Nicole Kidman’s last laugh: do actors really need to look like their subjects?
Humble pie was copiously scoffed this week when awards-watchers in Hollywood made it to the first screenings of Being the Ricardos. Aaron Sorkin’s insidery biopic of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz takes place over one tempestuous week behind the scenes of the revered 1950s sitcom I Love Lucy.
From the early stills and trailer, everyone had poured doubt on Nicole Kidman’s aptitude to play one of America’s best-known TV icons. Despite the curly red wig and drawn-on eyebrows, surely she looked nothing like Lucy? Even after the film was squarely in the can, a campaign sprung up on Twitter promoting Debra Messing, a career comedienne with a much closer resemblance, as the person they should have cast instead.
Well, guess what? After glowing reactions, Kidman is now predicted for an Oscar nomination, and everyone has made peace with the physical discrepancies between her and Ball. Sorkin, for one, says he was never fussed about those in the first place. “I’d make it very clear [to Nicole and Javier Bardem] that I am not looking for a physical or vocal impersonation of these people,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “Just play the characters who are in the script.”
It’s quite a turnaround for Kidman, who, after all, won her Best Actress Oscar for a biographical performance, as Virginia Woolf in The Hours (2002), which made her compete with her own bulbous prosthetic nose for our attention. As Virginia might have complained to Leonard: the untold hours in that make-up chair! By the time of Bombshell (2018), Kidman wanted much less tampering to approximate the Fox news anchor Gretchen Carlson. Still, that film was guilty of generally fussing around with the looks of its lead trio, creating an anxious and distracting ‘uncanny valley’ effect.
The urge to make your star into a perfect lookalike tends to be counterproductive, because great biopic performances aren’t distinguished by how sharp a double-take you do when the actor’s on screen. Take the example of the two Truman Capote portraits which came our way in 2005/6. Toby Jones was smoothly cast in Infamous, and gave a witty performance with a lot of the writer’s physical essence in there.
But he was overshadowed by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote, who stood half a foot taller than the real-life Truman, distantly resembled him at best, and was magnificent. That performance worked on a level much richer than impersonation: it was a virtuoso interpretation. It dug down superbly into the man’s demons, while summoning a bevy of cheeping mannerisms that were pure Hoffman, even when mischievously pilfered from Capote lore, and deeply hilarious. Anthony Hopkins’s take on Nixon – again, not an impression so much as a kind of grandiloquent cover version – is hardly any less valuable than his take on Titus or Lear.
Does anyone care that Julia Roberts, with those push-up bras and glorious curls, simply looked – and acted – like peak Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich (2000)? It’s almost a happy accident that she and the real-life Erin, from a few angles, look quite alike, but it would hardly have affected the film either way, since it’s a bespoke star vehicle for the ages.
Erin Brockovich wasn’t recognisable before that, of course, and here a wrinkle comes in: the more famous a figure, the greater the expectation that the leading actor has to change their whole physical being to achieve a good match. If you must have Gary Oldman playing Winston Churchill, a huge silicone mould over the face and foam bodysuit are prerequisites; but Oldman’s one recourse in Darkest Hour (2017) was to blast his way through those impediments by turning his performance (with ham klaxon inevitable) up to 11.
Rami Malek might have won a wholly inexplicable Oscar for Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), but he really pulled the short straw as Freddie Mercury, because those glued-on teeth and atrocious wigs didn’t furnish a resemblance so much as make him stick out as an unconvincing member of humankind. You’d never have found George C Scott submitting to such cosmetic indignities. He was an indestructible winner for Patton (1970), largely for merging his personality so cunningly with that of the ranting US Army general.
Studios used to have more lightly theatrical flair with biopics in the old days. In 1933, consider Charles Laughton’s broad-yet-persuasive Henry VIII, a matter of sturdy costuming, beard management, and vivid acting technique. Meanwhile, it never bothered anyone, when Greta Garbo took her most severe role in the same year’s Queen Christina, that the real-life Swedish monarch (going by every official portrait) had bulging, doughy features a million miles away from the legend playing her.
Garbo and her personal cinematographer, William H. Daniels, would never have let a fake nose interfere with the brooding compositions that immortalised that face. If Garbo looked like a dumpling in any given take – not like epicene Garbo at her most tragically beautiful – heads would have rolled, and they’d simply have redone it.
This isn’t to say there can’t be a special serendipity when casting of a lookalike falls unexpectedly into place – especially when there’s a natural fit that hasn’t been jerry-rigged by prosthetics, or when sheer performance skill completes the illusion. Of all the six actors who played Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There (2007), the one who looks most like Dylan, by a distance, is Cate Blanchett.
How did she do it? Sure, there was the curly wig, the pallor, the shades. But there was also the set of her jaw, that thousand-yard staring, the contemptuous angle of every cigarette she dangled, and everything she did with the voice. These effects fabricated a persona that was pure Dylan, built up from nothing but Blanchett. When actors can feel their way into a resemblance so ingeniously, matchy-matchy casting looks almost lazy.
Being the Ricardos will stream on Amazon Prime Video from December 21
