It's a strange thing, acting. I'm supposed to know at least something about it, but it remains fundamentally a mystery to me, still essentially magical.
Today I was thinking about the big Shakespearian roles and happened to catch an interview with Ian McKellen on the box. The best Macbeth I've ever seen, by a distance, partly because he was opposite the best Lady Macbeth (Judi Dench), and partly because he got that sense of reckless, manic courage central to the role. How do you fake that? My suspicion is that it wasn't faking.
Earlier in the week I saw a fair bit of Pelham something or other, the action thriller set in the New York subway system (a remake, if I'm not mistaken) with Denzel Washington in the role of the less than heroic everyday guy as hero. As so often with DW, an okay movie with a masterful central performance. The guy makes average movies really good. And again, beyond all the technical mastery in performance there's a weird sense that he does nobility so well because he possesses something like genuine nobility.
Maybe it's all just because we need heroes and will find them in someone, somewhere, given the appropriate staging. Maybe it's because it's real, despite the fakery.
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