“Nobody knows anything about screen acting. And certainly, no one (save for a few experts) knows anything about method acting — though lots of people feel free to use the term as a derogatory insult. When any actor goes to a laughable extreme in preparation for a role, they’re going “method.””
“Schulman’s now-infamous piece about Strong’s work on his character Kendall Roy, entitled “On ‘Succession,’ Jeremy Strong Doesn’t Get the Joke,” became a perfect illustration of how much we don’t know about acting, how much we think we know about acting, and how, generally, we consider anyone who takes themself too seriously to be something of a pain in the ass”
“To me, the article is all about how little we know about acting and what actors do, and how we feel entitled to have an opinion on a craft that remains a mystery to most of us”
“The brainchild of playwright and stage director Jesse Armstrong, the show is shot in a cinéma vérité style inspired by the Dogme 95 film movement, and, reportedly, each episode is rehearsed like a play. It has an immediacy that many other shows don’t have”
“The article revived age-old battle lines, evoking the myth of Laurence Olivier cheekily asking Dustin Hoffman, during their work on The Marathon Man: “[W]hy don’t you try acting?””
“As Schulman suggests, for many (imagined) stakeholders, the article was an empty signifier for whatever they thought it was about: acting, celebrity profiles, quality TV, social class, or ambition”
“why do we even care about Schulman’s article, Jeremy Strong, or Succession at all? What is it about this article that makes us think we can weigh in on Strong’s acting talent? Why are we so concerned with how he performs the role of Kendall Roy or how his colleagues feel about him? In short, what is it about this article that has hit such a nerve?”
“For me, a film scholar who studies acting techniques, the key question (with apologies to Raymond Carver) is this: what do we talk about when we talk about acting?”
“That’s one of the big questions that stage director and author Isaac Butler asks in his remarkable new book, The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act. In our conversation about the Strong phenomenon, Butler suggested that the amount of time we spend talking about actors and acting actually obscures how little we know about them or their craft.”
“as an audience, we’re not equipped with the vocabulary to evaluate what Strong says he’s doing, how Schulman reports it, or how Strong’s technique fuels his performance on-screen”
“As Butler suggests, even critics who write about acting and performance “often rely on a basic shorthand of ‘convincing’ or ‘bravura’ or ‘charismatic’ or ‘well observed.’”
“Sorting out what makes for a good performance can be like struggling to escape quicksand without the aid of a handy tree branch.” In other words, “We know good acting when we see it” and “Nobody knows anything” are two sides of the same coin.”
“Actors rarely speak (or know how to speak) about their craft to laypeople. And conversely, those who do are often seen as self-centered, uncooperative, or simply eccentric — like Strong”
“Though he cites Day-Lewis and Al Pacino as his chief influences, Strong seems a kindred spirit to De Niro. They both use behavioralist techniques — external triggers such as clothing or other physical cues — to embody their characters. They are also actors who push their performance process to the extreme — to the point of leading outsiders to believe that they are engaging in self-harm”
“What Strong’s detractors and partisans can all agree on is that what he does on-screen works — that his performances are riveting, requiring technical skills that most of us (and many actors too) lack. The furor surrounding him, the debate over whether he is a diva or a dedicated artist, is as much a part of this process as is our collective desire to understand it”