You Had One Job

I was recently chatting with a dear [male, because in context it might matter] friend about movies and actors and such. He hadn't seen The Last Jedi yet, and one of his reasons was because (to paraphrase): "I don't like Adam Driver as an actor. He only does one thing, and I just don't get—" here my friend waves a hand over his face, "the appeal."

Another [male] friend laughed and agreed that Driver does one thing, and in The Last Jedi "he does a lot of it."

This post isn't a critique of Adam Driver in particular, but we'll use him as an accessible example. To be fair, I've only seen him in Star Wars and Logan Lucky, so I may not be playing with a full hand.

Actors Doing One Thing

This has been Hollywood's underlying formula for decades. If you look at most Cary Grant movies, Cary Grant does his thing in them. He's charming and funny and a bit of a bumbler and he gets into insane situations that he struggles to get back out of. Every now and then he goes against type and does something sinister. In this day and age, I think things run along similar lines. If you want a Cary Grant type these days, you get George Clooney (capable of both charming and sinister). If you want an arrogant asshole, you get Robert Downey Jr. or Benedict Cumberbatch. Goofy man-child with a side of action/adventure? Better call Chris Pratt. Adam Driver does "aggrieved and petulant" I guess?

There's a reason for the term "typecast." When your name as an actor becomes synonymous with a character type . . . When a screenwriter or director or producer can say, "We need a Cary Grant type" and everyone in the room knows exactly what that means . . . you've been typecast. And yet, it's not entirely a bad thing. It might get boring for the actors, but for viewers it's more about interesting stories and combinations of characters. What happens when a Cary Grant type gets thrown together with a Katherine Hepburn type? Sure, we like it when an actor does something different and unexpected (well, sometimes we don't like that at all), but like comfort food, we often also like knowing exactly what we're getting. It's kind of a shorthand. We don't have to work as hard.

I'm not saying actors shouldn't stretch. Of course they should, if and when they get the opportunities (and want them). But there's no harm in knowing what you're good at.

"The Appeal"

This is, of course, hugely subjective, so I can only speak for myself on this point. While I won't say no to looking at classically handsome men on screen for 2+ hours, I find that, for me, I'm much more attracted to interesting faces. I like watching them more than I do perfectly symmetrical features or whatever. That's me; I don't know about anyone else, although I can say my daughter has the biggest crush on both Kylo Ren and Professor Snape, so . . . Apple/tree, I guess? I'm sure studies have been done about the way family and/or genes shape tastes.

And then again, I think characters—those same ones that seem so repetitive, so one-note—also contribute to the appeal of an actor. My male friends see Kylo Ren as whiny, and he is, but Kylo Ren is also complicated, and that's attractive. I, and I'm sure many other people, am willing to look past a lot of seemingly negative physical attributes if there's something interesting inside. I know that the character and the actor are not one and the same, of course. My daughter knows it, too. She knows she likes Kylo Ren, not Adam Driver. (Perhaps not everyone makes that distinction; I recall being guest author at a convention and having a woman talk to me about an actor as though he was the character, and I kept trying to gently prod her onto the correct track in that train of thought, but she was convinced that the two were, if not the same, interchangeable?) But if Adam Driver plays a lot of interesting, complex characters, my daughter and I will probably start to think we like him, too, at least as an actor. At which point his name becomes a selling point for studios. This is why it's so important for actors to choose good roles. Their appeal is tied up in those choices just as much as their looks are.