve heard anyone coin “film buff” and now i’m not sure if I didn’t just make word salad and it wasn’t a thing at all.
Anyways. The Nicholson. I do not remember the first thing I saw him (Jack) in. I remember The Shining being on at some point when I was too young to see it. I remember random things. Obviously Batman stands out, but As Good As It Gets, The Witches of Eastwick, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, his weirdo scene in the black and white Little Shop of Horrors, and so on… He’s been in a lot of stuff I’ve never seen but am aware of, like Pritzi’s Honor and Wolf and Hoffa. This is just what’s at the top of my brain when i think about Jack’s work.
My view of Jack Nicholson, the the Nicholson school of actor, is that he is, 100%, ALWAYS Jack Nicholson. Never anyone else. Never a stretch beyond where he starts. Jack doesn’t lose himself in a role. He makes the role Jack. And he does a great job playing the role, in that he’s entertaining to watch. But you walk out of the movie thinking, ‘That was a great Jack Nicholson movie.” You don’t walk out being blown away that you watched a movie where Jack was unrecognizable.
Remember, this isn’t a criticism. And shit, who wouldn’t love to be poor Jack, insulted by some asshole on the internet who says “he doesn’t act well,” which is not what I’m saying at all but people will hear what they want to hear or read what they want to read. This is just my observance, my opinion.
It’s gonna get worse now.
The Depp, meaning Johnny, is someone that absolutely changes into someone else for a part. Sometimes so much that you don’t see them in it. Now, when i started looking at Depp as a character actor (I may mean something else by that term than what the actual definition is), it was around the time of the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Johnny played a character that I had never seen him play anything similar to before. He made that role his own. He lost himself to it. And then I had to look back at other things he had done. Edwards Scissorhands was a good example too. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas I had (and have) never seen, but I remember being surprised when he did it. He started doing things like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory after (which I honestly don’t like at all), and Alice in Wonderland (same). His shtick started to be these weird characters that were meant to make him unrecognizable but weren’t necessarily always successful. But he did at least “act” like someone else.
You put De Niro in a movie, he’s De Niro. I mentioned this to Erin, and she said, “Well, what about Taxi Driver?” And I said it’s not fair to say that he played a role in his first movie where there was no expectations. Maybe playing that guy and then playing the part he’s played in pretty much every film since (that I’ve seen him in at least) was all he could do, and no one is saying seriously, “Hey, let’s do this one more like Taxi Driver.” You put him in Analyze This or Meet The Parents, it’s the same guy.
You look at what Heath Ledger did with his Joker. Or, lord forgive me, what Jared Leto did with his Joker. Compare them to Jack. Heath and Jared did something to distinguish the part they were playing from who they were all the time. Jack, frankly, didn’t. Did he have to? No, of course not.
Can someone be both? I think Tom Hanks, for the most part, is Tom Hanks almost all the time. And we love him for it. Love him so goddamn much. Was Big a stretch for Tom? No. Was it that hard to recognize him as the same actor between two disparaging parts like You’ve Got Mail and Joe Vs. The Volcano? What about when he started to get into some unexpected things like The DaVinci Code, something almost akin to an action movie? I haven’t seen to many of the parts he’s done based on real people, like Sully or Captain Philips. But then he’s done Forrest Gump, which was a pretty big departure from just the Tom you’d see in anything else. He played that really weird part in The Ladykillers. But would Nicholson ever try to pull off something like Woody in Toy Story? Highly unlikely. But a Depp would. Hell, Depp has played more cartoon type characters in live action movies that most.
And Erin brought up Robin Williams. Which, we’ve already gone over, is near and dear to my heart. Robin’s a hard one to gauge because he almost has to be looked at from the opposite direction. You take Robin who was doing comedy as Mork, and you put him in something like Moscow On The Hudson where he played a Russion defecting to America, or The World According to Garp, which I just can’t sum up that movie, you’ll have to figure that out on your own okay? But the wackiness, over-the-top expected Williams gets you him in Aladdin where he plays a thousand different parts. But that, I think, is a part that is so much like the Robin that we know and expect that it actually IS his “typecasting.” You put him in One Hour Photo or Good Will Hunting, that quiet part, that reserved, holding back role… That’s what surprises people. That’s where you forget that he’s Robin.
I don’t know. I don’t have a point to this, which is now the joy of doing a online diary (did I say this to finish last night too?). I do think that sometimes it’s fun to play with expectations.
Back in my days on Prodigy, when I first really started to play with storytelling in a more serious way, I was in a group that wrote original characters in the X-Men Universe. I mean, some of us did originals, there were other people that were very happy to write Wolverine and Colossus and such. My character was created to be very cool and tough and a 90s-style “badass” character that fit with a lot of the ideals that the comics were doing at that time. And it took me all of two days to break him. He became the butt of a lot of jokes (that I put him through). He was a weirdness magnet. He was always the beleaguered straight man to the funny folks around him that, in turn, made him one of the funniest characters to read. Because I don’t do big and tough and badass well. I was reading Robert Asprin and Douglas Adams in my teens. My leads were all in comedies. My poor X-Man character just had no idea that was what I was going to do to him. And when I started, I had no idea either.
At some point, on another Prodigy board, there was a vampire group. One of my X-Men friends joined up with it, and so I did too. And then I wrote something that was very much NOT like what I was doing in X-Men. It was horror. It was bloody and demonic and mean and grotesque. So I did what I could to write for that. And my friend, in what was one of my proudest moments as a budding creative at the time, paid me the biggest compliment by telling me how surprised she was at what I had written. Basically she knew me as writing funny stuff. And now I’d shown her I could write for this completely different genre.
And I think, if it came down to it, that’s probably my two main things that I would write. Comedy, in a fantasy or sci-fi setting likely. And horror. They’re both very comfortable for me. They’re what I like to read, when I actually sit down and do that sort of thing. They’re what I like to watch usually. And they feel natural. Some time, not long, after I played in the Prodigy groups for a while, and someone read some of my stuff and suggested that they might like to publish a comic or book of mine, giving me a kind of carte blanche of whatever I wanted to do, I started with one idea. And they loved it. And then I said, “Well, no, it’s not that. It’s this other idea.” And they loved that even more. And then finally said, “But you know, what I really want to do is…” And I didn’t have anything. And they were like, Dude, just give us whatever you want. We see the value in your work.
But i didn’t. So…
But i did start trying to write something then that wasn’t X-Men. And wasn’t a comic (in form, but it was supposed to be in my head. I just wasn’t scripting it). It was from the things I’d been playing around in the X-Men group, but taken seriously, and running on my own ideas and not someone else’s. Although to be totally fair, it was in tandem with two friends of mine and the stuff all tied together, so there was absolutely shared ideas in this world, so I’m not taking all credit. But what I was making was coming from me. And it was horror, absolutely, which a science fiction bent, because that’s the world we were making. But it also had some very ripe bits of comedy to it. Little moments interspersed. I don’t know that a less forgiving editor or agent (than the two people I completely let down by never coming back to them again with this or any other story) would have loved what I was doing. It probably would’ve been edited down to just one genre. Which is likely a good reason why I never did anything like submit my work to anyone for approval. It took a lot for me to figure out what I enjoyed writing. To find my voice as it were. I have maybe typecast myself as far as the kind of storyteller I am. Not that any successful writer is going to say that hoping genres is a great way to please a mass audience. Being typecast as a writer is probably more beneficial than harmful, if what you’re typecast as sells.
But I do think that, over time since, I’ve tried to convince myself that I could write something more marketable at times. And, no, I’m certain that’s not something could ever do or ever want to do. And even though it’s not what has held me back from finishing any of my big projects, it certainly has always felt like a giant wall in front of me when I’ve tried to explore that idea. “Zombies are popular, could I write a zombie book?”
“Not one that would fit the landscape that people are buying, no.”
“Vampires. What about vampires? Got anything there?”
“Just something that looks like Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends but with a erotica bent that leans towards Harold and Maude.”
“Wh– Who the hell is THAT for???”
“Apparently you, you ass. Don’t sound so judgey!”
Actually, looking at it distilled down to a one line description, I do now have a reaffirmed fondness for my vampire comic idea. Funny, that.
