best actor

Best Actor Nominee Bryan Cranston Talks ‘Trumbo’

January 24, 2016 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Period Piece: Cranston as blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo

Here is what Cranston told me when I interviewed him for The Hollywood Reporter:

“If you’re playing a character who is nonfictional, there is an added responsibility: Lyndon Johnson, say, or Dalton Trumbo.

There is a plethora of source material, and Trumbo’s two daughters, Nikola and Mitzi, are still alive, and even though they were children at the time, I would ask them a bunch of questions.

For instance, an earlier iteration had Trumbo tell his kids to hop in the car, and he takes them for ice cream. Nikola and Mitzi giggled — that was Cleo, their mom, especially during the blacklist years. Cleo clearly was the emotional foundation and kept the fires burning at home.

As much of a vulnerable, noble battle that Trumbo was embroiled in, there was also some selfishness. We had really honest exchanges about how irritable and angry and impatient he could be. It is important to know that the families of these blacklisted writers and directors paid a price and suffered as much as the men themselves.”

Don’t Laugh: Comic Actor Jason Segel Deserves an Oscar Nomination

June 26, 2015 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Sacrilege! Could Jason Segel of TV’s How I Met Your Mother and Forgetting Sarah Marshall merit a Best Actor nomination? Yes!

Segel’s performance as brilliant but troubled Infinite Jest novelist David Foster Wallace in James Ponsoldt’s The End of the Tour, opening July 31, could be forgotten under the thundering hooves of autumn Telluride and Toronto Oscar vehicles. Think of Chadwick Boseman’s James Brown in Get on Up, an Oscar worthy performance that opened last year on August 1 and was all-but-forgotten in last year’s competitive Best Actor race.

Appreciating the bromantic duet between Segel’s Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg’s (compelling) Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky for a second time at the Nantucket Film Festival increased my passion for Segel’s performance. He restores Wallace not as that author you should have read (and probably didn’t) but as a brilliant writer who might not have been the most brilliant conversationalist or company.

With very little action, and articulating lines that are often intentionally inarticulate (Donald Margulies wrote the emotionally satisfying script), Segel creates a multi-layered portrait of a petty, generous, dog loving, soul searching, depression coping, American TV addict. His bandana-wearing Wallace struggles to carve out an authentic life in Bloomington, Indiana far away from the Manhattan literary buzz, which his character describes as the sound of egos rising and falling. What’s strong about the performance is that very lack of ego. It doesn’t take long before Segel loses himself in Wallace, alternately charming and antagonizing both Eisenberg’s Lipsky and the audience.

It will be an uphill battle for Segel. And one fought previously by actors who have made their reputations first as comedians: Steve Carell (Foxcatcher), Will Forte (Nebraska), Robin Williams (One Hour Photo), Bill Murray (Lost in Translation), Eddie Murphy (Dreamgirls), Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig (The Skelton Twins), Whoopi Goldberg (The Color Purple) and even Jerry Lewis (The King of Comedy). The buzz that started at Sundance continues here.

Benedict Cumberbatch, Eddie Redmayne and Timothy Spall: British Biopic Stars Own Best Actor Race

October 6, 2014 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Cumberbatch as Alan Turing

It’s the British invasion of the Oscar race. It’s only October and three British actors – Benedict Cumberbatch, Eddie Redmayne and Timothy Spall – are already dominating the Best Actor race. And each of them comes carrying a biopic on his shoulders: The Imitation Game about mathematician Alan Turing for Cumberbatch, The Theory of Everything about cosmologist Stephen Hawking for Redmayne and Mr. Turner, a drama about the master landscape painter aka J.M.W. Turner stars Spall.

Biopics have always been one of Oscar’s favorite genres: Consider A Beautiful Mind, Lincoln, 12 Years a Slave, Dallas Buyers Club, Walk the Line, The Last King of Scotland and Milk. It may have been The King’s Speech that inspired this outpouring of veddy veddy English movie, but while the current crop is similar in genre, they are not the birds of one feather. The actors may play real-life public figures, but their approaches to their characters couldn’t be more different.

Redmayne, 32, fresh off awards buzz for his singing romantic hero in Les Miserables, takes on the brilliant yet physically challenged Hawking. He told Yahoo Movies that he believes biopics appeal to actors and audiences because of “the cult of celebrity…We see images of people like Hawking, or Turing, or Turner, and yet, because we are all human, we’re aware that it can’t be as simple as it looks on the surface. Biopics reveal what grounds these stellar individuals as human beings rather than just as achievers.”

In The Theory of Everything, Redmayne’s portrayal of Hawking begins at Cambridge – also the actor’s alma mater — before illness sets in. On campus, Hawking romances the pretty scholar (Felicity Jones) who will become his wife. But very shortly, Hawking’s fingers have trouble grasping a pencil, he trips over his own feet – and it is one long spiral from cane to wheelchair as ALS changes the course of his life. Despite this, he still authors the bestseller The Brief History of Time. This performance could easily be compared to the one that won Daniel Day-Lewis an Oscar for My Left Foot in 1990.

[RELATED: Eddie Redmayne Talks About Meeting Stephen Hawking and Why the Role Terrified Him]

Cumberbatch, 38, gives a complex emotional performance, where the intellectual’s scars are largely internal. The actor expresses every glimmer of feeling in his blue-green eyes, delivering brilliant line readings from a sharp script. He slayed me. The Emmy-winner best known for playing the TV’s sociopathic Sherlock Holmes takes on a figure less known in America than Hawkings, in a story with a less traditional arc.

Alan Turing, a brilliant and difficult puzzle-solver and Cambridge academic cracked the German Enigma code, playing a major part in defeating the Nazis in WWII. A homosexual, his greatest personal tragedy occurred in 1952 when Her Majesty’s government arrested him for the crime of gross indecency. Turing accepted chemical castration to avoid prison, only to commit suicide one year later. The bitter irony here is that his genius preserved democracy, but his own society failed him less than a decade later.

And then along comes Spall, 57, the classically trained character actor best known for playing Wormtail in the Harry Potter saga. (He also played Winston Churchill in The King’s Speech.) He brilliantly carries this Mike Leigh directed biopic of the Victorian landscape painter J.M.W.Turner. Spall has already won a Best Actor award at Cannes for his portrayal, an almost comic conglomeration of grunts, mutters, and grumbles roughly translated into English. While his Turner is far from eloquent or emotionally accessible – much less likeable – he is deeply human. Spall shows us a brilliant artist who creates transcendent work, even if his life is a patchwork of bullying and carnal urges and, now and then, genuine affection. Working in Leigh’s signature style, there is a feeling of improvisation to Spall’s performance, a looseness and spontaneity, as if the paint has hardly dried before they move on to the next scene.

God save her, the English monarch plays a role in all three features: Queen Victoria turns up at one of Turner’s art exhibitions only to fling insults at his canvases, Queen Elizabeth bestows an OBE on Hawking at the end of The Theory of Everything and, in 2013, she posthumously pardoned Turing from all charges of indecency.

Cumberbatch who, following rapturous reviews, will now be launched by The Weinstein Company on a Best Actor campaign, confided to Yahoo Movies: “The thing I’m interested in is that the buzz creates and generates an audience…I want a lot of people to understand Turing. Any attention that encourages people to get to know, understand and marvel and thank Alan Turing — at that whole strand of his all-too-brief life — is justification enough.”

Toronto Critic’s Pick: Benedict Cumberbatch Bristles with Brilliance in ‘The Imitation Game’

October 5, 2014 By Thelma

Cumberbatch as Alan Turing

Taking its place among those handsome biopics the British do so well, The Imitation Game tells the fascinating (and ultimately tragic) story of mathematician Alan Turing. A day after the UK enters the Second World War, the Cambridge-educated Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch) arrives at Bletchley Park, a top-secret center for breaking military codes used by the Germans — and is soon put to work on cracking a heretofore impenetrable code called Enigma. As presented by director Morten Tyldum (Headhunters), the mercurial Turing is impatient with social conventions and the accepted chain of command. And he is harboring his own risky secret: he prefers bedding boys to girls, resisting even the charms of Joan Clarke, a particularly fetching fellow code-breaker (played by Keira Knightley).

Cumberbatch, as you might expect, bristles with brilliance in the role – and should be considered an Oscar frontrunner. We’ve seen him as Sherlock Holmes, so we never doubt that he packs more brainpower than anyone else on the Enigma-busting team. But, unlike the emotionally cold sleuth, Turing is a real-life historical figure, sensitive and troubled. He feels deeply and passionately for his life’s work, and tears often flood his eyes, a repressed stammer forcing itself on his lips. The performance bears so many shades of varying emotion, on the surface and deep below, that it is nothing short of miraculous.

Among Turing’s many challenges, so vividly embodied by Cumberbatch, is one of identity: who he is, must remain an enigma. The mathematician and crossword-puzzle fanatic cannot make public his proclivities, no more than he can share who he fully is: A genius of visionary foresight into the still-embryonic field of artificial intelligence, and one of the pioneers behind the development of the modern computer.

While ultimately breaking Enigma, and turning the tide of the war in the Allies favor, Turing did not survive to enjoy the ascendance of democracy in his post-war life. In 1952, the police charged him with gross indecency after he acknowledged that he was in homosexual relationship. A judge imposed a sentence of chemical castration. He committed suicide a year later.

Some may know Alan Turing from the play turned TV film Breaking the Code, starring Derek Jacobi, or the movie Codebreaker or even the recent musical, A Man from the Future,composed by two members of the Pet Shop Boys. Yet, with cult-star Cumberbatch in the lead, the Turing triumph and tragedy will reach a much wider audience. Hopefully the film’s message of hard-won tolerance, and the sacrifices made by lesser-known martyrs to the cause, will bolster the continued struggle for equality for all.

The Imitation Game opens in theaters on Nov. 21

St. Petersburg Diary: It’s Too Early to Start Narrowing the Oscar race

October 1, 2014 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Stolen Kisses: Anne Dorval and Antoine-Olivier Pilon in Xavier Dolan’s ‘Mommy’

It was a crisp night in St. Petersburg as the city’s First International Media Forum had its gala opening with Xavier Dolan’s explosive mother-son drama, Mommy. The Cannes jury prize winner relates the tumultuous relationship between a sexy widow (Anne Dorval) and her troubled teen (Antoine-Olivier Dolan). Seeing it for the second time among a festive chattering audience at the city’s Old Stock Exchange that couldn’t quite sit still, I was taken again by the movie’s emotional power — it’s both freshly contemporary and Bergmanesque. I wept. Again.

Recently, while talking to Jessica Chastain about Bergman’s muse, Liv Ulmmann and Chastain’s Miss Julie director. Jessica described Ullmann as having no bones. In other words, she was all feeling, open to every possible emotion dark or light — which doesn’t make her fearless only brave. This echoed for me while watching Mommy, because the performances are so volatile and yet grounded in the real world. Both Dorval and Pilon change minute to minute, dancing to raging, hope to despair, violent to tender. You have to be extremely open to embrace this kind of movie. It’s scenes from a mother-son relationship that we haven’t seen before.

The magnitude of the performances reminded me of the single principal I have to live by this early in the Oscar race: before Thanksgiving is a time to expand contenders, to seek out those performances and movies that may not be obvious candidates but that deliver Oscar power. Let’s not ghettoize Mommy as a Best Foreign Language Film contender even if it is Canada’s selection; let’s bring those brilliant performances forward.

While my Gold Derby colleague Pete Hammond argues persuasively that the Best Actor race should be expanded from five to ten, I think we should be looking even farther afield than Michael Keaton, Eddie Redmayne or Benedict Cumberbatch. Let’s throw Pilon in the mix. From mugging at the mirror in an homage to Home Alone to dancing seductively with his Mum and a middle-aged neighbor to exploding in intimate violence, this is a performance to watch and register.

And, in a year where Best Actress is looking a little thin, we’re calling on Quebec-native Dorval to join the fringe French speakers — Marion Cotillard (Two Days, One Night) and Juliette Binoche (Clouds of Sils Maria, which is also playing in St. Petersburg as well as the New York Film Festival) — to power into awards season playing thoroughly modern women of the world beyond Hollywood.

Pilon power.