Can you recognize if an actor has good acting skills?

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I heard many times that an actor/actress was described as someone whose acting was brilliant while others were refered to as those deprived of acting skills because according to those who said it, their acting was wooden. It was recently when I read here some poster's question about how to recognize if you possess the ability to read social cues and someone else replied he should check if watching a movie he was able to judge the actors' acting skills because having this ability indicates the ability to read social cues and the other way round.

But it was years ago when I realized I didn't possess this very ability - well, let's start from this that initially, before I realized this concept at all, I even didn't know people were ever capable of having such an opinion on someone's acting because for me all actors' acting skills were just the same. Even now I can't understand what's the difference - after all, it's like that you are given a screenplay with the parts of yours ticked off and you just need to learn the role by heart, that's all, if you got a role of someone serious by nature, no acting skills can help you breathe more life into this role if this person played by you is to stay serious and calm. Or if you are supposed to play someone perky, bursting with energy and good humor, it is what you play, even if in your everyday life you are gloomy and commented on as wooden.

If an actor/actress can make a fictional character believeable, then s/he is likely skilled.

Jim Nabors comes to mind as one example of what I mean there, since he and Gomer Pyle are two completely different characters and one can be easily distinguished from the other and you would never expect/suspect any connection between the two. But in my own opinion, Alan Alda cannot act at all. In MASH, the character he plays is overshadowed by his own.

So, I think the issue here is about believeability, not discernability.

I agree, think of Tom Hanks as "Forrest Gump". Totally believable. Or Dustin Hoffman as Tootsie or Rainman, or Johnny Depp as Edward Sissorhands.

If it is any help in understanding about acting I would like to share something I recognized in my life. I was very active in drama classes in school, and later in college. I saw lots of plays on a lot of amateur and semi-professional levels but in a local areas around the States.

When I finally went to plays on Broadway in New York City, I was astounded! Those actors were just as good but not better as the best actors I saw in the bush leagues! (maybe this is just a level of my naivete, of course)

Good acting is good acting, no matter where it is done. What a wonderful liberating understanding that was. Just because someone is not on the screen or on the stage in a world class venue does not mean they are not as good as someone who is.

Merle

But why is your opinion on him like that, may you elaborate on this? I happened to watch this in the past somewhere back in the days of high school, but it was just when there was nothing better on TV, I even don't know the names of the characters nor the actors themselves who played in it.

And I think that every character played by an actor is believable, otherwise he/she wouldn't be allowed to play this role and someone else would have been found in their place. When for example there's an actor who plays a robot, a cancer sufferer, a person whose children have been abducted, a person suffering from mental retardation, a person in depresion, a psychopath etc. then all you need to do is behave like this person whose role he/she plays would have behaved - it isn't hard to play this because everybody knows how someone like that behaves. We know how someone being very ill, desperate, slow etc. behaves so it isn't like someone like Forrest Gump will deliver a speech on science, someone depressed won't be cheerful and so on - such a dissonance would be very easy to detect by the viewers.

i think it's all subjective. (it's an interesting question.) i tend to like actors who are believable to me in some way too, like denzel washington as malcolm x. or russell crowe as john nash. i think it must have more to do (for me) than just someone who can match the behaviors or mannerisms of those people. i think if acting is bad, there's too much emotion, or it's "off" somehow. so i think it does have to do with being able to read social cues in some way.

oddly, though, i still don't do well on those tests that measure ability to read facial expression/emotion from eyes, or from one still shot of someone's face. i think maybe it has to do with lack of context(?) i'm not sure.

it did take me a long time to realize all acting is not the same. but i do appreciate good acting now--or what i feel is good acting, anyway.

Which is exactly why Johnny Depp is a great actor, and one I really adore.

I like the Captain Jack Sparrow character that he plays.

Captain Jack is a really fun, enjoyable character. In fact, I read on Wikipedia that some critics call him the most iconic film character of the '00s, and that he has appeared on several lists of "Best Movie Characters".

I really don't understand how most people are able to ascertain which actors are good. It's as if they're seeing something that isn't there, or that I don't see, at least. I remember having that thought as an adolescent as well. That said, I'm not entirely convinced that there is such a thing as good acting; it's probably more about having a certain presence and being cast in an appropriate role.

When I hear acting described as wooden, one name always leaps to mind ahead of all others. Chuck Norris*.

Howdy Doody was a more lifelike performer than Chuck - and I'm sure he's a perfectly decent man in RL - but that poor guy couldn't act his way out of a paper bag.

If you're trying to get a handle on the difference between acting skills and a lump of mud reading lines from a script, that's a good measuring stick to start with. On a scale of One to Ten, Chuck Norris is Zero.

There are plenty of people acting today who'd score in the 7 to 10 range, depending on your own preference - Depp of course, Will Smith, Tom Hanks those guys can be utterly convincing as either heroes, idiots, clowns or bank tellers. Put them in the scene and they'll become that character. Others are very good at certain types of characters, but not so much in other roles.

They get a lot less attention than the stars, but some of the best actors are the 'supporting role' second-tier character actors who are so good, you've seen them in a hundred films and never realized that was the same person you saw in that other movie last week. Of course, that may just be poor facial recognition skills on my part.





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* although, to be fair David Caruso from CSI Miami is running him a heated second.

Not to mention Steven Seagal:

I've always heard about how "such and such is a good actor". All actors seem the same to me, and what bothered me about the "famous actors" is a lot of them almost always played the same role. So, I discredited their acting skills and stated, "Acting as one type only doesn't make you a good actor, but means you're good at acting as one type."

Maybe I still believe that, maybe not. What I do know is I favor the actors that play a variety of roles and personalities. Those ones to me seem convincing as a good actor. Why though? It may be because I don't notice the difference between good and bad acting. Most of it is "believable" to me.

I can certainly spot a bad actor, but I don't really spot good actors. However, I think this has a reason: If they're good actors, you're supposed to be enthralled by what they're doing and not noticing they're actors in something fictional. In a way, the best actors are the ones you don't notice.

Honestly, I've never been able to tell the difference between acting that others consider "good" and what they consider "bad." It's like all actors are equally good at it. I really cannot tell the difference.

There are actors I like, because they have a neat look or a cool way of speaking... Christopher Walken, Christopher Lee, Oliver Reed. But I have no conception of any actor's skill.

Except for Kevin Costner. He couldn't even *try* to fake an English accent for Prince of Thieves? Oh yeah, Alan Rickman, he's another cool actor.

I think my standards are different than the general NT public. Example; Steven Seagal is, in my opinion, a good actor so long as he plays an individual who shows little emotion. All his "business" with the martial arts moves, make him convincing to me in those parts. If he were to play a great lover I don't think I would find him convincing. To me, the least convincing actors are individuals who flub their lines, or act right through big plot holes. Did you ever see an actress running from a monster or a thug or whatever and she trips. Then her boyfriend must come back and pick her up....she can't get up by herself. An actor has to be awful good to do that without looking foolish. I think most critics are looking for something totally different however. This is probably why I like a lot of movies that are supposedly bad and lose interest in movies that "everybody" agrees are great. I thought some scenes in Citizen Kane were not well acted at all, yet I found nothing wrong with "Creation of the HUmanoids", a widely ridiculed sci-fi film. I've been told Andy Warhol agreed with me.

I have seen him in interviews and other places, and it seems to me his own personality remains dominant even when he is acting.



Yes, something like that. It is fine to know who played "Forrest Gump", but not at Forrest's expense!

Last edited by leejosepho on 05 Apr 2010, 5:26 am, edited 1 time in total.