October 15, 2021
I was recently listening to a podcast interview with Michael Keaton, who was promoting a new television series, Dopesick, and his latest movie, Worth. Most of the interview, conducted by Bill Simmons, focused on the early part of his career in the 1980s and 1990s, and at one point, they discussed the decision to cast Keaton as Batman, which was released in 1989. Simmons made a really good point that at that time in pop culture, with no internet and social media, we didn’t know a lot about movies before they actually showed up in the theater. Now, deals are announced years in advance, and we get little tidbits during production, including photos on social media of actors on location filming scenes. At the time of Keaton’s casting, it was considered pretty controversial. He was known as a comic actor, especially for his roles in Night Shift, Mr. Mom, and Gung Ho. This guy was going to be Batman? People who were devoted to the comic book were particularly concerned. Remember, this was long before the days of the comic book movie industrial complex we have in place now. Other than Christopher Reeve as Superman, there was little to this genre. Keaton recalled reading an article criticizing his casting in the middle of production and it kind of freaked him out.
As it turned out, things worked out great for Keaton, as the film was a success, both critically and commercially. Reviews were very strong for his performance, along with Jack Nicholson as The Joker, and director Tim Burton’s creative vision of Gotham City. Keaton took a pretty big risk taking on such an iconic role as Batman, but he was fortunate that 1) he was placed in the hands of a director who knew what he was doing and 2) he is extremely talented as an actor, who can pretty much do anything.
This interview got me thinking about an idea I’ve had rattling around in my head as a possible topic to write about – actors who took risks. The idea also came to mind as I’ve been thinking about The Last Duel, with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck (who co-wrote the film) starring in a 14th century period action-drama. This one looks good, but I also worry it could be a flop. It opens today, so we’ll see if the risk pays off for the writing team behind Good Will Hunting 25 years ago. I’ve previously covered musicians and directors who took risks, which you can read here and here, in case you missed them. So, it seemed time to look at actors who have gone out on a limb for a role.
What’s it mean for an actor to take a risk in a role? Well, for me it comes down to breaking outside of their comfort zone to try something different. It could be learning a new talent or skill, transforming themselves physically, playing a real-life character that would be very intimidating, or even playing against type, like a comedic actor tackling a very dramatic role. These don’t always work – there are plenty of examples that have been misfires, but here are some examples of ones that impressed me.
Learning A New Skill
Let’s face it – it’s not easy to learn a new music skill, especially when you are in your 20s or 30s and you have to cram it in before filming a movie. It’s particularly nerve-wracking when you’re going to be singing on screen, putting yourself out there for the world to see. Yes, there is magic that can be done in the studio, but we know that the best of the best do it naturally, without technology to fix their mistakes. I’ve previously written about my love of Walk the Line and La La Land, two films with music as a key component of the story. Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon took on the task of singing the songs of Johnny and June Carter Cash, with Witherspoon winning an Oscar. In La La Land, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone took on even more risk with their performances, learning to dance and sing, while Gosling also learned to play the piano. It’s one thing to make a movie that is based on a Broadway play, but La La Land was an original story. Gosling and Stone had to put their trust completely in the hands of director Damien Chazelle and his vision of a 1940s’ old-time musical story set in present day Los Angeles. Both Gosling and Stone were recognized with Oscar nominations, with Stone winning for Best Actress. Clearly, their risks paid off.
In 1991, I remember being in awe after seeing The Doors, the Oliver Stone vision of the legendary 1960s rock band, and their lead singer, Jim Morrison. Like most of Stone’s later work, there’s quite a lot to the movie, as he is not exactly known for subtlety in his filmmaking style. Overall, The Doors is very good, but the highlight is clearly the performance of Val Kilmer as Morrison. Now, this was an absolute transformation, as Kilmer appears to be EXACTLY like Morrison in his mannerisms, speaking style, and especially performing on stage. Kilmer did an enormous amount of research and preparation before production began, and he sang the songs for the film, with his vocals mixed with original music by the band. It is downright eerie to watch this performance – if there was ever someone born to play a role, it was Kilmer as Morrison. These are just a few of the examples of actors bringing music to life on screen that really impressed me.
Outside The Comfort Zone
I’ve previously written about the lack of chances Tom Cruise has taken in recent years with his acting choices. Granted, he was very effective as a contract assassin in 2004’s Collateral, and he took a big risk playing a singer in the Broadway adaptation of Rock of Ages, a film I haven’t seen. But lately, it seems like he is focused on the action genre, primarily the Mission: Impossible franchise. I do hope that he continues to try new choices as he moves into the latter stages of his career. Yes, he will be turning 60 next year (yikes, I feel old), so he is approaching the back nine, as they like to say. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see an impressive, outside the comfort zone, performance from Cruise in the next ten years that earns him a Supporting Actor Oscar.
In the late 1980s, Cruise took a departure from the hot-shot leading man type roles he played in Top Gun, The Color of Money, and Cocktail to tackle the dramatic story of Vietnam veteran turned anti-war activist Ron Kovic in Oliver Stone’s Born on the 4th of July. The role earned Cruise critical accolades, and more importantly, demonstrated the range he could bring to the screen. Similarly, in 1993, an actor primarily known for playing wisecracking comedic characters, took on his most serious role to date, in what was considered a risky role for this time period. In Philadelphia, Tom Hanks played an attorney diagnosed with AIDS, who faces bigotry from his law firm, and even his own attorney, all while trying to survive as the disease begins to ravage his body. Hanks was phenomenal in this role, which won him the first of two back-to-back Oscars, and showed that he was more than a comedy actor.
As much as we love to build up actors when we love their work, it’s even more inspiring when they come back from adversity. Despite success doing voice work in the Shrek films, the early 2000s were a pretty low period in the career of Eddie Murphy. He was far removed from his success as a comedy leading man, which he achieved in the 1980s, following a successful stint on Saturday Night Live. In 2006, Murphy took a risk by taking on the role of James “Thunder” Early in the film adaptation of the Broadway musical Dreamgirls. Loosely based on the origin story of The Supremes, the stars of the movie are Jennifer Hudson (who won an Oscar in her film debut) and Beyonce as two of the singers in the supergroup, and Jamie Foxx, who plays their manager. But not to be outdone was Murphy, who played a famous singer, hanging on to the last pieces of his career. Now, Murphy is an exceptional talent, and the man has done singing before – some very good, like this great SNL sketch and some, well….we all remember this unfortunate career choice in the 1980s. While playing a singer on screen was a bit of a risk for Murphy, the bigger stretch was that the character he played was deplorable – a man who treated the women in his life in the most horrible way, especially as he coped with his sliding career with a descent into drug abuse. Yes, playing a nasty character can be tough to pull off, as we saw with these next examples.
Playing A Controversial Character
It’s one thing to play a serial killer, or someone who is a horrible spouse or parent. It’s quite another to play the worst of the worst – a hate-spewing neo-Nazi, who commits unspeakable crimes with no care in the world. That’s what we saw with Edward Norton in American History X in 1998. This was still pretty early in Norton’s career and despite his incredible success with his debut in Primal Fear, it still took a lot of guts to play such a despicable character, like he did in American History X. Granted, the big theme of the movie is his character’s redemption as he sees the mistakes he has made, especially trying to save his younger brother from the same fate. But, Norton still had to spend about half of the film delivering some horrendous dialogue to other actors on screen. As I previously wrote, Norton is one of my favorite actors, and his courage and range displayed in American History X are a big reason.
You think playing a despicable fictional character is bad? How about one of the most hated public figures of the 1990s? If you were alive during the decade, you surely remember the Nancy Kerrigan / Tonya Harding saga. Heck, even Seinfeld did an episode that spoofed the attack that Harding and her husband arranged on Kerrigan that damaged her knee and put her Olympic dreams in jeopardy. In 2017, Margot Robbie (probably of the top five actors working today who have the brightest future ahead of them) portrayed Harding in I, Tonya. This was a very challenging role to take on, as the lead of a story who is nothing close to a “heroine.” No, Harding was seen by millions as the villain in the story, and rightfully so, given her explicit (or implicit?) approval of the Kerrigan attack. The film goes deeper than just that one incident though, exploring the troubled relationship she had with her mother, played by Allison Janney, who won an Oscar for her performance. Robbie was incredible in this movie, actually bringing some sympathy (just a little, not a lot) to the character of Harding, a task I never would have thought possible.
Physical Transformations
While learning a new talent, or taking on a controversial character can be daunting, one of the biggest challenges actors face can be roles requiring physical transformation. Some actors can be wearing so much makeup that they look unrecognizable in their performance. Robert De Niro went the extra mile by gaining 60 pounds to play boxer Jake LaMotta (speaking of deplorable, controversial characters) in Raging Bull, a movie that I only recently saw and found kind of disappointing. I guess I expected more out of it, given the heaps of praise it has received the last forty years, and De Niro’s Oscar win for his performance. That being said, the transformation he made in playing LaMotta in his later years was incredible.
While De Niro was considered the defining actor of his generation, the bigger icon over the same period was Meryl Streep. Now, it’s hard to pick just one iconic role that Streep has done – she has won three Oscars and been nominated a whopping twenty-one times in the last forty years. That’s Tom Brady-level dominance for the acting profession. I recently watched one of her most acclaimed performances in Sophie’s Choice, for which she won her second Oscar. Streep played a Holocaust survivor living in a tortured relationship with her boyfriend (Kevin Kline, in an impressive performance in his film debut) in New York. The couple befriends a young writer, who rents a room in the same house, and Streep’s character recounts her life in Poland during the most devastating time of World War II, including her time in a concentration camp. On the surface, you might not think of Streep undergoing a radical physical transformation of her appearance in most of the film, although she had to lose significant weight for the scenes in the concentration camp. What impressed me even more was her ability to speak with a pronounced Polish accent throughout the movie, delivering her lines in broken English, as her character learned the language. She also spoke fluent Polish and German during the film, not exactly easy skills to put on top of a difficult and emotional role. It’s no surprise that it’s considered one of her greatest performances, and one of the best of all-time. It’s certainly not an easy movie to watch, given the subject matter, but an impressive one nonetheless.
There are many other transformation examples I could give that were successful, both artistically, critically and commercially. For Dallas Buyers Club, Matthew McConaughey lost 50 pounds to play a man dying of AIDS who created a drug network to get the treatment he and his fellow patients needed. Holly Hunter played a mute woman suffering through a pre-arranged marriage in 19th century New Zealand in The Piano. It’s a remarkably beautiful performance that Hunter delivered, especially considering she couldn’t convey emotion with words. When compared side-by-side with her role as the firecracker producer of a network news show in Broadcast News (spoiler – that’s on the short list for a Comfort Film post coming soon), it demonstrates the incredible range that Hunter has.
Probably the most impressive example I remember from the last twenty years was Charlize Theron playing a real-life serial killer in Monster, a role which won her the Oscar for Best Actress. Hollywood has never been good at offering women roles with substance behind them, often having them portray characters who are objectified in their films. Of course there are exceptions, but they are far from the norm. Yes, things are getting better, but quality roles for women were still pretty few and far between in the early 2000s. So, it was impressive for Theron to physically transform her looks and appearance to more accurately look like the real-life character and someone who would commit these despicable acts. She wore prosthetic teeth, gained fifty pounds and was unrecognizable in the role. Choices like this are never a guaranteed success, especially for women. I always remind myself that when an actor is jumping into a role, the only thing they have to cling to is the trust of the script, the vision of the director, and what is in their own toolbox of skills to bring a role to life. For every success like Monster, there are countless examples of attempts that failed immediately. This was truly an impressive performance.
The Actor Who Can Do Anything
If I had to pick the best actor working today, I’d probably pick Leonardo DiCaprio as my favorite. With Daniel Day Lewis retired (or so he claims, we’ll see) and Phillip Seymour Hoffman (a master in versatility that I will cover in more detail later this year) passing away in 2014, Leo is probably the guy I will go see in any movie. A close second would probably be Christian Bale, who has demonstrated his ability to play any kind of role. Now, he has a reputation for being a complete a**hole on set, getting into arguments with fellow actors and crew members. So, while I obviously wouldn’t excuse behavior like that, I have to tip my cap to his incredible performances – and he has done it multiple times.
He may be best known for playing Batman in the Christopher Nolan films of The Dark Knight trilogy, he’s actually been acting for over thirty years, gaining recognition for one of his earliest roles as the lead in Steven Spielberg’s World War II epic Empire of the Sun, when he was only thirteen. His breakout role as an adult was in 2000’s American Psycho, where he played…..well, the title character, to put it bluntly. Patrick Bateman was a brilliant New York investment banker by day, and a serial killer by night. The role required Bale to go to an entirely different world to play the crazed character, something he had never done in his previous films, which were mostly period piece movies. American Psycho showed the industry that Bale could do anything on screen, and through the next decade, he demonstrated a versatility we rarely see in actors.
In addition to his strong acting skills, Bale may be best known for his ability to physically transform his body, losing 60 pounds to play a man tortured by a tragedy in his past leading to insomnia and psychotic visions in The Machinist. He did the same thing six years later, losing weight to play drug-addicted former boxer Dicky Eklund, who helps his brother become a successful boxer himself, in The Fighter. The performance won Bale an Oscar and he has received numerous nominations in the last twenty years. Of course, he can put the weight on too, like he did for American Hustle and Vice, in which he played Dick Cheney in the black-comedy directed by Adam McKay. It’s not just the yo-yo dieting that I’ve been impressed by (disclaimer – I’m not a doctor, but even I know that radically gaining and losing weight is not recommended, I just admire the commitment to his craft). No, I’m really impressed by his ability to be successful across multiple genres and different types of roles – he can be a superhero, he can do serious drama, traditional comedy, black comedy, and even historical fiction and period pieces. He is definitely one of the best actors working today, who has already built an impressive resume.
That’s all for this week. I hope you enjoyed my look at some of my favorite actors who took risks in their career choices. I’ll be back next week for a look at a director that I only recently discovered, but who has quickly impressed me with his ability to build creative worlds to tell his thoughtful stories. I’m talking about Wes Anderson, whose new film, The French Dispatch, opens next week. Thanks for reading and if you’d like to be notified of future posts, you can subscribe here.