Actors

This weekend, Tron: Ares releases across US cinemas, and is expected to make a decent, rather than record-setting, amount of money in its opening weekend. It is a curious film franchise in that neither of the two films that precede it are especially beloved, but both have iconic soundtracks composed, respectively, by electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos and French electro duo Daft Punk. (The honors this time around fall to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, aka Nine Inch Nails.) Yet whatever the strengths and weaknesses of Tron: Ares – and the early reviews have not been kind – there is one aspect that can only make audiences groan in anticipation, and that is the casting of its star, Jared Leto.

If viewers of Breaking Bad had taken bets during the show’s original run on which of the cast was likely to become a breakout action-film star a decade after the series finished airing, Bob Odenkirk would likely have been near the bottom of that list. The young actor Aaron Paul was perhaps the most obvious prediction, but Jesse Plemons, Dean Norris – even a grizzled and pumped Bryan Cranston – were all more predictable choices to do an alpha-male Liam Neeson-meets-Keanu Reeves act than the foppish comic relief Jimmy McGill, aka criminal lawyer (in both senses) Saul Goodman.

Actors are easily bored on long runs. Phoebe Waller-Bridge once revealed that she staged distractions in the wings to amuse her colleagues. On the last night of Hay Fever, egged on by another actor, she bent over ‘and showed [her] arsehole’ to the on-stage actors. Nabokov’s plays are seldom performed. But he was alive to middling, mediocre dramatic clichés, fashions long-forgotten, but invaluably preserved in his 1941 lecture ‘The Tragedy of Tragedy’: ‘The next trick, to take the most obvious ones, is the promise of somebody’s arrival. So-and-so is expected. We know that so-and-so will unavoidably come…’ This is the lost convention, the stand-by that Beckett was frustrating in Waiting for Godot – with its tedious announcements and its adamantine disappointment.

The late Val Kilmer was difficult. That word is a kiss of death in Hollywood, because as soon as it’s murmured that you are hard to work with, your career declines inexorably. Kilmer had directors lining up to say how impossible he was. Joel Schumacher, who made Batman Forever with him, barely stopped kvetching about the actor, calling him “overpaid, overprivileged and psychotic.” Shortly after the film’s release, Schumacher said “He was badly behaved, he was rude and inappropriate. I was forced to tell him that this would not be tolerated for one more second. Then we had two weeks where he did not speak to me, but it was bliss.

For the past few weeks I have been binge-watching the Netflix series Call My Agent! (or Dix pour cent, as it is more satisfyingly known in France). Though it’s not quite as exquisite, multilayered and beguiling as my all-time favourite French drama Le Bureau, it has a similar appeal: strong, well-drawn characters in a distinctive setting in another country (France, obvs) where they do things differently because everyone is just so damned French. This time it’s not about foreign intelligence services but a movie talent agency which, though perpetually on its uppers (for the purposes of that TV concept known as ‘jeopardy’, I suppose), nevertheless seems to have on its books all the most bankable stars in France. They crop up, playing themselves, in cameo roles.

The Carer is a Hungarian-British co-production about a cantankerous old thesp (Brian Cox) and the young Hungarian woman (Coco König) who is dispatched to look after him, much against his wishes, and whom he’ll eventually throw out on her ear. I’m joshing you. She wins him over, naturally, and mutual respect develops, naturally, and a friendship blossoms, naturally, although I wish he’d thrown her out on her ear as that way this wouldn’t have felt like something we’ve seen a hundred times before. There are affecting, powerful films to be made about old age, loss, mortality and dependence, but this, alas, has all the emotional grit of a Driving Miss Daisy.

Which is better, British TV drama or American? A couple of years ago, merely asking the question would have had the hipsters chortling into their obscure US box sets — and even now a strange cultural cringe seems to persist. Nonetheless, I’d suggest, British television drama these days really is in the midst of an era that will have commentators in 20 years’ time routinely (if a bit unimaginatively) reaching for the adjective ‘golden’. Already in 2016 we’ve had War and Peace, Murder, The Night Manager and Happy Valley — and that’s before the hugely welcome return of Line of Duty (BBC2), Jed Mercurio’s riveting thriller about a police anti-corruption unit.

Laurence Fox has this week joined an increasing band of actors hitting back at misbehaving audience members who seem to forget that they are in public rather than their own living room. He ramped up the drama by launching a foul-mouthed attack on a heckler before storming offstage during a live performance at a London theatre. During the play, The Patriotic Traitor at the Park Theatre, he was heard to say: 'I won’t bother telling you the story because this cunt in the front row has ruined it for everybody.' The audience member had been muttering and heckling during the play and apparently became so loud that, for Fox, it was impossible to deal with.