 From left, Matthew Perry as Chandler Bing, Jennifer Aniston as Rachel Green, David Schwimmer as Ross Geller, Courteney Cox as Monica Geller, Matt Le Blanc as Joey Tribbiani and Lisa Kudrow as Phoebe Buffay in “Friends.” (NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images) Every week, I answer a question from Monday’s live chat in this edition of the Act Four newsletter. To read the transcript of this week’s chat, click here, and you can submit a question for the Sept. 19 chat here. This week, a reader asks what it is that turns an actor into a movie star. I was wondering what it was that made Jennifer Aniston a movie star when her “Friends” co-stars Lisa Kudrow and Courteney Cox didn’t make it. Why are sweet, lovely and talented actresses like Lori Loughlin and Tiffani Thiessen popular television stars who couldn’t make the jump to movies? How did Meg Ryan, Julianne Moore and Alec Baldwin go from the soaps to movie-starring and so many others remained stuck in television? And why isn’t handsome, talented Cary Elwes, for example, a bigger star after being such a hit in “The Princess Bride”? I apologize in advance, because my response to you is going to have a whole bunch of caveats. The first is that the answer depends in part on how you define movie star relative to movie actor. For all that Jennifer Aniston made the leap to feature films, her career in that medium hasn’t quite burned as brightly as her work on “Friends” might have suggested. She has done some good work — if you haven’t seen her in “Cake,” I highly recommend it — but she transitioned to film at a moment when romantic comedy, the genre that might have made her a genuine superstar, was in a period of serious decline. And she never quite found the breakout dramatic role that would put her in Oscar contention. It’s also worth a reminder that not everyone wants to be a movie star. And as television has become more ambitious and eccentric, I think some actors have found richer opportunities there than might have been available to them in the risk-averse environment of the movies. Lisa Kudrow has done really interesting work in “The Comeback,” “Web Therapy,” “Scandal,” “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” and “BoJack Horseman,” while Courteney Cox starred in “Dirt” and “Cougar Town.” None of this means that either of them are doing poorly; they just made other choices. As for Cary Elwes, I’m not sure I know enough about the media environment of the mid-’80s to explain what happened to him. But as terrific as one performance can be, the corona from it doesn’t tend to glow almost 30 years after a movie comes out. Maybe when “Homeland” ends, Elwes and Mandy Patinkin can do some kind of fantastic reunion project. All of that said, though — and there’s more all than I intended — the alchemy of movie stardom is incredibly complicated. Sometimes an actor who seems to fit the star mold perfectly just doesn’t click with audiences: Taylor Kitsch’s career has been a good example of that sort of failure to launch. Sometimes audiences decide they want variety; the dual rise of Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hiddleston is a great case study in audiences’ tastes just shifting. And sometimes actors don’t want what movie stardom entails. |
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