This post was all set to look at the question of actors playing against type, in the light of George Clooney trading charisma for cruelty as a hired gun in The American, which I reviewed last week. There’s a thin line between audacity and miscasting, and Clooney, to my mind, strayed on the wrong side of it.
We get a hint of what he was going for during one scene in the film, where the TV in a café is showing Once Upon a Time in the West. That masterful Western, you will remember, transformed the avuncular Henry Fonda into a cold-eyed psychopath. The actor’s former trustworthiness only intensified his menace; the thought that so much unimpeachable goodness could turn rancid was chilling. Our rational selves know that whatever Fonda did on screen, whether it’s The Wrong Man or On Golden Pond, was only a put-on. But who watches movies with the rational part of their brain? Not me.
I was going to talk about such jarring switcheroos as the three-stage campaign by Robin Williams (in Death to Smoochy, Insomnia and One-Hour Photo) to remake himself as monstrous, something which required surprisingly little effort. Or Meryl Streep being crushingly unfunny in She-Devil and Death Becomes Her (though she had finessed the art of the light touch by the time she made Adaptation).
Then I heard about the death of Leslie Nielsen, the journeyman actor transformed into a poker-faced comic giant midway through his career. Talk about a performer leaving his comfort zone forever. Neilsen’s reborn career offers perhaps the most obvious example of how a director’s intuition (and an actor’s enthusiasm) in going against the grain can pay dividends. Why doesn’t it happen more often? The actor Martin Donovan, a former Hal Hartley regular, has a few ideas, and is quoted in an excellent piece on Nielsen over at Salon . He thinks film industry decisions are motivated entirely by people not wanting to lose their jobs:
That’s why you see a certain actor playing cops over and over again, or a certain actress playing the funny best friend that the heroine tells her problems to. The casting agent says, ‘I could give this part to somebody I think might be able to do it but hasn’t done it before and get fired if I’m wrong. Or I can give it to somebody I know for a fact can do it because he’s already done it three times, and keep my job.’
I spoke last year to David Zucker, one of three co-writer/directors on the 1980 disaster-movie spoof Airplane! (Zucker’s brother Jerry, and Jim Abrahams, were the others.) ZAZ, as the team was known, set out to make a comedy with a cast that was not conventionally funny. “Mel Brooks’s films used comedians to get laughs,” he said. “Airplane! was different because we didn’t have those middlemen. The studio wanted Chevy Chase or Bill Murray, but we resisted that. It would’ve broken the spell. We did the jokes through straight actors like Lloyd Bridges and Robert Stack instead. We wanted the audience to feel they were watching a serious movie that we had redubbed, the way Woody Allen did with What’s Up, Tiger Lily?“
ZAZ had already used Nielsen in a small part in The Kentucky Fried Movie, but it was Airplane! that remade him. “We knew Leslie was great,” said Zucker, “but we didn’t know he was such a movie star. He was the last one we cast. When we’d cast Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, the casting director had got annoyed with us. But he exploded when we said we wanted to cast Leslie. He said, ‘Leslie Nielsen is the guy you only cast the night before, as a last resort. If you can’t get anyone else, then you get Leslie Nielsen!’ We wanted to hear none of that. We were just so happy we could get him. We knew from his body of work that he was hilarious. Unintentionally hilarious, I mean. Look at that stuff now in the light of what he went on to be. It’s kind of unprecedented that any actor has had a career like that.”
Nielsen told me in an e-mail: “There are people today who have no idea I ever played romantic or character roles. I did quite well for many years in those roles — travelled the world, drove nice cars — but when the Zuckers and Jim Abrahams put their faith in me, it made me a star, which I’d never been until then.”
Zucker was right to feel that it was in his own work — not just Airplane! but the spoof TV cop series Police Squad! and the resulting Naked Gun spin-off trilogy — that Nielsen was at his best. “Leslie became a kind of shorthand,” he said. “A lot of people cast him, including Mel [Brooks]. I don’t know. It’s been less effective, I think. But Leslie loves to play golf and he also likes to work. He doesn’t mean any harm by it, he’s a great guy. He deserves it.”
And Nielsen told me was always ready should ZAZ call again and ask him to bring Lt Frank Drebin out of retirement for one last Naked Gun. “I’d just love it,” he wrote. “I’ve dusted off his suit a few times in the recent past when rumours were floating about, but I’ve heard nothing substantial. When Jerry, David and Jim want Drebin back, a little more addled, a little more bowlegged, I’d be there. And surely as confused as ever.”
He put an asterisk by that word “surely”, and wrote at the end of the email: “*I just couldn’t help myself. Had to put it in there.”
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