I was going to bring up this topic anyway, but ironically enough it reared its head all on its own following Bill’s piece on Olivia Wilde this morning. Inside the article Bill referenced Olivia’s work in Haiti, a topic that came up during the TRON: Legacy press junket round tables, but not as a result of Wilde’s stumping, but rather only after she was asked. Bill’s comment was to say, “The thing that was refreshing was that she didn’t talk about Haiti until she was asked about it. She knew this was a Tron junket so she didn’t try to mix politics with pop culture. She only answered those questions when asked.”
I can understand where Bill is coming from, but this didn’t sit well with a few of the readers. One commenter going by the name of “mfan” replies:
Actors should avoid politics. In the same article that I think (?) you are trying to build support for Ms. Wilde, you undermine her by linking her name to politics that repel one third of the country, and is often questioned by another third. While this can arguably be good for her career in Hollywood,
it is not helpful to her career with audiences . Actors rely on the good feeling towards them of their audience. You are not helping this girl.
To this, a reader by the name of “Kob” replied to “mfan” and gets to the heart of why I am putting this piece together:
It seems as if you have a problem divorcing an actor/actress public image from their acting roles. I’m not trying to make a fuss out of your point but realise that your reaction is your own and that not everyone cares about actor/actress political motivations and whatnot.
Regardless of what I think of Scientology, it doesn’t cloud my view [of] Tom Cruise. What they do/support in their own time has nothing to do with me.
Someone’s association with political movements won’t stop from seeing their performance.
From this comes the question of whether or not you let the politics or personal behavior of an actor affect your opinion of them and their onscreen performances. Or do you avoid an actor’s films altogether because you can’t shake who they are in their real life from the character they are portraying on-screen?
As far as a few examples go (to make sure we’re all clear on what we’re talking about), Olivia Wilde’s name is obviously on the board as is Tom Cruise. In the comments on the Wilde piece George Clooney’s name is mentioned and I don’t think we can forget Russell Crowe’s telephone fit, Roman Polanski’s statutory rape charges, Mel Gibson’s endless rants, Kevin Smith’s new found hatred of movie critics, Wesley Snipes and his trouble with taxes, anything and everything involving Angelina Jolie, Hugh Grant and Divine Brown, Nick Nolte and that mugshot, Pee Wee Herman and porn, Matthew McConaughey and bongos, Charlie Sheen’s issues and anything and everything involving Lindsay Lohan.
One name I purposely left off that list is Christian Bale, who has had his own share of tabloid trouble over the past couple of years. This includes the alleged assault of his mother and sister and then his rant during the shooting of Terminator Salvation, which leaked online and then became a YouTube dance hit. Bale went from being the loved star of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight to the media’s whipping boy for a little while, but did it affect the way you perceived him on-screen?
Bale was actually going to be the source of this question, before Bill’s piece sparked the fire, after I read John H. Richardson’s profile piece on the actor in “Esquire’s” December issue over this last weekend. You can read the full interview online right here (and you really should because it’s quite phenomenal), but here’s the snippet I want to address for this article’s purposes:
Bale is in the habit of requesting that his media interviews be printed in a Q&A format. He also prefers to conduct them at the same five-star luxury hotel in Los Angeles, and makes it known that he dislikes personal questions.
BALE: You don’t like that?
ESQUIRE: No! I don’t like being told what to do.
BALE: I’ll tell you why. Basically, it’s somebody who got stuck having to interview me who really wants to be a novelist, so they’re writing these novellas and I was like, “It’s not true, that didn’t happen, they just made all that up! Why don’t they just go ahead and be a novelist instead of bothering with interviewing me?”
ESQUIRE: So you want to be perceived accurately, but you also don’t want to give any details. You realize that those two things contradict each other.
BALE: No, it’s simpler than that. I want to be able to just act and never do any interview, but I don’t have the balls to stand up to the studio and say, “I’m never doing another interview in my life!” So I tip my hat and go, “Okay mister! All right mister! I’ll go do the salesman job!”
ESQUIRE: And you don’t want to talk about your personal life or family background either.
BALE: Look, I’ve got incredible pride for my family. I’ve absolutely fallen into that cliché of a dad who could just happily talk about my daughter endlessly. But it’s not what I’m about in terms of being an actor. I don’t want people to know about that.
ESQUIRE: Why not?
BALE: I don’t want people to know me.
ESQUIRE: Why not?
BALE: Because that buggers up my job.
ESQUIRE: How does it do that?
BALE: Because if you know something about somebody, it gets in the way of just watching the guy as the character.
ESQUIRE: But that’s not really true. If you really disappeared into your role, people wouldn’t realize it was the same guy from movie to movie.
BALE: No! It’s like painting behind the radiator — I’d know about it even if nobody else does.
ESQUIRE: But for the audience, that’s part of the pleasure. “Wow! He’s a great actor! He’s so different than he was in Julius Caesar.”
BALE: Well, it’s also just I’m bored shitless with myself.
On top of many other clueless statements by Richardson during the interview, the one here where he says, “But that’s not really true. If you really disappeared into your role, people wouldn’t realize it was the same guy from movie to movie,” has already been proved false by the few comments left by RopeofSilicon readers that are obviously affected by an actor’s personal beliefs and behavior. After all, can’t we all say we are affected to some degree, no matter how slight it may be?
While we may be able to overlook some things, the fact Russell Crowe threw a telephone at a hotel employee and Roman Polanski’s long-documented troubles are all in the back of our minds. That list of actors I made earlier in this article was from the top of my head, I didn’t have to scour the Internet for ideas. I obviously remember those things, and they remain somewhere in my subconscious, but I like to think I am quite capable of overlooking them when I see these actors on screen… The questions is, Are you?
