On-screen suffering wins best rewards
IKNEW I liked James McAvoy. First he donates his own money to set up a scholarship for underprivileged drama students, and now he has revealed that actors are encouraged to overplay the difficulty of preparing for a role to boost the chance of winning an award.
Does it work? Exhibit one has to be Daniel Day-Lewis, who apparently insisted on being spoonfed while playing Christy Brown in My Left Foot, stayed in a prison cell and had cold water chucked at him at regular intervals to play Irish prisoner Gerry Conlon for In The Name of The Father, and learned how to throw knives to play brutal Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York. Daniel has three Oscars.
Over the years I’ve listened to actors tell me how they played farmers by learning to plough fields to a standard that would have Robert Burns, the original artistic Ploughboy of the Western World, wolf-whistling in admiration. Jamie Foxx glued his eyes shut to play Ray Charles. Others removed teeth, added tattoos or learned to whip up cordon bleu meals.
Demi Moore boasted that in GI Jane she had trained alongside real Navy SEALs and became just as hardcore, unconscious of the fact she’d just despatched an assistant to fetch a cardigan to ward off the ‘chill’ of our bloodtemperature hotel room.
WEIGHT is a particular badge of pride, ever since Robert De Niro inflated himself by 60 pounds in order to play boxer-in-decline Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. Ding! He won the Oscar for best actor.
Ralph Fiennes put on 20 pounds to play Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List but forgot the Oscar rule: It doesn’t matter how big you are, nobody votes for a Nazi.
Meanwhile, Liam Neeson refused to gain weight to play Schindler, an even larger man, saying people would simply think he had become fat.
Sometimes even lengthy prep doesn’t produce authentic results. Russell Crowe told me that his portrait of a journalist in State of Play was based on ‘30 years of experience of sitting in front of journalists’ and yet somehow he failed to notice we use the space bar on keyboards – unlike his investigative reporter, who is seen tapping out his stories as onelongcontinuousword.
Spencer Tracy, one of Hollywood’s most natural actors, had just three rules: ‘Show up on time, know your lines and don’t bump into the furniture.’
Peter Mullan is persuasive as golf great Old Tom Morris in the forthcoming Tommy’s Honour simply by borrowing a lady’s club and swinging it around golf courses in his spare time.
But journalists are always going to ask about preparing for a role, because most stars love to tell their war stories.
Some years back, Daniel Craig and Danny Dyer gleefully related that the cast of their film, The Trench, had been sent to a replica of a First World War trench to eat bully beef out of tins while fireworks whizzed above their heads.
However Green Wing’s Julian Rhind-Tutt sussed what was in store, quietly hailed a cab and deserted his brothers-in-arms, leaving a cheery note.
‘Dear chaps. Terribly sorry. Gone back to Blighty.’