The Paradox of Steve Coogan: Performing Class in British Film Acting
2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 75; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/19346018.75.2.03
ISSN1934-6018
Autores Tópico(s)Social and Cultural Dynamics
Resumo“there should be a cull on posh actors.” This is an idea put forward by the English actor Steve Coogan, or to be more accurate, “Steve”: the fictionalized version of himself that he plays in Michael Winterbottom's television series The Trip to Spain (Sky Atlantic 2017). Steve is listing, grudgingly, the number of old Etonians—former pupils of the exclusive and ancient English private school—taking lead roles in British and Hollywood film and television. Steve's list includes actors such as Eddie Redmayne, Damien Lewis, and Tom Hiddleston and could also include, among others, Hugh Laurie and Dominic West. (Another British A-lister, Benedict Cumberbatch, attended Eton's rival school, Harrow.) At a later point in the same series, Steve, speaking on the phone to his agent, rails against the idea that some other actor might take the role in a new film he has written for himself: for example, “Tom Hoddleston [sic]” or, as Steve then puts it, “some other posh twat.”While this outburst is technically coming from Steve, Coogan himself offers similar opinions in his 2015 autobiography, Easily Distracted. Here, one finds frequent references to the types of actors from whom Coogan distinguishes himself and whom he also perceives as having an unfair advantage in the screen-acting marketplace. Early on in his career, Coogan tells us, he came “into contact with an endless stream of people who were uber-confident and educated at Britain's finest universities,” while Coogan himself was a “kid from a Manchester suburb who had failed English O-level not once, but twice” (18).Coogan's self-narrative paints a picture of failed access to prestigious London drama schools such as the Central School of Speech and Drama and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, both breeding grounds for future stage and screen stars. Although he secured a place in the theater course at what was then Manchester Polytechnic (now Manchester Metropolitan University), Coogan still claims to have been out of place, given that he did not “know anyone at the BBC,” and adds that he had not “been to fucking finishing school” but was “state-educated” (238–39). Despite this apparent adversity, Coogan has gone on to achieve household-name status in the UK and a degree of international celebrity as a movie actor, starring in films such as Around the World in 80 Days (Frank Coraci, 2004), Tropic Thunder (Ben Stiller, 2008), and, in his recent critically praised turn as Stan Laurel, Stan and Ollie (Jon S. Baird, 2018). Like the latter film, his various collaborations elsewhere with Michael Winterbottom have been characterized by performances of real-life figures: from Factory Records founder Tony Wilson in 24 Hour Party People (2002) to London erotica impresario Paul Raymond in The Look of Love (2013).Both Steve's and Coogan's tirades tap into a particular cultural moment and concern in UK film and television. Recent sociological studies and also policy reports have looked at the socioeconomic contexts informing the pursuit of actor-training opportunity, entry into the profession, and the casting experiences of actors from specific class, racial, and ethnic backgrounds. These same studies and reports conclude that, among other things, there is a “class ceiling” prohibiting actor mobility in the country (see especially Friedman and O'Brien; Friedman et al.; Friedman and Laurison; British Film Institute). Other actors with similar social backgrounds to Coogan are quoted within these studies, affirming a similar impression of restricted entry on regional or class-based terms. Julie Walters, an earlier Manchester Polytechnic graduate, warns that with “the way things are now,” in the future “there aren't going to be any working class actors,” while Chris Eccleston, who like Coogan was raised just outside Manchester and who, like Walters, identifies as working-class, suggests that actors these days “need to be white . . . male, and . . . middle class” (both quoted in Friedman et al. 993, emphasis in the original).My focus in this article is not sociological; nor is it my aim to challenge the aforementioned findings. Nevertheless, these sociological studies have rarely engaged with the subject in a more interdisciplinary way, exploring the possibility that prevailing attitudes to screen acting have a role to play in the discussion. It is difficult to dispute that certain people, often on class and geographical bases, are disproportionately gifted the economic and cultural capital to enter the British acting profession and succeed within it. What remains underexplored, though, is to what extent actors’ craft and their own practices and approaches might either contribute to or challenge this problem of representation. This is an important point to make, given that Coogan himself seems to suggest that the presentation and perception of one's self in performance is mostly determined by a preexistent impression of class and upbringing. As he claims, casting directors attending graduation showcases at his Manchester course “were interested only in the good-looking, privately educated students . . . I didn't have floppy hair and I didn't speak with a posh accent . . . so I was routinely ignored” (264).Coogan here implies that contexts of class and economic background are somehow manifest in the work actors do. Anecdotally, this may be true, but why should it necessarily be so? Coogan's own body of work, in fact, perhaps as much as any other British actor, highlights the more complex ways one might understand and perceive screen performance. Coogan's own performances call into question the idea that there is an obvious correlation between actors as socioeconomic individuals and identities and their professional identities onscreen, as actors performing roles. An aim of this article is therefore to engage with film studies work on acting theory and, in particular, work centering on the specificity of acting as both an art and a product of the performer. As I argue, Coogan's work in particular, as a manifestation of this idea, exposes some of the paradoxes within that same actor's own professed views. But it also exposes some of the potential limitations, both representationally and professionally, in thinking of actors onscreen as mostly literal embodiments of their class and cultural backgrounds.I undertake this discussion in order to add to the existing conversation around screen acting, thinking here about its importance to the specific cultural context of UK film and television. I am conscious here that the even bigger issue alluded to by both Steve and Steve Coogan is more the classed types of roles predominantly on offer to actors, which may merely perpetuate a circle of actor-class privilege. For reasons of focus, I will engage with those particular questions only obliquely, though as I suggest here, what I call the “class-ification” of actors in the first instance does little to resolve this situation. I recognize too that my argument focuses exclusively on white actors and questions of class and does not engage, for example, with questions around race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality, all of which remain beyond the scope of this article. Arguably, though, this article's questions pertain to further discussions around actors and their presumed preexistent cultural “fit” for given roles (potentially, I would suggest, to debates around the significance of “color-blind” casting in the wider screen industries).This article does, however, aim to make a critical intervention within some of the often-received views and approaches operating in British film, questioning some assumptions around film acting's inextricable link to class. Indeed, within certain traditions such as British “social realism,” and as I have discussed elsewhere with regard to the films of Ken Loach (such as Raining Stones [1993], Looking for Eric [2009], and I, Daniel Blake [2016]), actor origin and background are sometimes seen to supersede or even obviate the potential of the actor's art in terms of the capacity to register “truth” onscreen. For Loach, a sense of lived experience and deep personal connection with working-class contexts trumps most other considerations when it comes to casting working-class roles (Archer 284–85). From this perspective, upbringing is assumed to instill “nuances of geographic and class difference” that cannot be feigned in screen performance (English 263). In other words, in this understanding of British screen performance, when it comes to class at least, the movie camera cannot lie: the same goes for the actor.As I argued in that same article, however, because the discussion of Loach's films effectively touches on two different things—the politics of casting and the politics of acting—one's view of performance should never rely on assumed, anecdotal, or biographical correlations between a performer's background and their screen work. Rather, the significance of these performances emerges through the distinctive physical, gestural, and vocal signs that emerge in the process and are in turn registered by the viewer. Both there and here, then, my argument aligns with other work on screen acting that rejects the idea of acting as a “received” art, a simple “capturing” of a non-performance, and instead views screen acting as a particular work of craft: a work that articulates “discernible performance details with specific qualitative features that carry a delimited range of meanings and connotations” (Baron and Carnicke 17). As Coogan's work illustrates, once we see acting in terms of an imitative accumulation of these same details, meanings, and connotations, combining to produce a performance, what does this mean for the significance or otherwise of an actor's “class,” in terms of what we actually see onscreen?The Trip to Spain is the third in a series of four films made for television, all directed by Winterbottom, beginning with The Trip (BBC Two 2010), and with the three sequels also adapted into theatrically released films. (I have throughout used the more widely known television series as the bases for my discussion.) Devised by Winterbottom, Coogan, and Rob Brydon (who plays Rob, Steve's traveling companion), the series is a showcase for the particular imitative skills of its central duo, both of whom have achieved success not only as screen actors but also as impersonators and voice artists. Coogan himself has claimed to have “a photographic memory for voices” (186), and the ability to find character through the starting point of vocal imitation has in many respects defined the actor's career to date. This is especially the case in terms of what (at least for British audiences) is probably his most famous incarnation: Alan Partridge, the unctuous DJ and chat-show host, who started out as a character on British radio in On the Hour (BBC 1991–92) before migrating to various television series and a feature film, Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (Declan Lowney, 2013).Imitations of numerous figures from film and television run through the Trip films, often in a form of competition or as the subject of critical analysis between the two men. Yet what might be overlooked in the Trip films is that this narrative focus on imitation is only a further performance layer on top of what is already an act of imitation, since we are not watching a concealed observational documentary, but a fictionalized presentation on the part of the actors. As Cynthia Baron and Sharon Marie Carnicke identify, the reception and discussion of star actors’ work can often “misconstrue the relationship between star image and performance,” especially when it takes the “cultural image” constructed through such performance as “tangible signs of the star's actual personality” (66). The Trip series, in this respect, works as a sustained reflection on this very problem, precisely because it encourages viewers to identify Steve and Rob to a large extent as their real selves, particularly when the performers’ dialogue aligns, as already outlined previously, with other real-life contexts and views.In The Trip to Greece (Sky Atlantic 2020), to give one example, Steve shares with Rob a review of Stan and Ollie from the British magazine The Spectator. In praising Coogan's performance, the review concludes, “It's a good job Steve Coogan is a brilliant actor: he conveys Stan's likeability so well that for 97 minutes you forget what a self-regarding arse Coogan himself is in real life” (Mason). Steve's response to this—that the only significant information is the bit about him being brilliant—is not just cherry-picking, since his comment makes a clear separation between the actor's work and the actor himself, emphasizing the primacy of the performance as a measure of what an actor really does and what an audience sees. But the added irony here is that Coogan is here already in character, as the arrogant and self-aggrandizing Steve, adding another layer to the text. Indeed, where exactly is “Steve Coogan” anyway? One of the questions raised by the review of Stan and Ollie is on what basis the critic assesses the “real-life” Coogan and whether the view of the actor as a “self-regarding arse” is itself misleadingly inferred from other screen performances such as those in the Trip series.The fact that the actors, in physical terms at least, are inextricably linked to the characters they play arguably contributes to such (mis)perception: at the simplest level, as Carnicke points out, “it is hard to separate actor from character when they both occupy the same body” (“Screen Actor's” 191). Yet acting, both in theory and in wider practice, acknowledges screen performance as performance, which means recognizing it as a form of conscious demonstration and imitation. Moreover, Carnicke's observation allows for the possibility that what a viewer calls the “actor” is inferred from a work of characterization that is already an act of construction. What, then, binds the perception of an actor's work, in the UK context or elsewhere, to such rigid conceptions of the actor's class?As a deft impersonator and character actor such as Coogan knows, and as his own career has largely sought to challenge, actors are in principle, in terms of their performance capability, not at all defined by their background. Although he does not pursue some of the idea's implications, Coogan recognizes this in his own writing. He suggests, for example, that his interest in vocal and physical impersonation was looked down upon within acting school circles, but as a young actor, he was insistent that he would create something “mature and sophisticated” out of his gifts for mimicry (248). In turn, he believes his own approach to acting was at odds with the central tenets of actor training and, above all, the Stanislavskian approach that underpins much modern drama-school teaching. Starting with “the exterior aspects of a character,” Coogan claims, he is then able to “go back inside and find out who that person is” (264). In describing his approach in this way, he distinguishes his imitative acting practice from what he assumes to be the more interior-driven approaches of Stanislavsky.This may indeed reflect what he saw at Manchester Polytechnic, though in truth, Coogan's comments are mostly revealing of a possible misapplication or misconception of Constantin Stanislavsky's work. More careful consideration of the Russian's theories indicates the primacy of working inwardly from an understanding of the role within the given dramatic piece; the actor should “visualise the details of a character's world” in such a way that it “energises the imagination” (Carnicke, “Stanislavky's System” 11). As Richard Hornby describes, in fact, late in his career Stanislavsky came to view the importance of careful and precise “physicalizations” as a way into the “logic of the role and the play” (95). In other words, he worked out that “externals affect internals” (95, emphasis in the original).During the discussion of Stan and Ollie in The Trip to Greece, Steve questions the idea that he is (merely) an impersonator, arguing instead that he works from outward manifestations of character to find a form of inner truth. In stating this, he actually comes much closer to applying Stanislavskian principles than he would elsewhere suggest. Such approaches here inform Steve's (and by inference here, Coogan's) recognizable strengths as an actor: his ability to submerge or efface his “self” through observation and the construction of an external characterization, through the skillful manipulation of voice, body, and gesture, in order to find the truth of a given role. In Stan and Ollie, for instance, playing the creatively more dominant Laurel to John C. Reilly's more socially confident Hardy, Coogan deftly integrates some of the physical and vocal hesitancies familiar within Laurel's screen relationship with his partner: the pause and the brief look of reflection and frown before replying (or not replying) to someone; the slight overcompensation of arm gesture in his efforts to make a point; the rounded shoulders and somewhat stooped gait that convey a misleading impression of secondary status in the relationship.Oddly, though, Coogan's professed views appear to limit the possibilities of his own character-building capacity along what seem to be hereditary class lines. His complaint as a graduating actor seeking agents and work was that he “didn't have a clue how to do a straight posh role” (264). Whether he wanted to do one, or should be required to, is one thing, but the question of “how” seems to beg another question, since his admitted talent lies precisely in his ability to obviate his “own” body, voice, and self through externally crafted, inwardly directed characterization. “Straight,” as Coogan describes it here, seems to refer back to the idea of an essentialized representative fit between the sociocultural individual and the character; yet from a performance perspective, his own work and methods question this framework altogether. One only has to look at some of Coogan's other work for evidence of this: whether he is essaying the sinewy gestures and mannered vocal cadences of the Cambridge-educated Wilson in 24 Hour Party People; embodying the upright, uptight manners and entitled physicality of the eighteenth-century landowner Walter Shandy in another Winterbottom collaboration, A Cock and Bull Story (2005); or conveying the vocal ease, assertiveness, and persuasiveness of Martin Sixsmith, the privately schooled and Oxford-educated journalist cowritten by Coogan for himself in Philomena (Stephen Frears, 2013)—a character who, in clear distinction to his diffident Stan Laurel, is confident and pushy enough to wedge a foot through a stranger's door in order to get the interview he desires.Coogan's work in this respect offers an unusually marked case of the distinctions between actors and their characters, to the possible extent that the very capacity for flexibility becomes, as it were, Coogan's star persona. Yet, as Carnicke suggests, even in the case of actors much less associated than Coogan with physical transformation (her key example being John Wayne), what we understand to be “the actor” performing is in actuality a “second self,” a technical negotiation of the “first self” for the purposes of capturing a character onscreen. Carnicke suggests that screen actors typically “imprint images of characters onto themselves in ways that create credible illusions of natural behavior” and that Wayne “manipulates gestures to the technology that frames his performance” (“Screen Actor's” 198). These same processes are highlighted in The Trip, where Steve gives an astute impersonation of Richard Gere, highlighting the American actor's tendency toward delivery pauses, intimations of flickering private thought, and enigmatic glances to unspecific points in space. As a manifestation of accumulated performance habit, what Coogan highlights here is less Richard Gere (“first self”) and more “Richard Gere” (“second self”), whose physical and vocal reiterations across a number of roles exemplify the paradoxically “ostentatious” and “expert” ways in which the screen actor shapes an apparently naturalistic and “spontaneous” performance (Naremore 27).Looked at in the broader terms of screen acting, Coogan is in truth less of a professional outlier than his own testimony would suggest. The idea that truth onscreen is a product of conscious labor, craft, and specific adjustment of gesture to the camera is central to the message of pragmatic screen-acting theorists, who argue strongly against the need for corresponding psychological and emotional motivation on an actor's part (see especially Tucker; Hornby; Mamet). What the camera captures—and what viewers believe—is of sole importance, since what the actor is really thinking or feeling remain unknowable. As Matthew Potolsky puts it, discussing Denis Diderot's famous essay “The Paradox of the Actor,” “the ‘original’ of an emotion is unknowable to anyone other than the person who feels it.” Likewise, the “mimed emotion of a skilled actor is all but impossible to distinguish from genuine emotion” (82).This idea of the actor's “natural” performance emerging instead through the conscious and conscientious work of acting craft is further implied in a reiterated exchange between Steve and Rob, first in The Trip and subsequently in The Trip to Italy (BBC Two 2014), concerning the vocal cadence and tone of British actor Michael Caine across different contexts of his career. This exchange takes the form of repeated line readings, in an incremental process of repetition, criticism, and revision. As Michael Allen and Janet McCabe in turn argue, it is via Steve and Rob's own work of finding the Caine “voice” that one actually gets a sense of what Caine's own work as a screen actor involves: it is in this [process] that we . . . get to see the ‘hard labour of the persona’ . . . As [Steve and Rob] talk through the changing tonal and vocal patterns of the Caine voice . . . the two performers . . . reveal exactly what is involved in creating the most ‘authentic’ or ‘truthful’ replication. (159)Most importantly, in terms of the contexts of this article (given Caine's frequent associations with the so-called New Wave, in the 1960s, of British working-class actors [see, for example, Sellers]), such observations call into question the casual attribution of a kind of “classed” acting style to some preexistent and class-defined sense of self. Allen and McCabe note how frequently viewers have suggested Caine “simply plays ‘Michael Caine.’” But as they add, Steve and Rob's “careful study of his vocal style and how its range has evolved and altered, quite literally, speaks of how [Caine] has adapted, developed and refined his performance style over time” (159–60). Michael Caine may indeed play “Michael Caine,” but the two are not synonymous.Taking this into consideration, then, it seems that the problem of classed actors to which Coogan refers needs further scrutiny. If there is neither a necessary nor a direct correlation between the actor's “self” and how a performance signifies to a viewer, what do we mean when we talk about class in acting, at least with regard to, say, “working-,” “middle-,” or “upper-class” actors? What one might sometimes mean is that the significance of background in an actor's performance is inferred, after the event, from its signification within the text. Or equally, the significance could be imposed in a non-analytical way via anecdotal or biographical information about the actor in question, in such a way that the signifying work of performance is effectively ignored altogether. Inferences like these have no essential concern with what actors can—or more importantly, could—do in practice and are only potentially reinforced by the connotations of the role they play, in terms of a coincidence between the role and their real-life backgrounds.Taking the argument purely to its limits, then, for the sake of the discussion, if class, like the idea of the actor's self, is more strictly a textual signifier born out of the mechanics of performance and a viewer's perception of it, class has nothing strictly to do with the actors in themselves in terms of their backgrounds, but rather is the outcome of specific techniques. Why, then, to pursue the argument rhetorically, should an actor's class matter to performance at all? But more pressingly, how might notions of an actor's work that reduce to ideas of the actor's “self”—and to the idea that it is this self that signifies in performance—actually prove an obstacle to actors’ creative capacity and professional mobility?Jim Leach's recent analysis of Daniel Day-Lewis's screen work (“Acting and Stardom”) brings this question into view. As Leach notes, Day-Lewis's breakout role was in My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1985), in which he played the character of Johnny: a former supporter of the anti-immigration National Front and now a gang member, a role to which Day-Lewis brought a working-class London accent, a prowling, loping physicality, and a capacity for sudden bursts of violence. Day-Lewis's father, Cecil Day-Lewis, was the British poet laureate between 1968 and 1972, while his mother, Jill Balcon, sister to Michael Balcon (the head of Ealing Studios), was a stage and screen actor. He was privately educated (Bedales School) and received theatrical training at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. At the time of My Beautiful Laundrette's release, however, he had yet to make significant impact as a film actor. The same year, Day-Lewis also played the aristocratic aesthete Cecil Vyse in A Room with a View (James Ivory, 1985): a performance as upright and florid in its movement and delicate, precise gestures as the same actor's Johnny was ranging, hunched, and physical. In theory, while Vyse seems the more apt role in terms of Day-Lewis's background, it was, Leach notes, the part of the lower-class Johnny that “turned [Day-Lewis] into an international star” (“Acting and Stardom” 214).Day-Lewis's case may, like Coogan's, be an exceptional one, yet it serves to highlight the point that signification in performance is not automatically correlated to some actors’ preexistent “essence” or “character.” Day-Lewis's credibility in the role of Johnny may have owed something to the fact that many viewers did not have existing frameworks for his screen persona, and therefore Day-Lewis simply “was” Johnny. But this only further demonstrates the ways in which performance, as a series of signs, can create meaning and encourage interpretations opposed to the actor's origins, once freed from the interference of anecdotal factors, such as the knowledge of an actor's other roles or biography.Notably, in The Trip to Italy, along with Rob, Steve overlooks Day-Lewis's real-life status as another “posh twat,” affording him recognition by improvising around his various turns: from Rob's (weak) version of Vyse to Steve's (better) attempt at the wrongly convicted Ulsterman Jerry Conlon from In the Name of the Father (Jim Sheridan, 1993), rounding off with Rob's attempt at a speech from Lincoln (Steven Spielberg, 2012). As these wildly different parts highlight, Day-Lewis's screen-actor persona is synonymous with extremes of character range and the absence of an identifiable type of role. In this respect at least, Day-Lewis is not unlike Coogan, in his capacity to essay a variety of physical and vocal characteristics, in characters that span wide contexts of class. Whatever way he may achieve his results (processes we cannot discern from watching performance alone) his characters are built around the manifestation of exterior markers, the result of a refined and exacting technique: aspects of bodily stature and movement, vocal tone, cadence and accent, and the precision of certain gestures, most of which appear specific to the individual characters, rather than shared across performances.The wider reception and recognition of Day-Lewis's work actually highlights, though, the inconsistencies inherent to some film-acting critical discourse. As Richard Dyer points out, in a certain Hollywood tradition, so-called “good” acting has been viewed in terms of the ability of the performer to hide “behind the character s/he constructs and in no way play him/herself” (140). Such a view sustains Day-Lewis's professional reputation and the many awards his work has garnered. A parallel critical history of screen acting has nevertheless focused negatively on actors perceived to reach beyond their capacities, by striving to play “outside” their allotted screen personae (see, for example, Bona). While oddly critical or even derisive of these actors’ efforts to act, such dismissals also wrongly imply that the screen persona from which the movie star deviates is not really “acting” in the first place. Taking John Wayne to task for playing Genghis Khan (in The Conqueror [Dick Powell, 1956]) overlooks the fact that, as already identified, the “John Wayne” familiar from his work in Westerns is already a “second” self, his “first” self to some extent already “hidden.”The possible confusion on the part of observers once again appears to stem from the fact that the craft of screen acting so often strives toward its own obviation as craft. Caine, intriguingly, appears to give ammunition to the detractors of his own capacity to act, observing that if “you catch someone ‘acting’ in a movie, that actor is doing it wrong” (4). Put into its proper context, though, this quotation appears in Caine's own detailed and highly technical guide to screen acting, the very existence of which attests to the fact that this “non-acting” is a technique in itself, one acquired, in Caine's case, through years of experience and practice.The broader critical reception of screen acting and institutional
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