Recently I watched a 2021 movie called The Protégé, which features Maggie Q, and which left me thinking about the parts of her career that I’ve seen. It’s possible to read the film as a reminder of some of her work in action films and thrillers, even as a reflection on it.
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Andrzej Chyra as Hippolytus and Isabelle Huppert as Phaedra in the Sarah Kane section of Phaedra(s) at BAM (photo by Pascal Victor/ArtComArt, courtesy Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe)
Though the ability to play multiple roles is essential to the art of acting, there’s something uncanny about seeing the switch happen before us. Even when we know there’s some presentational trickery involved, as when separate performances by Tatiana Maslany are composited into a single scene on the BBC America drama Orphan Black, we’re beguiled by it. (This year, Emmy voters were too, giving Maslany the award for outstanding lead actress in a drama series.) The Peter Brook approach to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, first presented in 1970, in which many of the players of the court scenes also take on characters in the forest scenes, wins us over in part for thematic reasons but in part for purely theatrical reasons—this is a form of magic, especially appropriate to that play, but increasingly popular in other productions. Multicasting is part of the very idea of small companies such as New York’s Theatre Bedlam, which is currently using it in an adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. Whether this means something I’ll leave to others to decide, but I can’t help noticing that these theatrical demonstrations of multiple selves seem to have become more common during the last half century, roughly the same period in which our concern with authenticity has grown.
A recent presentation at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Continue reading
An actor acquaintance of mine, Jeff Still, recently shared on Facebook an Atlantic article about the contortions that film actors have begun going through in the name of creating a character. Surely you’ve heard of a few. Jared Leto acted like the Joker throughout the production of the recent Suicide Squad film, a process that included pranking the cast with used condoms and a dead pig. Leonardo DiCaprio, a committed vegetarian, felt he had to eat real meat in a scene of The Revenant. Adrien Brody starved himself and (by one account) broke up with his girlfriend before doing The Pianist.
This overheated approach to acting Continue reading
In a books column on the sports business in the May 16, 2016, New Yorker, Louis Menand mentioned this:
The entire industry rests on the labor of athletes. The number of athletes is actually quite small, but, as a class, they are not getting that much of the money. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 13,700 people make their living playing spectator sports in the United States (compared with, for example, sixty-nine thousand people who are actors). The median annual wage for athletes is $44,680.
Are those numbers correct? Prepare for a bit of head spinning.
Even if you watch the kind of movie trailer that outlines half the plot, you’re likely to be surprised by any decent film, just as you’re likely to be surprised in some manner or degree by most other works of art or entertainment. The experiences they create are just too dense or extensive to be conveyed in reduced form; the reason we read the book that just got good reviews or see the movie everyone’s talking about it is to find out for ourselves what it’s like. But you can get a special kind of kick, or jolt, or unsettling sensation, from going into something with near-total ignorance. Continue reading
Francis Thompson felt that the world was full of angels: “Turn but a stone, and start a wing!,” he wrote. While it lacks a certain something, one might say the same about actors, for our entertainment-saturated world seems to abound in them; turn but a stone, and start a thespian. One I discovered a few years ago is Mireille Enos, who played a leading role in The Killing, an American TV drama based on a Danish show called Forbrydelsen. Many viewers took it as essentially a crime story and were disappointed when the end of its first season failed to resolve the case with which it had begun, but in truth it dramatized a view of the world as much as anything else, and a good deal of its view was embodied in Enos, whose character seemed always to be harried, doubting, or in pain.
Television hasn’t been much prone to sequelism, because a series is, by definition, a thing that keeps coming back—recurrence is built in. So it’s pretty odd that the Fox network decided to revive its SF-and-conspiracy drama The X-Files for what amounts to a six-episode sequel, which starts tonight. The show began in 1993 and came to a fairly conclusive ending in 2002, after nine seasons and one movie (a much-derided second film was released in 2008), appearing to have nowhere left to go. At its peak, the series was well written, well produced, winningly wacky and engaging, both popular and influential. But it lost its way before time and consequently lost some of its admirers, as the show’s entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction points out; its departure was not entirely regretted. The X-Files is not so recent that it can just be restarted, as Netflix has done for a handful of shows. Nor does there seem to be much room for a fresh look, a new version for a new era, given that Fringe, which ran on the same network between 2008 and 2013, already regenerated the show in a sense. Replacing aliens with a parallel universe, Fringe could’ve been called The Altiverse Files.
Variety, with its amusing lingo, recently pointed out that three performers from the cast of WGN’s Manhattan are now doing “legit projects” in New York: John Benjamin Hickey, Christopher Denham, and Mamie Gummer. In a conversation with the three of them conducted by Cynthia Littleton, they discuss the lure of the stage, the differing demands of stage and screen work, and the value of a theater background. Continue reading
“All you need for theater is two planks and a passion”—one version of a saying attributed to Spanish playwright Lope de Vega (who actually said something a little less pithy). Planks can be gotten anywhere. For passion, you need actors.
Given the cooperation of the Fates, this will be an occasional feature, exploring the life and work of actors by means of a standard set of questions. Earlier entries in the series can be found here. (Responses have been lightly edited.)
In this installment of my Q&A, which introduces a few new questions, actor Atra Asdou speaks to the casting issue that has recently stirred attention (for examples, see here and here), recalls playing to the family camcorder, and explains how her most recent role affected her perceptions. I discovered her, so to speak, while looking into a recent Steppenwolf Theatre production. You can find Atra on Twitter.
Where were you born?
Chicago, Illinois.
Where do you live now?
Chicago, Illinois.
What’s your current role?
I just finished a run playing Julia in George Orwell’s 1984, a production in the Steppenwolf for Young Adult series. In February, I’ll start rehearsals for the role of the Wife in a Lookingglass Theatre Company production of Lorca’s Blood Wedding, which will begin performances in March.
What sparked your interest in acting?
My father has always been a huge movie fan. Spending all day at the movies was his favorite pastime when he was growing up in Iraq. When my siblings and I were children, we didn’t have a bedtime and we didn’t have restrictions as to what we would watch at night: it was whatever my dad wanted to watch. He’d, of course, manually censor any inappropriate moments by changing the channel then changing it back, but we’d watch every movie from Dumbo to The Godfather. Lots of Westerns, too. He’d quiz me on actors. “Atra, do you know who that is?” “Robert Redford?” “Robert Duvall.” When he bought a camcorder, my brothers and I would record silly premises and characters. My father would also take us to our cultural center to watch plays and sketches the people of our community would perform. I didn’t know acting could be a profession until fifth grade. That’s when I met my friend Nicole, who, at the time, wanted to be an actor. Her parents took her to the theater all the time, and she was involved in plays. They often had an extra ticket and were so gracious as to have me along to see shows like The Lion King. That was the first professional production I’d seen. That’s when I started pursuing it—taking classes in middle and high school, then majoring in theater at Loyola University Chicago.
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In subway stations a few weeks ago, I began seeing a poster, for a film called Sicario, that featured Emily Blunt wielding a pistol. To put it plainly, this bugged me. Is this fulfillment of Henry Higgins’s wish for a woman to be more like a man really the kind of equality we want? I had felt the same way a few months back, when I kept seeing promos for the second season of the HBO series True Detective that featured Rachel McAdams with a handgun. Recognizing that there’s a certain appeal to this form of power (as in a few of my pictures on Flickr), I grabbed a quick photo and posted it to Instagram with a comment:
Je Suis, Ergo Sum 