Core Post #1 - Liam Kenney

    In the eternal struggle to make a performance “real,” King’s framework of the relationship between actor and character offers a look at some of the practices that modern casting directors, actors, and audiences sense to break free from in 2024. We’ve now reached a period of filmmaking where the notion of a “real” performance and the “hyper-semiotization,” of actors has become a point of discussion in the massive online forums of social media. The shared consciousness of the entertainment world has now completely absorbed King’s theories as a matter of fact. The way that casting directors were previously able to toy with the perception of actors, an example being Hitchock’s use of James Stewart in Vertigo, now comes under far more scrutiny. If the end goal of these actors is to play authentically on the screen, it’s odd to consider how “method” acting has become so distorted. Obviously the first example to come to mind is Jared Leto’s Joker. I believe Jared Leto even came up in a class discussion, but Jared Leto’s douchebaggery was so public, so reprehensible that it altered both his perception as an “actor,” and the public perception of the movie. The role of The Joker deserves its own paper as the public perception of The Joker almost exists as its own entity, who alters the actor playing the role, rather than the opposite which King writes about. King’s writings on the “personality,” that actors adopt in the world beyond their roles ties in nicely with the documentary we watched earlier in the year about the presence of stars on social media. There’s a clear through line of the evolution of these “characters,” especially in the light of the different ways stars interact with fans online. Kyle MacLachlan for instance has embraced meme culture, and seen a massive uptick in popularity as a result. An actor I think has effectively broken out of being type-cast and successfully changed the relationship to his broader “character,” is Dave Bautista. In many of his interviews, he discusses this phenomenon directly, often citing his own desires to play new characters and roles not typically given to someone of his stature. He has effectively “suppressed,” as King writes, his own appearance in order to fit into the various roles he’s found himself playing across multiple genres, a relatively uncommon phenomenon in the massive world of entertainment.