2009 May « Theatrical Musings

No, this is not a review of the new Star Trek movie (It was great, by the way. I highly recommend it.). I did go see Star Trek over the weekend, however, and was amazed at how much the cast channeled the original cast. That got me thinking about, as a director, how you handle an actor you cast in a show which is already known for iconic performance.

In case you have been living under a rock over the last year or so, the new Star Trek movie chronicles the meeting of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy and the coming together of the original Enterprise crew. Now the original Enterprise Crew is HELLA OLD (and in two cases dead….RIP Deforest Kelly and James Doohan. You guys ruled!), so there is no way they could make us believe that they were young recruits straight out of Starfleet Academy (Shatner, the work you had done is good, but not that good…). So they had to recast the original characters with brand new people.

Now we have a situation where brand new people are not only stepping into characters other people have played, but stepping into characters who are so well known that their patterns of speech and physical movements have entered our public subconcious. It’s hard to imagine anyone else saying “Damnit, Jim!” and be the same.

Often this happens in our profession. How many times do we do a show or play a character which has been made famous by someone else? What do we do then?

The key, I find, is to neither completely emulate the famous performer nor completely make the character something different, but rather a combination of the two. On some level, the audience would like to see the character they fell in love with, but as an actor, you don’t get to do your job if you just copy someone else’s performance.

Finding that balance can be hard. There is a tendancy to either get lazy and not work as hard and just do it like it has always been done or to go so far over the top to get away from it that the character becomes unintelligible.

Which beings me back to Star Trek. The new cast, with Chris Pine as Kirk, Zachery Quinto as Spock, and Karl Urban as McCoy. Watching these actors tackle these characters is nothing short of amazing. Urban’s McCoy is by far the outstanding one. He was able to completly get DeForest Kelly’s accent, inflection, and demeraor without me once thinking I was watching a mimicry of an old performance. It’s JUST enough McCoy to work, but Karl Urban has completly made the role his. Pine and Quinto are equally as good in their portrayal of these characters, throwing in the essences of the character we have see other actors play for years, but completly making them their own characters.

As directors it is our job to help the actor balance the two. Even though I asked my actors NOT to watch the movie when I was directing “The Graduate” (The characters are COMPLETELY different in the movie and I didn’t want them to pick up bad habits), I will ask my actors to read AND watch the movie version of To Kill A Mockingbird when I cast it later this year. Those performaces are just too iconic not to at least have the essences of those character in the show.

So next time you are doing a show which has a very iconic character, don’t be afraid to try to capture the essence of someone else’s famous performance. They defined the character, let that definition shine your (or your actor’s) intrepretation of it