mikeymikec
Lifer
- May 19, 2011
- 18,577
- 11,231
- 136
That's not for Best Actor. It's for Best Supporting Actor.
Shooting stuff on screen for fun isn't the same as holding a villain in high regard, enough to duplicate his actions/way of thinking in real life situations which is what immature minds would do. "Oh it's cool to be like Deadpool. Imma gonna pull my dick out in public and laugh my ass off at the look on everyone's faces!".
I think you're making an argument along the lines of an actor should be careful about picking their roles in case someone with the mental capacity of a potato mistakes what they're doing for advocating real-life behaviour. In which case, huge swathes of fictional material should be banned for the sake of public health. Needless to say but I'll say it anyway, if a society has this level of problems, then the problem is rooted far deeper than in fictional material.
Your use of the word "perfect" seemed like you were moving goalposts, but as I said before but I'll say it more explicitly this time: in hindsight I inferred something that apparently wasn't there. Moving on.Still don't understand what I said to deviate the conversation away from the original point. All I said was, villains are unlikable in general despite their performances. Weird if they win the Best Actor award (meaning none of the protagonists in the other nominated movies were up to snuff so there was nothing to do but choose the perfectly portrayed villain).
Do you think anyone plays these roles because they really want to?
Oh god yes, absolutely. Heath Ledger for example was thoroughly bored with playing the boyish heart-throb. Gene Hackman has a general rule of not wanting to play roles that he considers were written with him in mind, partly because good actors want to expand their repertoire.
Given the choice between protagonist and antagonist, a normal person would obviously want to be remembered as the hero.
A seriously sweeping statement that may be true (at least insofar as what a given person might consider to be heroic, which might horrify another person), but actors are not "normal people". An good actor goes on stage/set to deliberately portray something that they are not, the challenge is to deviate further from the actor's self-perception. A good actor needs to understand what makes / would make a realistic character tick, to try and adopt the mannerisms that they think such a character might have, like Heath Ledger's Joker putting emphasis on certain consonants, or Brian Cox's Hannibal Lector lip and tongue mannerisms that are akin to say a serial killer like Fred West (AFAIK). Their craft is to adopt all of these characteristics in a believable manner.
Is therefore an actor playing a protagonist or antagonist more like something they are not?
Also, an actor might want to play a villain like Homelander because the actor has something they want to express about a POS like that character that they feel needs to be expressed. Like the very matter-of-fact way that the rape scene is portrayed in 'Once Upon A Time in America', putting the notion right in peoples' faces how many men believe that when they've wined and dined a woman that they're entitled to sex at the end of the night.
The decision to choose the role of the antagonist may be based on many factors, like amount of work (maybe the villain is paid a lot more for lesser screen time and the job is "easy" compared to all the effort that the protagonist has to go through like training and bulking up for the role etc.), to make their career seem more diverse (actor A has pigeonholed himself for playing the good guy always. actor A is not happy about that. he wants to show his acting has "range") and plain boredom (what? winning and falling in love with the girl again? nah. I wanna rape the girl this time!).
I don't think any of this is factual TBH, except the point about diversity. Your last point about rape is a little odd; the only person (apart from a wannabe rapist) I might suspect of this is Mark Wahlberg, being the guy who said he dreamt many times about what he would have done if he was on one of the planes during 9/11. What goes into a sex scene as far as mainstream actors are concerned is not anything like the effect that is (presumably competently) portrayed on-screen. What you're saying is like an actor supposedly wanting to play Superman because they'll get to fly in the role... no, they'll get to be around green screens while hanging from wires often.
Last edited: