I have never chosen to watch a film or TV show because of the stars in it, but that’s not because I don’t rate actors. I also don’t watch something just because of the director.
Okay, I will watch because of the writer. But even then, it’s not automatic, it’s not enough. I have to be interested, something has to interest me, something has to make me watch.
But in particular, it’s not that I under-appreciate actors. Yet then you get things like the cast of “The Usual Suspects”. This is the thriller with the fantastic twist that means every character you’d got interested in doesn’t matter anymore and you can go home, change channels, stream something else, that’s very clever, we’re done now.
Gabriel Byrne in particular, so good in the series In Treatment, is regularly reported to have said he didn’t know whether his character in The Usual Suspects was the one who is revealed to be the baddie.
In my turn, I have regularly said – mostly to myself, you now stop listening when I grumble – that Bryne and the rest should take another look at the script. Specifically, page 142.
Only, this week I came across an interview on YouTube with John le Carré talking about the BBC version of his Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. And in it he describes a conversation he had with its star, Alec Guinness, in which the actor worried aloud about who the baddie was.
Before I could draw breath and say to my TV set that it’s in the bloody script, does no one read this thing, you’ve got one job to do and it starts there on the page, le Carré said “William, no, shut it a minute.”
Well, he might as well have done. What he actually said was how fascinating this conversation was because at that point Alec Guinness knew every word of the scripts — but his character only knew as far as the point they’d got to in filming.
Alec Guinness was able to be a pro who knew everybody’s lines and simultaneously be that much into the character George Smiley, for whom this wasn’t a script, wasn’t a story, it was the character’s real life.
I sit corrected.