When you’re a member of Suncoast‘s ‘Replay’ membership program, one of the benefits is their Request magazine. It’s about what you’d expect from this type of magazine — 50% advertising, 47% advertising thinly disguised as content, and about 3% that’s actually somewhat interesting to read.
The current March/April issue has a rundown of six top Oscar contenders: Nicole Kidman, Jack Nicholson, Julianne Moore, Tom Hanks, Jennifer Anniston, and Robin Williams. In the article, there were two quotes from Nicholson and Hanks that really stood out to me in the differences between how the two actors confront the stereotypes they’ve been saddled with — and illustrates why I tend to think more of Nicholson than I do of Hanks.
Discussing his role in About Schmidt, Nicholson had this to say:
More difficult, [Nicholson] says, is crafting a performance real enough to make the audience forget everything they know about the personality behind the character. “Almost anyone can give a representative performance when you’re unknown. The real pro game of acting is after you’re known — to ‘un-Jack’ the character and get the audience to invest in a fictional person. In order to keep growing as an actor, you have to learn the devices that keep you from just relying on what works for you.”
Then, regarding Road to Perdition, Hanks said this:
…Hanks insists that changing his image wasn’t the reason for taking the dark role. “That would take into an account a falsehood that it’s possible to change your image. You can’t do it,” he says. “[The audience] walks into a theater with a preconceived idea of everybody in the film, but hopefully that switch goes off, and you just watch the movie.”
In other words, while both actors know that they’ve been sterotyped — Nicholson as absolutely insane, and Hanks as the “nice guy,” Hanks just shrugs his shoulders and does his thing, while Nicholson actively works to challenge himself both in his roles and his acting to stretch both himself and his audience’s perception of him.
Good for you, Jack.
