There are loads of excellent actors who never get a big break in the movies. And there are fair few rubbish actors on the A list. Often it's a choice between actual talent and a big name that will bring in the audiences.
Yeah this is a real issue, because audiences don't always respond to good actors. There's a pretty good correlation, but we often see pretty terrible actors pretty hugely celebrated. Which I think is totally fine but it's calling to see someone talking about "good acting" when it's definitely not happening from a certain actor, and what they actually means is "I'm enjoying their work". Like, I don't think anyone is saying, say, Keanu Reeves is the greatest acting-actor ever - we celebrate him because he's charming, good enough, has great physicality, and god versatility and so on. But you see other actors who are even worse actually getting called "good at acting".
A good recent example would be WandaVision, where to be frank, Paul Bettany is acting at level several stages up from Elizabeth Olsen, in terms of conveying real raw and complex emotion, humanity, and depth (even with pretty ordinary writing - it's not bad but also not amazing).
Yet if you look at it being discussed, people praise them together and often praise her acting. And her acting is just not special in any way. It's not anything elevated, she doesn't convey anything raw or complex - it's pretty basic stuff.
And it doesn't make her a bad person that she can't match Bettany - he's 18 years older, much seriously trained in acting, and has done serious acting roles vastly more than her (I'm not saying action movies etc. aren't serious, but I am saying stage acting in general is a wholly more serious thing than Mary Kate & Ashley or the like). Nor does it make her miscast. You don't actually need amazing acting from her, though Bettany being so far ahead does seem a bit troubling at times. And also she seems pretty damn cool in interviews and as a person.
But it does make my opinion of the
audience steeply drop when you see whole bunch of people Emperor's New Clothes-ing Olsen's performance. Even that's almost too kind actually - it's not even that they all know and are saying that out of fear of standing out (though there is a bit of that I daresay), it's that plus a lot of them literally couldn't tell good acting from a hole in the ground but are only too pleased to say how great certain people's acting is.
Sorry, thank you for coming to my TED talk.
You misunderstood, I agree with your statement. Jeremy is a great actor who couldn’t bring up the crappy material in the 2000 movie. The point of my statement was thar you need good material (story, writing, direction, etc.) more try an you need A list actors. Don’t get me wrong, greater actors are good, it the underlying material is more important.
I agree but there is a threshold below which the actors are so bad they drag the material down with them. The 2000 movie had that on top of crappy material, with the male lead particularly (Marlon Wayans is Laurence Olivier next to that guy).
All of the actors cast so far are extremely pro though so no issue yet.
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