Heroic limitations
Every movie has a good guy. The one who has his face on the poster, saves the day and gets the girl. He does no wrong. He’s the one audiences root for, the one they love. This role usually falls to the biggest star in the film — the Cruises, Pitts and Clooneys of the world. But does being part of the Hollywood elite mean you have to be the good guy?
It would seem so. The megastars America loves so dearly rarely risk their reputations by playing the bad guy. Audiences can’t handle seeing Forrest Gump as a serial killer or Jerry Maguire as a supervillain. But why? Are we really that sensitive? Aren’t we missing out on some great would-be performances?
Sure, it’s nice to see Brad Pitt (The Counselor) play a young detective hunting down a serial killer in Se7en — but it could be even better to see him as the killer. Or, instead of playing an abolitionist in 12 Years a Slave, why didn’t he try his hand at the role of slave owner Edwin Epps? Those roles were played to perfection by Kevin Spacey (House of Cards) and Michael Fassbender (The Counselor), respectively, but it’s intriguing to wonder what Pitt could have done with them.
This idea of megastars only playing heroic, uncompromised roles is ridiculous. Often, the villain is the more interesting and challenging role anyway — it takes real skill to make a monster human. The performances that stand out are the ones with a little bit of crazy in them. People such as Cristoph Waltz (Django Unchained) and Michael Shannon (Boardwalk Empire) are fantastic actors who have made careers out of portraying evil, but it would be nice to see a few stereotypical household names try their hand at it.
Few actors have solely played good guys. Tom Hanks played an assassin in Road to Perdition. Robin Williams played a serial killer in Insomnia and an all-around creep in One Hour Photo. Denzel Washington played a crooked cop in Training Day and did so well he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. But these performances are outliers in careers that are otherwise filled with feel-good roles.
Hollywood’s leading men are fat and happy, not willing to risk their pristine reputations for the sake of variety. They’re good at what they do so they stick to just that. They need to keep trying different things to keep them on their toes, to prove they still have the chops to be out of their element. They’ve proven they can make us love them; now they need to prove they can make us hate them.
