Hey, Hollywood, Shut Up!

Yesterday’s video of actors making their personal pledges to the new president got me thinking about what the job of an actor really is. An actor’s job is to be a blank piece of paper. His job is to publicly be completely free from personal character so that he may use the words and actions of the writer to tell a story. His job is to start with a clean slate and then proceed to “draw” upon it as he tells his part of the story.

That’s why yesterday’s video was a professional mistake for the actors involved. Their pages are now colored on just a bit. It’s the same as when my 4 year-old sits down with her princess coloring book and opens to the perfect page only to discover that her baby brother has taken a red crayon to it. No matter how well she colors the picture, it is never going to be quite right because of the marks which were already there.

Perfect example, I loved the fat nun in Sister Act. Loved her. She was great and made me laugh until she signed her name to an ad in Ms. magazine saying that she had had two abortions and regrets nothing. It kind of ruins it for me to know that the fat happy one becomes a child murderer. It taints her work. Or Neil Patrick Harris on How I Met Your Mother. It’s hard to imagine him as the womanizer he plays now that I know he’s rather be banging his buddy.

In our cult of personality culture, the actors in Hollywood have begun to think it is about them rather than the work that they do. They’re wrong. When we know too much about them to be able to project them fully into the story, their careers tank. Just ask Lindsay Lohan how her last few movies did. Is there any way that she could believably play the sweet girl next door? She has let the public know too much and her career is over. I predict that she has a few more years in the gossip pages and then will fade from sight.

Hollywood people need to understand that their careers last only as long as the regular folks can imagine themselves in the actors’ shoes. We have to be able to project our own thought and emotions onto that blank page as well. The problem with actors being political is that their page is so filled in that it’s no longer interesting or relatable. My advice to the video people is that they all just stop talking.