Anyone can be anyone? about suspending unbelief.
For some time, the internet has been a discussion about the extent to which sex and sexual orientation of an actor or actress should match the sex and sexual orientation of the character they play. This discussion provoking great emotions, Cate Blanchett in 2018 publicly stated that in her opinion, the actors should not be obliged to draw only from personal experiences. So how is it? Everyone can play everything or are there any limits to crossing themselves?
Personally, I am of the opinion that we are dealing here with three different issues that are functioning side by side. The first is the question of the very idea of acting. Such distilled from the existing world. Acting is something older and definitely more complicated than modern Hollywood. It is one of our oldest artistic traditions. Looking at acting as a way of telling a story, we discover that basically - from the very beginning, accompanied by the suspension of disbelief - regardless of whether we are talking about ancient times, Elizabethan theater or more contemporary theater roles - actors exceeded the limits of age, sex and experience. And the audience took part - moving the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet despite the fact that there was no woman on stage.
At the same time, acting is based - at least today - not only on imitation and looking for external similarities - how to speak, stand or tone of voice, but also internal relationships with a character. These can be based on a simple community of experiences, but it is not necessary. Certain life experiences - such as fear, rejection, a sense of being lost may result from different situations, but the feelings themselves - or the feeling that they are known - are similar to individuals. An actor does not necessarily have to lose a wife to play a widower, but at the same time - if he has ever lost a loved one - he can reach for this emotion to feel closer to the character being played. But it does not necessarily have to be the death of a wife.
In a distilled actor's world, there are actually no limits. Everyone can be anyone. This is, among other things, the miracle of the theater - where people enter the wooden stage. And after a while, we are all sitting in the Russian court among bored landowners, even if the decorations consist of one table and four chairs. The acting game allows you to cross the limits of age, sex, skin color, everything that has ever happened to us realistically. This is one of the magic of the theater, which allows us to transfer our emotions to the entire gallery of diverse characters and at the same time - for a time not to be just ourselves. In the most extreme cases, it is "not being yourself" that leads to losing yourself when you enter the role so far that people who play with us can never get to know the actor, knowing only his role. No wonder that in many cultures acting has a mystical and religious dimension - a bit distant from everyday life - because it is based on this extraordinary transformation between the scenes and the backstage.
So much for ideal acting - as an idea that has been accompanying us for millennia. The problem is that acting does not exist in a vacuum. The discussion we are talking about concerns primarily the cinema. And not just any cinema but mainly American. The rules are cruel - as long as you can employ representatives of the conventional majority (as if to scratch it would turn out that these white heterosexual men are not as much in the world as suggested by popular culture) so long they will get all the roles as it flies. Meanwhile, representatives of minorities are still fighting to make their presence on the cinema screens not only symbolic (in the role of an actor or actress from the majority) but also real - in the form of representatives of minorities who play the roles closest to their experiences. In other words - if there is one homosexual character in the film, it may be worth checking first if we do not have in the catalog of our actors or actresses someone who could play this role reaching out to their experiences. The assumption is that - playing characters whose identity or gender is consistent with the identity or gender of the actor is the easiest way to broaden the representation - a necessary way because for now there is a problem with it.
At the same time, it is worth remembering that while many minority actors have problems finding a job, the actors from majority groups often get prizes, praise and awards for playing minority people. For many, it is a proof that still playing the representatives of sexual minorities is considered an amazing challenge worthy of awards and Oscars. At the same time - passing on these roles to the majority representatives confirms in culture a certain vision of minority filtered through the acting game. In other words - really thinking about minorities in films, we often get - how the majority imagines the minority. What causes that we fall into a strange circle where we have more and more LGBTQ characters on the screen, but we do not necessarily know anything more about minorities, and the actors are still afraid to reveal their sexual orientation. In this aspect, the request to allow actors from minorities to participate in roles that are closest to their experiences seems to be the most important.
However, there is also a third element of the discussion - which I will not hide is the most problematic for me - and I do not have a good answer here. Well - it can not be concealed that for this mechanism to work, most people involved in acting should reveal their sexual orientation to the world. What's more, they should be somehow divided due to this orientation. Here I have a problem because it does not seem to me that everyone who decides to be an actor must at the same time say everything about themselves to the world. Not because there is anything embarrassing or wrong about it, but because, contrary to the imagination, an actor doesn't have to reveal his personal facts about his private life or identity to the public opinion. Acting is, among other things, that you can be in public someone else. Anyway - it would be possible to consider whether this would lead us to a disturbing mechanism - in which an attempt to cross this border in the other direction - people from a minority who wants to play the role of a majority person would be negatively affected. Which would be disturbing because it would push LGBTQ into specific, closed circles. And considering that acting talent has a sexual orientation somewhere - it would be a great loss for acting. No one would like English theater in which Ian McKellen can hear anything unpleasant in his own right because he plays a heterosexual character. And undoubtedly - no matter how stupid it would be - they would probably appear.
It is also worth noting that the above remarks do not apply equally to any minority. Homosexual actors are not in this situation, such as transgender actors. The former have a decided greater opportunity to get a role independent of their gender or sexual orientation. For years, transgenders have been watching actors and actresses get the roles that would be the easiest to play and get rewards for it, while the representation of transgender actors varies around one percent. In this case, we are talking about the whole group which is on the one hand represented in the feature films but there is practically no actor representation (the fact that most people are able to name all working transgender actors from the head tells a lot about their situation). For this group, the request seems to be much more reasonable. On the other hand, it would be very limiting for their careers if they were to be told only to play characters who have the same experience. However, at this point their problem is that they do not get any roles.
Separating these issues is important. Because it is quite another to talk about the idea of acting - which has in its assumption the suspension of unbelief and the full possibility of crossing oneself, and another talk about show business, which is still extremely exclusive for all minority representatives. It seems to me that the voice of Cate Blanchett can also come from the theater community. Here issues are problematic in a big cinema, sometimes they do not occur, sometimes they look different. The theater actors community does not necessarily have the same approach to acting as the bosses of the big film studios. On the stage - especially the more niche one, indeed, the suspension of unbelief is absolutely crucial, and the community itself is more diverse. It is worth remembering, because the actors are a very large diverse group, and not everything refers to the world of great Hollywood productions - which is worth remembering in such discussions.
Is there any good solution to this issue? It seems to me that the actors are really the last element of a larger machine. The problem is that people who are responsible for what stories will be told, who will be invited to the casting, what history will tell and who to direct them for who we will reward - all this is a very homogeneous group for now. In order to change anything - it is necessary to diversify people who make decisions, make films and decide what is acceptable in popular cinema and what is not. Here the change can bring the most. And only then will we be able to return to such unreserved conversations about the essence of acting.