Readers discuss representation in Hollywood and other realms of entertainment from the perspective of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and political bent. Share your own thoughts via hello@theatlantic.com.
Opening with the egregious example of Jared Leto playing The Joker in Suicide Squad, Angelica Jade Bastién takes aim at the ostentatious way Hollywood is using method acting in recent years. She observes:
[M]ethod acting of this sort couldn’t exist without the culture of permissiveness and indulgence Hollywood has fostered over the years. For the last few decades, particularly after Robert De Niro’s infamous body transformation for 1980’s Raging Bull, which netted him an Oscar, method acting has become a critical factor in the campaigns of actors seeking trophies. Actors like Daniel Day-Lewis, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christian Bale, and particularly Leonardo DiCaprio have spoken about how they lose themselves in roles—gaining weight, whittling themselves down, never breaking character, taking on accents and hobbies that affect their personal life.
I love this observation from a reader:
The hilarious thing is that the more actors talk about their Method acting, the more attention it calls to their acting in the movie, thus breaking the suspension of disbelief. Of course, this assumes that their goal is actually to heighten their art, as opposed to win trophies or gain popularity.
I had a similar feeling about Leto’s overrated and not believable method performance as a trans woman in Dallas Buyer’s Club:
Another reader looks to a difference performance from a long-time method actor:
There’s a great story I heard once that happened on the set of Marathon Man. Upon being asked by Lawrence Olivier how a previous scene had gone, one in which Dustin Hoffman’s character had supposedly stayed up for three days, Hoffman claimed that he too had not slept for 72 hours to achieve emotional verisimilitude. “My dear boy,” replied Olivier, “why don’t you just try acting?”
It didn’t quite go down that way. Here’s a clip of Hoffman’s response to that apocryphal anecdote:
Another reader takes the opportunity to snipe at Hoffman:
Putting aside acting methods, Hoffman is one of the worst actors. It’s a blessing that he rarely works. He is constantly drawing attention to himself, letting you know how hard he is acting. There is no sincerity in Hoffman’s acting; it’s all a front. (Meryl Streep suffers from the same self-absorption; one is always extremely aware that one is watching Meryl Streep act, not a character on the screen.) The English conservatory approach has trained many more exceptional actors than the self-indulgent method, in my opinion.
Another reader quips about Hoffman, “But he did give his all to portray a tomato in Tootsie; he Became that tomato.” This next reader goes into great depth over the English conservatory approach (and I’ve embedded clips throughout):
British actors of Olivier’s generation certainly didn’t use The Method, and it’s true that recorded performances by John Gielgud, Olivier et al appear “hammy” and unnatural, even by theatrical standards.
But as Ian McKellen has remarked: What modern audiences think of Olivier’s acting now is irrelevant. The important thing is that the audiences who saw him live cried when he died, laughed when he did something amusing, and empathised with his characters; they believed him. And that is the actor’s goal.
Of course what audiences want from theatre and film changes over the years and, as a consequence, so do tastes in acting styles. Hence why Olivier’s performances are now unpalatable, even laughable, to many.
Contemporary British actors now receive a comprehensive training (usually over a full-time, three-year study period) in a variety of approaches to acting.
The most reputed drama schools will train their students in Strasberg’s Method, Sanford Meisner’s techniques, Stella Adler’s techniques, Stanislavski’s System (with the most weight being given to Stanislavski, as his system is the most complete, and the root of the works of the other practitioners), with additional training in the work of Le Coq, Michael Chekhov, and Uta Hagen (to name a few).
These approaches to acting are complemented with classes in movement, dance, body conditioning, voice, singing, clowning, and improvisation. British drama schools offer the most comprehensive and in-depth actor training in the Western hemisphere and remain the most in-demand from international students who are serious about pursuing a career in acting.
The problem with restricting yourself to Strasberg’s Method alone is that it’s incomplete. Strasberg’s aim in developing The Method was to take the work of Stanislavski and to adapt it for contemporary performers. The trouble was Strasberg had only ever read Stanislavski’s first book, An Actor Prepares, which details such staples of Strasberg’s Method as emotional memory.
Not long after publishing that book, Stanislavski witnessed first hand the physical, emotional, and mental toll that his system took on a young Michael Chekhov (who would later go on to become a significant theatre practitioner in his own right). This experience led Stanislavski to develop his work to be more holistic, and complete, with a great emphasis on what he called the psychophysical.
He wrote two subsequent books on acting in which he did not precisely disown his earlier writings, but refined them within the context of his new ideas. Strasberg does not appear to have had access to these later writings (at least when he was developing his Method). Sanford Meisner and Stella Adler are two American practitioners who felt that Stanislavski’s later writings were of equal importance, and worked them into their own working practices and teachings, which are far more complete than Strasberg's.
Couple of little corrections to the article …
Daniel Day Lewis has expressed discomfort at being labelled a Method Actor. He’s gained a reputation for being “the actor who stays in character all the time on set,” but as he has said, he only does this as he feels it’s a better use of his time than sitting around having a drink and a chat with the other actors. If he stays in character between takes and scenes he might discover something new about the character that he hadn’t thought of before and that he could bring into the next take or scene.
Here’s a brilliant scene in There Will Be Blood of that actor playing a character who’s acting:
Back to our reader:
Other stories about Daniel Day Lewis’s immersion in the parts he plays tend to be exaggerated, and the truth behind them seems more to do with his personality than any strict adherence to The Method. He’s a naturally curious man, so his research often becomes in-depth (he learnt how to build a canoe for The Last of the Mohicans, for example). But it’s not restricted to his work as an actor; he learnt how to make shoes just because it intrigued him.
Marlon Brando has also always rejected the (what he saw as) accusation that he was a Method Actor. In fact he seemed to take quite a dim view of Strasberg and his work, describing him as “an ambitious, selfish man who exploited the people who attended the Actors Studio and tried to project himself as an acting oracle and guru. Some people worshipped him, but I never knew why.” Brando credits Stella Adler and Elia Kazan as being the people who taught him to act.
Here’s a compelling clip of Brando blurring the lines between professional acting and everyday acting by ordinary people:
On that note, here’s another passage from Angelica Jade Bastién—and an especially adept one in an overall compelling piece—touching on the macho insecurity that compels many actors to go method:
Brando never went to the extremes of those who came after him, but his career and outlook provide the template for those who see themselves as his successors. Beyond his obsessive dedication to the form, Brando was self-deprecating about his choice of career. He saw acting as inferior to the kind of work a “real” man would do.
By going method, a performer can signal that he works for his art; he can make his labor visible. This attitude has lived on today, and comes through in how [Christian] Bale once framed his career for Esquire: “I have a very sissy job, where I go to work and get my hair done, and people do my makeup, and I go and say lines and people spoil me rotten. This is just not something to be quite as proud of as many people would have you believe.”
Bastién goes on to press the case that double standards over method acting are “sidelining the transformative work of actresses.” Do you have any favorite method performances by women, or thoughts about the topic more generally? Drop us a note and we’ll post: hello@theatlantic.com. For my part, here’s Ellen Burstyn in Requiem For a Dream—an Oscar-nominated performance that outshines all her costars, especially Jared Leto:
In December, I wrote an Atlantic story about how the Internet led to the decline of female film critics at prominent media outlets. The piece noted a sad irony about women and film media in 2016: At a moment when checking up on the role of women in front of and behind the camera is a popular topic with news organizations and amongst film reviewers, women write just 18 percent of top reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and constitute less than a quarter of membership in the four top national critics’ associations. I called for news and media outlets to make a deliberate effort to hire women writers and editors, because the stakes are high: As one study showed, critics tend to write about films helmed by members of their own sex, and reviews have been shown to influence audience attendance and box-office totals. Even in the Internet age, critics matter.
At the time of my writing, I argued there was reason to hope. That BuzzFeed, Time, and The Village Voice had just hired women for prominent film-critic positions in the past two years seemed, to me, a solid reason to be optimistic that media organizations had made hiring women a top priority. But yesterday, the film blog Women and Hollywood put a damper on my assertion that prominent publications have “doubled down on their commitment to women writers.”
In a story called “The Dudeocracy of Film Writers,” the blog’s editors note “a bothersome trend” over the past month—many prominent film-critic jobs have recently gone to men. The new chief film critic at Variety and the Los Angeles Times, senior film critic and film reporter at Indiewire, the film staff writer at Rolling Stone, and editorial director and editor at Film Comment are all men. The editors at Women and Hollywood write they have received plaintive messages from women film writers who are “flabbergasted,” frustrated, and themselves struggling to land staff positions.
It’s important to take the Women and Hollywood story with a grain of salt. The editors did not reach out for comment from hiring editors, who may have told them they initially contacted women to fill those positions. Editors may have added that some hiring decisions have occurred in tandem with internal promotions of women (Kate Erbland, for instance, became film editor at Indiewire) or emphasized that at least one of those hired men—Justin Chang, now the chief film critic at the Los Angeles Times—fills other, gaping diversity holes in film criticism (in his case, Asian-American critics). And as one writer pointed out to me on Twitter, the article didn’t note two other major, recent hires: While the Village Voice has a new male film critic, MTV News recently brought a woman on to be its lead film critic.
But the Women and Hollywood story nevertheless provides a crucial check-in on the ongoing, disappointing conversation. I’m grateful to the blog for ending its own addition to this depressing dialogue on a high note—with a list of women critics to read. You can find those writers (follow them!) here.
A reader suggests there are limited career opportunities, or at least “perceived” limited opportunities, for certain minorities outside of professional sports:
When reading one of your notes yesterday, the phrase “disproportionate diversity” jumped out at me. It just doesn’t quite make sense to me unless diversity is understood as a simple code for the inclusion of “minorities,” which would be disappointingly revealing of a perspective insufficiently critical and careful in its engagement with race. Diversity may often be used as code for simply including numbers of minorities below and or up to their proportionate demographic levels, but that cheapens the concept.
Can you have a disproportionate representation of minorities in sports? If your only metric is demographic proportions, sure. But if you survey the field of opportunities perceived to be truly open to minorities and the ways in which minorities have been and continue to be systematically shut out of careers by both personal and institutional biases, then I think the disproportionality becomes a reflection of the realities of minorities’ perceptions of the avenues open to them.
Another reader suggests that such a perception could be self-defeating:
Is extreme overrepresentation of black men in pro sports actually the result of underlying social issues?
Becoming a professional athlete requires a person to both have the genetics and then work extremely hard from the time you’re a child. If you do both of those, and don’t sustain serious injury, there is a remote chance of a sustained career as a professional athlete. In short, being a child working primarily with the goal of becoming a professional athlete is essentially playing the lottery with your own life. And isn’t playing the lottery an irrational decision that taxes the poor? For every professional athlete, there are thousands left in the wake who don’t fare nearly as well.
Should ANYONE work that hard from the time they’re a child in hopes of a remote chance of making a professional sport? The hard work that the tens of thousands of kids are putting in today in hopes of getting drafted in the 2029 NBA draft is potentially coming at the expense of other interests, with most of those interests carrying much better career potential than playing basketball six hours a day as an eight year old. If you’re that same eight year old, you’re relying on others around you to provide these other interests. If you’re poor, each of those interests can grow to represent “a way out.”
So, looking back, is today’s overrepresentation of black men in professional sports the result primarily of an overrepresentation of eight-year-old black boys in the 1990s who felt they had no other way out?
That could lead to a tragic irony; even when educational and job opportunities open up nationwide, there will inevitably be a lag in the perception that those opportunities are attainable, and thus some young people won’t be as prepared to seize them.
Responding to Lenika’s piece about the small percentage of Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans in Hollywood, a reader snarks, “Just look at that racist NBA: Whites and Latinos are terribly under-represented”—74.4 percent of the players are Black, 23.3 percent are White, 1.8 percent are Hispanic, and 0.2 percent are Asian. That supposed double standard was echoed in the comments section of Julia Lee’s piece for us today about how Asian Americans are often discouraged by their parents from going into the arts. But this reader makes a key distinction when it comes to professional acting and pro sports:
While there is some subjectivity, who’s hired in the NBA and NFL comes down to beating the clock, scoring, and yardage. Those three things have no opinions nor feelings.
And regarding the hugely disproportionate percentage of Black players in the NBA and NFL, the reader notes, “Those are leagues where the white guys hire all the black guys.” As far as the coaches? Here’s a snapshot of the NFL from The New York Times last year:
Among the league’s hundreds of assistant coaches, 16 percent were members of minority groups in 1991; that proportion increased to 36 percent in 2007 and 29 percent in 2013. [The NFL is] where 67 percent of the players were African-American in 2013, according to data published by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport.
This season, five out of the 32 head coaches are Black—or nearly 16 percent, just ahead of the percentage of African Americans nationwide—in addition to just one Hispanic coach. Regarding the NBA, here’s a snapshot from FiveThirtyEight in 2014:
… 43.3 percent of NBA coaches were black compared with just 2 percent of the league’s majority owners (of the NBA’s 49 majority owners, Michael Jordan of the Charlotte Bobcats was the only person of color, according to Lapchick’s data).
With that context in mind, do you have any strong views about diversity in pro sports, or the entertainment industry more generally? Drop us an email. Meanwhile, this reader broadens the debate even further:
What about religious diversity? Do all religious groups receive proportional treatment or are certain groups under or overrepresented? Do evangelical Christians receive adequate representation in the Academy and the Oscars?
A reader responds to Lenika’s essay examining diversity in Hollywood beyond Black and White—namely to Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans:
I appreciate the inclusion of multiple viewpoints within the rubric of diversity. What some of the commenters on this essay seem to disdain is the idea that everyone wants an award, a good part in a movie, fame, and success just for being from a particular background. May I respectfully suggest that what a lot of people actually want is to see stories that reflect their experience, their intelligence, their sense of compassion, and their sense of complexity. It is a difficult issue to see what any of us (myself included) do not experience directly, but rather filtered, if presented at all, through stereotypes or distant stories that reduce people—real people—to convenient parts of a machine that glorifies someone else.
Did you, on the other hand, have any problems with the piece? Drop us an email. A few more readers sound off:
I would like to make a point regarding the quote from Joel Coen.
I agree with him that shoehorning in a specific type of character in order to appease some general notion of inclusivity is a bad idea because it will be immediately obvious to the audience and it would hurt the story. The Coen brothers’ own biases about the stories they want to tell and the identities of the characters whose stories are told are completely shaped by their experiences. If a casting director, screenwriter, or director has a very narrow experience with specific types of people, then he or she will not even begin to think about casting, writing, or directing for people that do not fit that experience. It doesn’t occur to them that this is the case because they are blinded by their own biases.
The issue is not that we cannot have biases, because that is impossible. We each bring to the table that which we know. But I believe that diversity among casting directors, screenwriters, and directors would translate to a greater proportion of interesting stories about characters that everyone would want to see because they would not be “Black stories,” “Hispanic stories,” or “Asian stories.” They would be stories that happen to include characters whose backgrounds are diverse and no one would need to fill a quota because it would be intrinsic to the scriptwriting and casting process. A plurality of voices in positions of power and influence in film will be needed for this to happen.
This reader also addresses the famed directors:
It’s funny, but as a Latino, I would love to see a movie the Coen Brothers could direct “that involves four black people, three Jews, and a dog,” as they put it. With their irreverent, twisted sense of humor, I honestly think this could work.
And that’s ultimately the problem: So many decision makers in Hollywood have a fantastically cramped view of minority experiences. There needn’t be a quota— just a simple acknowledgment that minorities can also be cast in movies about weirdos in the L.A. suburbs, or darkly comic murder mysteries in Minnesota. It is this severe lack of imagination on the part of Hollywood gatekeepers that is fueling to this growing backlash from minorities.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with an alleged white hipster girl from Williamsburg on The Atlantic’s comments section about Lena Dunham’s exclusion of minorities on her show Girls. This woman was highly offended that minorities would dare challenge Dunham, because Dunham was describing “her” reality, and in “her” reality there were no minorities anywhere. So why should the minorities then butt in and demand that Dunham include them in her show? I had to retort that there are hipsters who are black and Latino, that some live over-privileged, cosseted, prickish lifestyles, and that I know a bunch of them myself. It worried me deeply that Dunham isolates herself (intentionally or unintentionally) so thoroughly in a lily-white island in the most diverse city in the world, where there is a surfeit of overprivileged black or Latino hipsters. The reader got huffy, responded more or less that she wasn’t racist, and we let it go.
But the very act of isolation is the racism that minorities are trying to get some of these gatekeepers to understand. But then the gatekeepers get highly offended, which leads to a backlash of the backlash. It’s not pretty, but this is how progress happens. This will be a long and hard-fought slog, but Hollywood will be changed. It has happened in other hidebound institutions, and it will happen in this one too.
Another reader wants to broaden the debate:
African Americans are over-represented in the popular music industry compared to other groups. Should that over-representation balance off under-representation in the film/TV industry? Should we start a campaign to reduce African-American involvement in the popular music industry so that underrepresented groups like whites and Asians can chart more hits songs? Should every industry be demographically representative, or is it OK if some demographic groups gravitate to specific industries? And as mentioned in the article, do Africans, Asians, and Latinos count if they are not African-Americans, Asian-Americans or Latinos born in the USA?
Want to tackle one of those questions or any of the points raised thus far? Contribute via hello@theatlantic.com. We’ll post the strongest arguments from all sides.
