Actors which you used to think were cool

[TheFeniX]

Cruise might be a nut-job, but I've read more than a few stories of him being an all-around nice guy and helping people out (such as at a wreck where he stayed with the accident victims until paramedics arrived). Not exactly high-intensity EMT stuff, but many people can't even be bothered to stop for a wreck much less offer assistance when you're Tom Cruise. He's also been described as the kind of guy who would talk to people like a normal person.

I heard the same thing about Tommy Lee Jones. He suffers from a full-blown case of Texas crazy, he'll shoot the shit with anyone.

Segal is one of those actors I grew up watching and cannot fucking stand to this day. Lately, he's been shitting up the MMA scene with his insanity. But I remember reading an article (likely Cracked) that was listing off shit I'd been saying for years. Namely, the bad guys in his movies always talk about how much of a fucking badass he is and how he's going to kill them all, yet they keep going on with the plan, rather than running away from the specter of death. This is all on Segal as he'll give shit to any director that doesn't immediately get on his knees when Segal enters the room. Executive Decision was the best Segal movie ever because he dies in the first 15 minutes.

Since this thread got me thinking about Under Siege 2 electric boogalo, I'll bring up Katherine Heigl (sp). I loved her in Knocked-Up but I read an interview where she bashed the movie to pieces because it portrayed her (and women) negatively, but 52 dresses (or whatever) was the better movies because.... it does nothing but retread old romantic comedy cliches? Listening to her talk outside of the box-office is infuriating. That's less nostalgia though as those movies aren't that old.

Russel Crowe (Virtuosity) and Alec Baldwin (Beetlejuice) were more around my time and my first introductions to the actors. Crowe is a dick who's been acting in more and more movies I couldn't give a shit about. But Baldwin can consistently sell me on any role and make me laugh my ass off on 30 Rock and damned Capital One commercials (Beard growing contest, GO! I WIN!). Even before his voice-message of doom, I'd heard about his asshole shenanigans in real life, but I still enjoy his acting.

While only a local celebrity that told us how much Texas whether was going to suck on a given day, Dr. Neil Frank was walking back to his car from the gas station and I happened to be passing by him. He looked me in the eye, so I did what I do with anyone who does that: I nodded my head and asked "How's it going?" He looked at me like I was a fucking psycho and sort of veered around me even though we wouldn't have passed with 3 feet of each other anyway.

I didn't even realize it was him until I stopped and asked myself: "Did Neil Frank just worry that I'm a serial killer?"

[Eleas]

Ok, structuralism and poststructuralism merit an explanation. Let's take a really stark and simple example, starting from the perspective of a white(ish) man whose usual day is spent at work at a reasonably respected job.

Let's say you've had a bad day. Absolutely rotten. It began when you realized that a) you're running a bit of a cold and b) you forgot the laundry so there are no good clothes for work, so you had to grab some really tattered threadbare crap that doesn't fit you. At work, people look at you a bit oddly but you it's no worse than a few chuckles at your expense. Then, after lunch, some of the contractors are in and you decide to help them move some shit out of the way, except it's greasy and rancid, and now you've got it all over yourself. You're a bit flustered, the cold has made you start shivering and sniffling, and after you drop what you're holding when the boss walks in, he takes pity on you and orders you off work.

You decide to take the bus, so you sit down at the nearest bus stop. Other people come by but strangely enough, they don't really seem to want to look at you or sit beside you. When you get on the bus, the conductor doesn't even look at you nor answer your greeting. You're a bit woozy already -- it's that damn cold -- and as you fumble the change, you drop some.

Nobody helps you pick it up.

Okay, so now you're at the back of the bus. There are whispers. You don't really think about it, because you feel really sick now. You get out your phone, but you can't dial the number, so you ask the guy next to you to do it. He looks at you as if he'd almost rather confiscate your obviously stolen iPhone, but grudgingly, he makes the call. You hear something about a vagrant on the Greyhound who's obviously high on some street junk. You mutter that it's not that, you don't take drugs and never would, but not much more because after that you pass out.

When you awake, you're at the ER. Turns out you were put in the slammer for drunk and disorderly and it was only a passing nurse that took an extra look and recognized the symptoms of pneumonia. But you're fine now -- once people realized what they were seeing (and perhaps more importantly, readjusted their perceptions), you got treated and you're on the mend. Story ends happily, kinda.

But wait... what really happened? I mean, you could have died and all because people didn't take the situation seriously. Because you fit the bill as one of Those People. Because they didn't see you. Because they saw a "hobo" and they just "knew" what "hobos" are all like, and as people overwhelmingly tend to do they simply followed along and acted according to a prevailing social consensus. A structure.

Structurally, a homeless person is often at a disadvantage. Anything he or she does can be explained by a shortcoming on his or her part. Any offense they give will statistically tend to be punished harsher than if a non-homeless person had done it. These aren't rules that any one individual decides to enforce out of informed malice: structure is pervasive bias and a social reinforcement of entrenched power. We all, to some degree or other, do it.

If two men get into a fistfight on the streets of Pasadena, Texas, one being white and the other Latino, who, all things being equal, will have the low-level support of bystanders, police, etc? Who will have the most people remember things favorable to him? Who will, for that matter, statistically be the wealthiest (wealth is a structural power too)? And we all know, or should, that simply having more money will inherently bias many people to view you as successful and thus a bit better than the other. The end result is a lopsided situation: through structural mechanisms and quite without having meant to, the white guy has a substantial or even towering advantage over the Latino. In immediate reaction, in police response, in peer judgement and even in the degree of violence that would be done against them, should they get rowdy.

...this is necessarily a stupidly simplified description of structures, but it'll have to do for now. Suffice to say that in individual cases, we can easily recognize that there are women who abuse their spouses using physical or mental violence. Nothing about structure mitigates that: it's a dismal state of affairs and of course it "counts" as spousal abuse.

However, structurally, females are disenfranchised in today's society, and are therefore at a disadvantage to men. That doesn't mean atypical cases cannot exist, or that you cannot have various structures cooperating to make the situation quite different; factors such as sexual orientation, perceived race, perceived social standing, perceived education, perceived attractiveness, even the way you dress... all these things are also relevant. But even an attractive white upper-class woman who defends herself with a knife against a belligerent blue-collar lover can expect to have questions asked about what she did to encourage him (whereas the opposite would never be asked, as it is ludicrous victim-blaming). And thus, just like it's problematic to insist that "sometimes, a white guy just needs to shoot a black guy", so is it problematic to contend that a man sometimes really needs to slap a woman, because we know the power differential that usually enters into that equation.

[mr friendly guy]

I don't think it's possible for any actor to seem as 'cool' as they did when they played their iconic characters, mainly because their iconic characters are fictional representations of unrealistically talented, lucky, or successful people.
.

I don't know. It depends on what you consider to be cool. If playing a character or doing a good film is cool, then it follows that the actor can be cool. Another situation would be if say the actor is a martial arts star, and if you think martial arts is cool, then by extension if the actor does his own fight scenes, he or she is also cool.

Of course, what happens on screen can never outweigh what happens off screen. Thus even if someone thinks Steven Seagal is a great action hero, the fact that he is a wife basher tends to make him look like a douche.

[Borgholio]

Ok, structuralism and poststructuralism merit an explanation.

Thanks for the detail. To boil it down, sounds like simple bias and stereotypes to me.

[Patroklos]

It is, though oddly his explanation requires assigning steriotypes...

[Civil War Man]

I think that's debatable, but not really the point. Throwing away fan mail? Trash-talking the thing which has made you a hero in the eyes of gazillions of children? What a contemptible and loathsome individual, whom I'm glad I'll never share a drink with.

There's a line. Jake Lloyd despises Star Wars, but considering all of the hate that he received to the point where it completely destroyed his acting career and, arguably, his life in general, he has every reason to hate it. And I can't really blame him for getting angry at fans, because how angry would you get if every day you had people constantly asking you about what you consider to be the lowest point in your life?

Now, Alec Guinness didn't receive any hate for playing Obi-Wan, but it's obvious he still considered it a low point in his career.

A great number of famous male actors are abusers of women (and/or massive bigots), to the point where it's actually significantly more rare to find one who's actually a decent person anymore

Apparently Marlon Brando is relatively decent, at least in the area of hating bullies. He absolutely hated playing Stanley Kowalski because the character was a wife-beating pig.

[TheFeniX]

The story of Jake Lloyd makes me cringe every time I think of it. I remember him originally from ER (a weekly family event) and even Jingle All the Way. To get death threats from psychotic Star Wars fans for "ruining Star Wars forever" at that age must have been terrifying.

Guiness doesn't really rate in that as he was able to connect with an entirely new generation of people at the twilight of his career and he made a metric-ton of money doing so and was adored by the Star Wars fanbase. Patrick Stewart wasn't to keen on being Captin Picard to American audiences for many years, but I remember him stating that it was a different kind of person (one who wouldn't appreciate his older work) that he was dealing with now and that's ok. It likely helped a lot that's he's done numerous other roles he's recognized for now.

I've noticed on this forum (and Star Trek fans in general) that a lot of people dislike Captain Janeway, but have no issue with Kate Mulgrew. In fact, she's kind of the unsung hero of Voyager considering what she went through with retakes due to shitty direction. LLoyd (and Will Wheaton) didn't have that. People hated the actual actor which is fucking sad and hard to justify resentment when the actor is pissed at the role/fans.

On the opposite side of this topic, I remember growing up and Samuel Jackson (Loaded Weapon, Amos and Andrew, and Jurassic Park) was this really stiff black actor. Generally uptight roles, not a really "cool" guy even though I loved his acting. Holy shit was I wrong and that's like the most tame I've ever seen him in an interview. His interview with Leno (I think) when he was talking about wanting to be a Jedi was hilarious. Him and Avery Brooks (especially after watching Captains) are two guys I'd love to meet before I die.

[Borgholio]

Yeah I personally loathed the character of Janeway. Nearly every episode in which she opened her mouth I wanted to smack the shit out of her. (Yes, I know what we just talked about earlier, I'm aware of the irony...but we're talking in-universe fiction).

With that said, I've met Kate before and she's nothing at all like Janeway. She's intelligent, articulate, and you can tell that Captain Mulgrew would be a damn sight more competent than Janeway.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

Brando also apparently boycotted the Academy Awards ceremony he won in and sent a native rights activist in his place to protest the shitty way Hollywood portrays native american people, so yeah he's several points ahead so far in my book and put him in the "even better upon closer examination" category for now

[Eleas]

Thanks for the detail. To boil it down, sounds like simple bias and stereotypes to me.

In part it is, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Structures imply a system that is not just perpetuated by bias and stereotypes, but by inertia. It becomes a cultural fixture whether you accept it or try to work around it. You can play within such mores, accept them or invert them as you like, but it's really hard to unmake them once they're in place, because they're not just a handful of biases and stereotypical traits, but a determiner of what is considered normal and/or proper in a given society.

For instance, to demonstrate how the difference in structural power manifests itself: I've read several male-to-female transgender people remarking on the fact that walking on the street as a woman was a different experience for one simple reason: people wouldn't automatically give way to them to the degree that they were used to. At the same time, this is nothing that most people on the street would ever consciously decide to do. Like the distance we keep from one another during conversations, or the degree we gesture as we speak, this is behavior we engage in largely without reflection.

It is, though oddly his explanation requires assigning steriotypes...

How so? Yes, I took the most obvious and therefore certainly stereotypical explanation I could find, but it wasn't in any way required; it was simply a choice I made to clearly exaggerate the scenario so there would be less ambiguity. If I were to try a more plausible example, I can bet you any sum you'd care to name that there would be several people offering alternative explanations and models for what I described, and that would be counterproductive.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

There's a line. Jake Lloyd despises Star Wars, but considering all of the hate that he received to the point where it completely destroyed his acting career and, arguably, his life in general, he has every reason to hate it. And I can't really blame him for getting angry at fans, because how angry would you get if every day you had people constantly asking you about what you consider to be the lowest point in your life?

Now, Alec Guinness didn't receive any hate for playing Obi-Wan, but it's obvious he still considered it a low point in his career.

Sure - I don't think Lloyd was cast well, but that's the director's fault, not the actor's. I certainly can't blame people like Lloyd or Wheaton (though he's been doing quite well for himself lately) or Hayden Christensen for their situations - it's the complete opposite issue, in fact, since they're usually pretty cool people (I know Wheaton certainly is) underneath un-cool characters/writing/acting/whatever.

Guinness is the other way around. Much-loved, and yet pissed that love away out of some combination of spite, apathy, or contempt. Which I suppose makes me grind my teeth that much harder when you contrast it with someone like Wheaton, who endured a lot of haters and so never had the luxury of being loved by thousands, despite frankly deserving that love a whole lot more.

[Lord Revan]

Yeah I personally loathed the character of Janeway. Nearly every episode in which she opened her mouth I wanted to smack the shit out of her. (Yes, I know what we just talked about earlier, I'm aware of the irony...but we're talking in-universe fiction).

With that said, I've met Kate before and she's nothing at all like Janeway. She's intelligent, articulate, and you can tell that Captain Mulgrew would be a damn sight more competent than Janeway.

I've not heard that much hate for the actor who played Neelix either.

In Kate Mulgrew's case it helps that she's a great actor when given material to work with and it's very clear that Janeway written as very flat charater and Mulgrew wasn't normally allowed to bring any extra dimensions to her thru her performance making for a very poor character.

[Eleas]

I used to have enormous respect for Tilda Swinton. Then I learned that she'd gone in defense of Roman Polanski, and that respect was gone. Although to her credit she didn't match the scumminess of Whoopi Goldberg's attempt to downplay child abuse.

[Borgholio]

I've not heard that much hate for the actor who played Neelix either.

Ethan Phillips? Yeah he's been in Star Trek before as other characters, including Ferengi and even out of costume in ST:FC. But he is also a Shakespearean actor with credits on Broadway. So yeah, he can act quite well but like Mulgrew, he was given a shit character to play.

[Raw Shark]

Tom Cruise...before he came out as a fucking nut job working as the spokesman for a cult.

It's not like Tom Cruise is a very good actor anyway, so not much of a loss there. All of his most recent films have been Tom Cruise as Tom Cruise.

While I agree that Cruise is an utter fucking lunatic IRL, with regard to his acting ability I submit Tropic Thunder. He's also great in Magnolia, IMHO, but I'm not sure I'd call that his "most recent" work.

My Secret Shame: I thought the Two Coreys were brilliant actors when I was a kid. I'll just leave that here.

[TheFeniX]

I've not heard that much hate for the actor who played Neelix either.

I've noticed people are much more inclined to hate child actors, especially boys, more so than adult actors. I get that kids are pretty fucking annoying and all, but I can only assume they associate adult actors as just people working a job, but a child actor was chosen specifically because they are a child, hence annoying. From what I know, men are hardwired to dislike young males that aren't their progeny, so that may have something to do with it.

Female child actors seem to have some kind of opposite effect: "we" care much less about their professional lives and are much more interested in when they either "fuck up" (by acting like children or teenagers) or hit 18 because it's totally not creepy to sexualize them once they hit that magical number.

I noticed this kind of thing WRT "War of the Worlds." A normally forgettable movie, but I physically cannot watch it because Dakota Fanning spends the entire movie screaming over and over and it actually hurts my brain. However, the general consensus seems to be "she was told to act that way." However, Jake Lloyd and Will Wheaton basically played super-kids, as instructed, and everyone hated them for it. The actors, not the characters.

Anyways, Ethan Phillips was in "Critters," so he's ok in my book. And without an actor like him, Neelix could have be so much worse. Phillips is a genuinely funny and nice guy, which you could see break through the Neelix mask multiple times over the series.

[Lord Revan]

You can tell alot of times that the actors on VOY and ENT are trying to do their best but the material they're allowed to work with is so super restricting that it's pretty much impossible to end up with anything else then bland and unintresting end result.

[Vendetta]

Now, Alec Guinness didn't receive any hate for playing Obi-Wan, but it's obvious he still considered it a low point in his career.

The thing with Alec Guinness was that basically after he did Star Wars, no-one referenced any other part of his career ever again. That was his beef, not that he had any problem being in the movie, or the role, but that it seemed to immediately eclipse everything he'd done up to that point because people were taking a silly adventure movie way out of proportion to its actual content.

[Borgholio]

Now, Alec Guinness didn't receive any hate for playing Obi-Wan, but it's obvious he still considered it a low point in his career.

The thing with Alec Guinness was that basically after he did Star Wars, no-one referenced any other part of his career ever again. That was his beef, not that he had any problem being in the movie, or the role, but that it seemed to immediately eclipse everything he'd done up to that point because people were taking a silly adventure movie way out of proportion to its actual content.

On the other end of that scale you have Anthony Daniels, who is delighted to be seen as C3PO and is very kind to his fans. I recall an interview with him awhile back asking about Alec Guiness' attitude and he kinda side-stepped the issue. It seemed he understood Alec's feelings, but didn't agree with him. Anthony felt that if a character such as C3PO makes people smile, then the actor should take pride in playing that character.

[Vendetta]

Not exactly comparable situations though, Anthony Daniels had been in one thing before Star Wars, whereas Alec Guinness had a near 40 year movie career which suddenly no-one at all gave any shits about.

It's not a case where he got to connect to a "new audience" through this different role (silly adventure movies were not unknown to him), because no-one made that connection at all, no-one cared about anything else he'd done, they didn't say "hey, I watched Star Wars and I liked you, so I watched other things you did", they only wanted to ask about this one thing. Forever.

Thats' what it's about, it's your 40 year career, which already includes significant performances which are actually still well remarked to this day by people who actually watch films not just Star Wars, and literally none of it matters any more because of one thing you did once, and it's not something that's this amazing magnum opus, it's just a good adventure movie with some novel special effects.

[Borgholio]

it's just a good adventure movie with some novel special effects.

It changed the face of cinematic history...I think being part of something that turned out to be historic should have been good enough for him. Granted, I can understand if he liked his previous work better, but I don't understand how he could be so cold towards a movie that had a bigger cultural impact than all of his previous movies combined? I mean Star Wars isn't some shit movie found on SyFy...

At the very least he should have had some grudging acknowledgement for what he helped take part in.

[Spoonist]

I give you a counter example with John Rhys-Davies.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0722636/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t27
Loved him in Shogun, Ivanhoe and Raiders of the Lost Arc when I was growing up. Especially in Ivanhoe as Font-de-beuff, mimicking his swordfights and all.
But...
He turns out to be an all around nice guy. And I haven't seen a role he's done badly although he gets typecasted a lot.
Then he becomes Gimli in LoTR, that could have been an Alec moment right there, but since none recognize him in it he is still an all around nice guy who still signs autographs and such. Plus still does cool roles.

[Scrib]

it's just a good adventure movie with some novel special effects.

It changed the face of cinematic history...I think being part of something that turned out to be historic should have been good enough for him. Granted, I can understand if he liked his previous work better, but I don't understand how he could be so cold towards a movie that had a bigger cultural impact than all of his previous movies combined? I mean Star Wars isn't some shit movie found on SyFy...

At the very least he should have had some grudging acknowledgement for what he helped take part in.

He probably acknowledges it's popularity, how can he not? I think he got a share of the gross (which others apparently did not get for some reason). The issue is that it's not what he values yet it has come to define him in the eyes of others.

He doesn't have to be super proud of playing a small (and really not that awesome tbh) character in some surprisingly successful movie. And I'm not sure that I disagree. Did Alec Guiness make Star Wars great? Did he give a performance that blew everyone's socks off and put butts in the theater three, four times? One he'll always look upon as his best? Apparently he doesn't think so, so the success of Star Wars doesn't really address that. He probably feels that that wasn't about him, and I don't know enough about his work (irony lol) to contradict him.

The Star Wars movies were big, but not for him. This is nothing new tbh, I'm sure someone into 'serious" literature is looking down on Game of Thrones right now because they feel that it has little to offer him. The fans might find this strange, him...not so much.

[Vendetta]

it's just a good adventure movie with some novel special effects.

It changed the face of cinematic history...I think being part of something that turned out to be historic should have been good enough for him.

You do realise he'd done that before, right? Multiple times, in fact. Lawrence of Arabia, Bridge on the River Kwai, Doctor Zhivago, the old Ealing comedies. Alec Guinness had been involved in quite a lot of cinematic history by that point... (That's why he was able to negotiate for a percentage of the gross, Star Wars made him quite wealthy)

His problem isn't with the movie though, it's with how fans reacted to it and him because of it. Which is not unreasonable, because the kind of dedicated hardcore fans who think that Star Wars, in itself as a movie is anything other than a silly adventure movie which happens to be quite fun to watch, and take it all rather too seriously, really are sad specimens of humanity. I'm talking about the kind of fat people who list their religion as "Jedi" and are being completely serious.

[Formless]

If it was the movies themselves that Sir Alec Guinness had a problem with, how come he insisted that he had no right to complain since it had made him so rich? How come whenever the other Star Wars actors were asked, they all insisted that on set he was professional, respectful and even helped some of them with their careers (Mark Hamill, IIRC)? Why did he show up in three of these movies between 1976 through 1982 for filming?

Keep in mind that Harrison Ford has implied in interviews done for The Making Of Star Wars that he too doesn't really think of Star Wars as anything special, besides the fact that (in direct contrast with Alec Guinness) it kick-started his career in earnest. And Alec Guinness was also the only one who managed to keep the rights to his image and voice, meaning he avoided having his face plastered all over creation, from toys to video games, like Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford. That has always been a dubious move by Lucasfilm that no one likes to talk about, and which may have contributed to Mark Hamill going into voice acting. I'm sure Guinness was glad to have avoided that bit of exploitation.