Perhaps I am living in Cloud Cuckoo Land – actors are as much at the mercy of market forces as anybody else, and ever since the birth of cinema, executives have needed “stars” to sell their films. Indeed, you could argue it was even worse in the Golden Age of Hollywood when performers were almost exclusively hired for their looks, not for their actual abilities. The principles of the cinema were founded on selling a fantasy, and the untouchable allure of those early movie stars was part and parcel of that.
But today, this problem of seeing the same old faces is exacerbated by the fact that the call for diversity is greater than ever. Big pushes by companies such as the RSC (who have consciously assembled diverse casts for their productions) have highlighted and tried to rectify the fact that certain minority groups do not have a fair chance of winning roles. But in TV and film, in particular, such decisive action is not being made.
It remains to be seen whether the increasingly modish (and in my opinion, wrong) assertion that actors should only play parts that reflect their own experiences changes the industry’s ubiquity problem.
If you think about it logically, although most actors would argue that versatility is a prerequisite for the job, it is very unlikely that someone is SO chameleonic that they deserve a CV as packed as Colman’s (OK, maybe Miranda Richardson who I often fail to recognise), and it is clear to me that casting directors need to get off their backsides and into the theatres where so much great work is being done.
Their job then is both to spot talent, and to convince the fat cats that an unknown who has brought the house down at the Lyric Hammersmith will make their project sparkle.
