Reading Response

In the Glendhill article, the author explains how the popularization of Stainislavski’s Method acting affected the development of the personas of method actors. The first group of successful Method actors, those of the 1950’s, including Marlon Brando, Montcomery Clift, Rod Steiger and Kim Hunter, came to represent the very characters that they performed as. Their personas became ‘based on the unresolved tension between an outer social mask and an inner reality of frustration’ (225). Melodramatic actors begin to internalize and exemplify social and moral issues, as Glendhill describes it, ‘redefining the terms of the social occult’ (226).

Method actors and their related personas still exist. You know, those ‘specially trained’ actors that seem to exist on a higher plane of being still, to this day, seem to represent the same social malaise and psychological malformation. Some actors try to deny that Method acting is dependent on an abusive childhood or whatever, as Daniel Day-Lewis does in the quote from an interview with EW in this blog (I couldn’t find the whole interview). Regardless, its safe to say that Method actors tend to gravitate toward the same dramatic roles, thereby creating a persona based on past performances—emotionally unstable, tragically dichotomous, etc. I can’t help but name Johnny Depp here, whose constant selection (and mastery) of ‘loner’ roles seem to only contribute to his I’m-too-good-for-Hollywood-drama attitude.

Its so ironic, isn’t it, how the Method was developed to teach actors how to act more ‘realistically,’ when, in fact, it is just as artificial as ever? Even if, as Daniel Day-Lewis says, acting doesn’t necessarily come from a hidden part of a damaged psyche, then it is an artifice, one like those carefully constructed personas mastered by the Studios during the Golden Age of American Cinema. My point, then, is that the manufacturing of star personas did not end with the break up of the studio system or the popularization of Method acting. It just morphed into another sort of artifice, one perhaps more ‘hidden’ by so-called realism.

Actors today, like Sean Penn, whose political activism seems to run hand-in-hand with his selection of roles (think: I Am Sam and Before Night Falls), and Russell Crowe, whose various temper-charged characters (in LA Confidential and maybe 3:10 to Yuma or American Gangster) seem to reflect his own problematic violent outbursts (against reporters, mostly), seem to almost replicate the roles that they select. Thus comes the question of the chicken and the egg, did their star personas develop because of the roles they selected, or do the roles they select only reinforce their image?

The personas of modern Method actors, as I am beginning to understand, are of a much more complicated weaving than one might expect. While they aren’t so clearly formulated by studio executives anymore, they are still responsible for maintaining a persona—one that not only keeps them in the public’s eye, but one that makes them easily cast in whatever generic structures they specialize in (like Daniel Day-Lewis and character-driven historical melodramas—yes, I’m bitter about this if you can’t tell).