I’m not sure what brought this to mind. Maybe it’s the torrent of advertisements for The Huntsman: Winter’s War we’ve been deluged with lately.
Have you noticed how many of the lead characters in American movies and television are Brits, Canadians, Aussies, etc.? I think it’s about half. Take the movie above for example. Of the principal cast Charlize Theron is South African, Emily Blunt is a Brit, Chris Hemsworth is an Aussie, and the only American is Jessica Chastain.
It’s not just costume dramas, either. Comedy is about the only area where you’ll find mostly American casts.
I’ve been thinking about why that might be. Here’s what I’ve come up with:
- Casting directors’ standard of beauty leans towards Brits, Canadians, etc.
- American casting directors find their accents charming.
- American actors and actresses tend towards the method which makes them hard to work with.
- Americans are too fat.
- There are more venues for honing an actor’s craft in English-speaking countries other than the U. S.
- Brits, Canadians, etc. improve the prospects for distribution in English-speaking countries.
- They’re cheaper.
It isn’t a new phenomenon. Mary Pickford was Canadian for goodness sake.
I don’t think its the accents, because I’ve been surprised a number of times to hear an actor being interviewed and I didn’t realize before that they were foreign. It seems like a British accent is only good for villains.
Looking around for more examples of British actors, I found this guardian article about the alarm this issue has raised in Hollywood. The most persuasive explanation is:
“[Richard] Hicks [actor and President of Casting Society of America] and his colleagues put the problem down to a failure to train American actors in character work. It is by building up a portfolio of cameo roles that a talent can develop, he argued. In answer to the dearth of substantial male talent, his fellow casting directors cast their net wider, giving serious roles to actors who had picked up technique in comic roles.”
It goes on to describe American comedic actors that have had good dramatic roles (Carrell, Sandler, Stiller, Vaughn), though I’ve not seen the examples given. Bill Murray, Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, and Steve Martin are the ones that come to mind. Comedy is hard.
I was curious why Anthony Hopkins was cast as Nixon. From Wikipedia:
“The studio did not like Stone’s choice to play Nixon. They wanted Tom Hanks or Jack Nicholson — two of Stone’s original choices. The director briefly considered Gene Hackman, Robin Williams, Gary Oldman and Tommy Lee Jones. Stone met with Warren Beatty but the actor wanted to make too many changes to the script. Stone cast Hopkins based on his performances in The Remains of the Day and Shadowlands. Of Hopkins, Stone said, “The isolation of Tony is what struck me. The loneliness. I felt that was the quality that always marked Nixon.””
So many bad choices in there, but the one that makes the most sense to me besides Hopkins is Oldman, who I can see submerging himself in the role assuming he could physically be made to look the part. Of course, Oldman is British too.
Anyway, a snapshot of a thinking process.
Having well-trained actors is a necessity when you are basically casting and recasting the same movie over and over again.
It’s the versatility. Hemsworth and Blunt are pretty talented and versatile. Given how he looks Hemsworth is really good at being dressed up as a Norse God and not sounding like an idiot, and Blunt can do action and Sondheim and Sicario. But they can also be moved around. The big personalities can’t be moved around. Robert Downey can’t play Iron Man and an inventor in a very similar movie. He’s a personality rather than an actor.
“He’s a personality rather than an actor.”
I dunno. Have you see his Chaplin?
I’m thinking of when they audition rather than in their on-screen performances. Consider, for example, Idris Elba. He’s a very good-looking guy who is also a fine actor. But there’s are lots of very good-looking American actors and lots of very good-looking black American actors. Why Elba? They don’t have the accent.
In the UK every town of any size has a good professional theater. I suspect it may be the same in Australia. That provides young actors and actresses with the opportunity to hone their crafts. That’s just not true in the U. S. It’s one of the reasons I started my own theater group going on fifty years ago.
Sam,
You’re right. But that was before he remade myself.
Dave,
There’s got to be something to watching Idris Elba drop the British accent and become a Baltimore gangster. The reverse would be shifting from a Long Island accent to become a slang-overdosing thug from Leeds.
It’s one of the reasons I started my own theater group going on fifty years ago.
Have you mentioned this before?
Every once in a while. It was a former life. My group existed for about ten years and we produced four or five shows a year. We secured the first rights to quite a number of shows after their original Broadway/off-Broadway runs.
I remember one of my opening nights all of the founding members of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company (Gary Sinise, Terry Kinney, Jeff Perry, H. E. Baccus) were sitting in my front row. Pretty scruffy-looking bunch. We had beat them to the rights for the show, an obscure little experimental off-Broadway musical called Promenade.
My then-partner in the company and I had started up in the mid-1960s.
I’ve taken more acting classes, directing classes, etc. than any human should for their own sanity.
I’ve had several almost distinct lives: theater, musician (I’ve sung at more than 400 weddings), martial arts instructor, antique dealer, and my present life.