Re: Lethality of events

On Tue, 8 May 2007, Ben Finney wrote:
> This is true, but actors do invest a great deal of their own
> creativity in expressing the part.

It honestly depends on the actor.  If you have a chance to see Adam
Baldwin and Jewel Staite at a convention, for example, or read about
how they approach acting, you'll find that Adam Baldwin is a method
actor while Jewel Staite just does what the director tells her to do.
While I think there is some similarity between role-playing and the
Adam Baldwin style of method acting and role-playing, the Jewel Staite
style of just acting treats emotions and vocal inflection more like
singing a musical note and the actor doesn't actually feel what they
are acting.

> That's true, but how is it significant in the context of this thread?
> How does that difference affect the morality of the act of ****traying
> a character?

The problem is that the issue is not about the morality of the act of 
****traying a character.  The issue is the choice to spend time playing a 
character who does Evil, especially if there is no possibility of 
redemption.  And I can't speak for Brian but bear in mind that when I talk

about "Evil", I'm not talking about bad behavior and personal flaws but 
about the sort of things really awful people do.  So I wouldn't personally

call Jayne in Firefly "Evil", though I would consider the character Niska 
"Evil".

> And the majority of cases where the actor *does* have access to the
> background and situation of the character. If you want to bring in
> special cases, you're talking about something quite different from the
> original analogy, which was between actors in a play *in the general
> case*, and roleplayers.

And *in the general case*, not all actors are method actors who think 
deeply about their character's background and situation.  And while
I think there is some comparison to be made between method acting and
immersive role-playing, there are still usually im****tant differences
in motive and so forth.  The outcome of the play is not determined by
how an actor decides to play their character.

> You have a fairly narrow view of what an actor does. An good actor
> will put real effort into attempting to *become* the character for a
> time, trying to get into the mind of the person and experience their
> motivations, for the sake of ****traying that person convincingly. If
> all actors merely did what you seem to describe, nobody would ever be
> captivated by a performance.

Actually, I think it is you who have a fairly narrow view of what an actor

does.  What you are describing is "method acting".  There are plenty of 
actors, if not the majority, who are not method actors.  I strongly urge 
you to listen to Jewel Staite talk about how she acts if she ever shows up

at a nearby convention.  She's a very good example of the other sort of 
acting.  In fact, both she (talking about Adam Baldwin) and Bill Mummmy 
(talking about Andreas Katsulas) seemed to think all of the effort that 
the method actors put into staying in character was pretty funny, as did 
Laurence Oliver when he is said to have suggested to Dustin Hoffman, "Try 
acting, dear boy."

As I've said, I think there are some similarities between method acting 
and immersive roleplaying, but that's not what all actors do, just as
not all role-players ****tray their characters by immersing in them.

John Morrow