Nonprofessional Actors Are the Heart of the Movies
Some of the most accomplished actors in the business are among this year’s Oscar nominees in the acting categories, but, in the films for which they’ve been nominated, many of them are partnered by actors who have little or no training and have never (or hardly ever) acted in movies. In “Marty Supreme,” Timothée Chalamet is joined by such newcomers as the reality-TV celebrity entrepreneur Kevin O’Leary, the rapper Tyler Okonma (a.k.a. Tyler, the Creator), and the writer Pico Iyer. “One Battle After Another” puts Leonardo DiCaprio together with the musician and professor Paul Grimstad. In “Sinners,” Michael B. Jordan acts alongside the musician Miles Caton. “The Secret Agent” stars Wagner Moura, who has several major scenes with Tânia Maria, a longtime dressmaker and rug maker. What’s more, although none of these nonprofessional actors are nominated for their supporting roles, these films are four of the five nominees in this year’s newest category: Achievement in Casting.
The prominence of movies featuring nonprofessionals, in this category and in the year’s Oscar nominations over all (forty-two), is no surprise: directors may make movies what they are, but actors are what viewers see, and these movies, with their casting of nonprofessionals, offer flavors of performance that differ drastically from what can be achieved with a uniformly skilled cast of professionals. The casts of all of these movies are tangy—they offer documentary grafts, as if figures from life offscreen showed up to authenticate the drama as a found object rather than a fabricated one. The kind of authenticity they bring, however, varies from movie to movie and from performer to performer, not least because there are many kinds of nonprofessionals. For instance, O’Leary, Okonma, and Iyer are used to being on camera, albeit as themselves; Grimstad, as a professor, is a longtime public speaker; Caton has often performed his music onstage and on TV. Only Tânia Maria, plucked from obscurity by the director Kleber Mendonça Filho, as an extra for his 2019 film “Bacurau,” was a completely private person.
All of these types have been prominent in movies for more than a century. Will Rogers, a newspaper columnist and vaudeville monologuist—an influencer of the nineteen-tens and twenties—became a movie star who essentially played himself. Singers without theatre experience, such as Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Doris Day, were launched into movie stardom. The tradition continued with Cher, David Bowie, and Will Smith, and it also includes dancers (Cyd Charisse, Jennifer Lopez) and athletes (Woody Strode, Esther Williams, Jim Bouton, Arnold Schwarzenegger). There’s a singular space reserved for the saxophonist Dexter Gordon and his performance in “ ’Round Midnight,” which he largely improvised. The cinema features a special category of nonprofessionals who are cast to play themselves. The 1930 German film “People on Sunday” (one of the first for which Billy Wilder had a writing credit) is the story of five ordinary Berliners (such as a travelling wine salesman and a record-store clerk) who perform as themselves. Jackie Robinson plays himself, movingly, in “The Jackie Robinson Story.” Elroy (Crazylegs) Hirsch did the same, in “Crazylegs,” and who can forget Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle playing themselves in “Safe at Home!”? Even military veterans have played themselves: the much-decorated Second World War hero Audie Murphy in “To Hell and Back,” the 1955 adaptation of his war memoir, and the servicemen who reënacted their thwarting of a terrorist attack in Clint Eastwood’s “The 15:17 to Paris.”
But there are two categories of nonprofessionals whose place in the history of the art strikes me as particularly exalted. The first is directors who act, whether in their own films or those of others. I don’t mean performers who go on to direct themselves, such as Charlie Chaplin, Jacques Tati, Orson Welles, John Cassavetes, or Clint Eastwood, but, rather, directors with no acting background who took it up in the course of their own filmmaking. These include Chantal Akerman, Spike Lee, François Truffaut, Youssef Chahine, David Lynch, and—in the most dramatically complete performance by a dramatically unschooled director—Jean Renoir, with his central role in his masterwork, “The Rules of the Game.”
These indelible performances by directors are no surprise; I’ve long felt that just about all directors are, first of all, actors—albeit ones who usually reserve their performances for the members of their casts and crews. Of course, to function in any professional environment is also to perform (see under: O’Leary), but to do so as a director is to create a specific kind of drama, a comprehensive ambience that is itself a private play. It’s a form of theatre in which the synergy of technique and performance converge in the image to yield the metaphysics of cinema. Far from merely giving orders, directors are participants in a social reality in which the most important results aren’t the naked-eye ones of deeds achieved but the magic infinitesimal moments that expand into big-screen spectacles.
It’s that metaphysical element that distinguishes performance in theatre from performance onscreen—and why the very notion of a nonprofessional actor makes sense in movies but, of course, doesn’t in theatre. That’s where the second exalted form of nonprofessional acting arises: when the star is born. John Wayne was a prop assistant and an occasional extra when Raoul Walsh cast him in the lead of the spectacular Western “The Big Trail,” from 1930. Joan Crawford was a dancer in a chorus line when she was summoned for a screen test and signed to a studio contract. Jason Schwartzman was a seventeen-year-old high-school student with no background in acting when Wes Anderson tapped him to star in “Rushmore.” What all three have in common is that they became more than stars; they expanded the very art of movie acting. Each one brought an entirely new style of performance to the cinema.
Modernism in cinema is inseparable from the art of the untrained, nonprofessional actor, because there’s something about the nonprofessional that accords with the very essence of cinema: the involuntary. As soon as the camera rolls, even the best-trained actors are in the same position as nonprofessionals: the camera takes what it will, regardless of what the actor intended to give it. In the theatre, the actor gives; in the cinema, the actor is taken from. Cinema is an extractive art, which is what makes for much of the bad faith in the business: exceptional methods (including the Method) to exert control, and exceptional measures, in advertising these methods, to assert the power of one’s own exertions over the results—and to publicize one’s strenuous efforts to entertain the audience. The mystery ingredient that makes the camera love some actors and spurn others is a terror. Those who don’t have it work to overcome the lack; those who do have it work to overcome the nagging sense that they haven’t really worked for what they have—not to mention the fear of losing this intangible endowment. Nonprofessionals, by contrast, work in a cinematic state of grace. They work hard because making movies is difficult, but the implicit breeziness of their performances comes through as the fundamental truth of the art.
That’s why the casting of nonprofessionals is at the core of the modernist project of cinematic demystification, the stripping of theatrical artifice to arrive at an essence—whether social, spiritual, formal, or emotional. Specific approaches may vary. Robert Bresson, in seeking the essence of sin and grace in the slightest gesture, largely eschewed professionals in order to distill performance to embodiment. Jean-Luc Godard used nonprofessionals to rend the dramatic fabric and expose the artifices of performance. John Cassavetes, a highly trained actor, valued actors not for their training but for their freedom, and sometimes found that freedom in nonprofessionals, too. In Abbas Kiarostami’s work, embracing the way that people who aren’t in the movie business talk and move bolsters the films’ documentary essence. But in all of these directors’ productions the presence of nonprofessionals is both a pursuit of progress in cinematic form and an emblem of that effort.
What has changed, in the twenty-first century and thus in the nature of cinematic modernity, is the status of cameras, audiovisual recording, and the very distinction between performing and not. The first home movie may be more than a century old, but home video gave amateurs seemingly boundless capacity for recording family and friends. The on-camera generation blasted through the hoary methods of established independent filmmaking (which essentially amounted to cheaper and diminished versions of Hollywood storytelling) by relying on nonprofessionals. In films like Andrew Bujalski’s “Funny Ha Ha” and “Mutual Appreciation” such performances provided dramatic versions of domestic self-portraiture; elsewhere, as in Ronald Bronstein’s “Frownland,” they enabled a Dostoyevskian flaying of a filmmaker’s own milieu, laying bare its states of mind—and his own. Then came YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok, and more, turning just about everyone in these platforms’ target generations into nonprofessional performers—and, perhaps even more crucially, viewers of the nonprofessional performances of others. Filming one another, such filmmakers begat the most fertile and influential body of work in modern independent filmmaking, the much-maligned movement dubbed mumblecore.
Bronstein starred, as a novice actor, in Josh and Benny Safdie’s 2009 movie “Daddy Longlegs,” and remained their collaborator throughout the following decade. Now, as Josh’s co-writer, co-producer, and co-editor on “Marty Supreme,” Bronstein has been central to the casting of nonprofessionals, which is far more extensive in “Marty Supreme” than in that film’s main rivals for the new casting Oscar, “Sinners” and “One Battle After Another.” Fascinatingly, Paul Thomas Anderson relied far more prominently on nonprofessionals in his previous film, “Licorice Pizza,” which stars Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim, both of whom had no prior big-screen experience, and which also features people from the filmmaker’s own circle. The movie was “a family-and-friends project,” Glenn Whipp, of the Los Angeles Times, reported:
Because everyone knew each other, it fostered a warm, intimate camaraderie that can be felt in the finished film. “I kept thinking, ‘Why haven’t I done this before?’ ” Anderson says. He laughs at the memory. ‘It’s hard to imagine doing it any other way now.’ ”
Coming after the fanatical precision of performances in “Phantom Thread” and the antic artifice of “Inherent Vice,” “Licorice Pizza” played like a liberation. But in “One Battle After Another” Anderson reverts to his earlier practice of centering stars; he merely spices the cast with nonprofessionals. The most noteworthy newcomer, Chase Infiniti, is an astonishing young actress with musical-theatre training and television experience—not a nonprofessional but a professional just starting out, at an exceptionally high level. And the film’s dominant performance, the freest and the one that goes beyond interpretation of a role to determine the movie’s tone and shape, is that of a consummate professional, Benicio del Toro.
The paradox of this quartet of movies up for the new casting Oscar, all boldly peopled with nonprofessionals, is that this very practice has become professionalized. Maybe the extreme pliability of modern digital editing makes it possible to smooth out the rough edges of untrained performers, and it surely helps that viewers are now so used to watching nonprofessionals act outside of movies. But, whatever the reasons, the nonprofessional performances don’t so much disrupt the films as slot into them. It’s all to the credit of viewers that it takes more to shake them, to the credit of the performers that they learn fast while remaining themselves, and to the credit of directors that their methods are free and capacious enough to blend a disjunctive range of acting styles. What has expanded in these movies, above all, is scope: all four comprise major historical confrontations and mighty vectors of power in dramas that teem with characters and action and that look at life on a grand scale. The professionalism of stars, their charismatic hold over audiences, is inseparable from such tough-minded reckonings. The rough edges and blunt forms of nonprofessionals lend the exploits of such high-flown luminaries a democratic aura; here, even the casting is political. ♦