Why I Love Acting, or Why I Rather Play the Villain
It’s odd to live in this time. Because of the Coronavirus, entertainment has been put on hiatus, especially in Broadway until sometime in the Fall where shows & films will go back to production, released, and for Broadway, shows will resume even though some shows have closed because of the Coronavirus. For me, the past several months I’ve been wrapping up my last semester at Brooklyn College. After close to fifteen years, I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre. It has been a lifelong dream to have a degree like this even when people discouraged me from acting or have been with horrible, toxic co-stars or performers I’ve worked with.
Even when I was a kid, I always loved acting and had the need to perform in front of others. I wasn’t a theater kid growing up nor was I in a glee club, a chorus line, or in my church’s choir. I never study at any acting schools, conservatories, or studios. I was taught by some of the best professors in CUNY. What I did do was watched movies as a kid. I grew up watching movies like RoboCop, Total Recall, Starship Troopers, Die Hard, Back to The Future, Clue, just to name a few. These were the type of films that I would watch endlessly, and I know for record that I had watched Total Recall to a point where my mother had to hide the VHS away from me watching it. I loved watching Jim Carrey making an ass out of himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger being Arnie for a couple of hours, or being mesmerized by Jackie Chan’s feats of superhuman pain tolerance by the making and performing the perfect stunt.
I grew up and started to stray away from watching Hollywood films. The acting in these movies are legendary. If there was a reason why I always watched movies as a kid, it was because acting captivated me. Harrison Ford as Dr. Henry “Indiana” Jones Jr., Bruce Willis and Alan Rickman as John McClane and Hans Gruber, and Robin Williams as Mrs. Doubtfire are acting tours de force growing up. This even works for wrestling, too. An odd focal point I know but hear me out.
I have a love and hate relationship with wrestling, but a wrestler must work the crowd either as a babyface or a great heel. You must play off to the crowd and allow them to make them love you or allow them to make them hate you. That’s great character work. Case in point, the greatest heel turn performed by a babyface has always been and will be Hulk Hogan at WCW’s Bash at The Beach ’96. The man was the hero for most of the 80s and early 90s, so when he performed his famous heel turn at WCW’s Bash at The Beach ’96, it was unprecedented to have seen something like that before. From that point on, anything was possible with faces and heels and Hollywood Hogan started to blur the line of acting and being a heel. Ironic, when he did act in a few films in the mid-to-late 90s as a good guy while he was still a heel even though they got around that by having Hogan essentially become a face with heelish tactics like “Stone Cold” Steve Austin.
As I grew older, I began to watch Quentin Tarantino films, giving me a sense of excitement, and Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, and Darren Aronofsky were teaching me the different sides of New York. The works of Kevin Smith prove to me that it was okay to be a nerd, among other things like being proud to where you’re from. The glue that bounded this all together was acting. These movies were perfectly casted, and their villains were played by great actors. They always having fun with their roles but showing us why they were excellent in their form. Robert Englund did wonders as Freddy Krueger, portrayed him as evil incarnate with a sadistic sense of humor, a jokester that killed for fun, or something in-between. I will always remember Joe Pesci as Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas. The ways he switches from comedic to sadistic is what makes Pesci is a great actor. He picks and choose his beats naturally, letting the scene play out. He knows when the tension is building and knows when to release it when a joke.
If there any two actors I look up to as my acting idols, its Gary Oldman and Christopher Walken. Oldman has always been a part of my life whether I knew of it or not. My first film I saw of him was probably The Fifth Element as Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg, an industrialist weapons dealer. Even though he’s played villains before that point, that role is the man’s golden hour as a villain. He’s campy, hilarious, and still a credible threat even when he doesn’t show it. Compare that to a later villain role of his, Mason Verger in Sir Ridley Scott’s adaptation of Hannibal. Here, he plays the role in a similar way like Zorg just campier and more over the top in a southern drawl. Even when he is playing a villain or a hero, Oldman makes his roles his own with his charm and the way he can act around people, showing us why he is one of the best actors around.
Christopher Walken is an actor I really admire a lot and as mobster Vincenzo Coccotti in Tony Scott’s True Romance, he shines like Oldman does in his roles. He’s only is in the film for ten minutes in, what people dub, “The Sicilian Scene.” Like Tommy DeVito, Vincenzo is all smiles and affable to his victim, Dennis Hooper’s Clifford Worley. Here, he talks to him, calmly and humorously talks to Clifford, but also asks about his son’s whereabouts whom Vincenzo is actively looking for. When Clifford doesn’t give in, he decides to go out with a smile by making Vincenzo laugh by stating how Sicilians had gotten their dark hair and olive toned skin: Sicilians were created through the interracial affairs between the Moors and Sicilian women.
Both Hooper and Walken make this scene work, with Hooper playing it as causal like any other day with his character even with the pretense of death. Walken plays it like it’s just another day for his character. He’s methodical, invasive, and is just toying with Clifford until the point he shoots him to death. Even with he is taken aback with the Sicilian story, he never loses his composure. All-natural instincts and complete professionalism done by Walken, making you think that, maybe, Clifford would get out of this alive. Vincenzo keeps to his word and kills him. Its roles like this that make me genuinely love acting and why I would rather play the villain.
