The Canadian city is where Hollywood actors
go to reinvent themselves. By Steven Zeitchik
The Toronto International Film Festival is Hollywood’s annual showcase for its most prestigious movies, the ones that might reap Oscars in February. For many of the big-name actors attending, there’s a different agenda: reinvention.
The gathering, which runs till September 14, has seen an unusual number of major stars hoping to recast their screen images, including Robert Downey Jr, Adam Sandler, Reese Witherspoon, Richard Gere, Bill Murray, Tobey Maguire, Jennifer Aniston, Al Pacino and Chris Evans.
Some, like Downey and Maguire, want to remind audiences that they can be more than action heroes. Sandler and Aniston want to stretch beyond comedies. And with the major studios shying away from adult-oriented dramas, all of them want to be in the running for the shrinking number of meaty, edgy roles available.
Downey is best known today as a star of the Iron Man and Avengers franchise films. So he’s starring in The Judge, a story about a big-time lawyer who returns to his small town and has fraught encounters with estranged family and friends. The film could restore Downey’s image as a dramatic actor who in another life starred in such movies as the addiction drama Less Than Zero.
“I think the same way that we like seeing new colours from actors like Robert or Johnny Depp in big studio movies, we also want to see them return to their roots and go to deep emotional places in movies like this,” said Judge director David Dobkin.
Actors have sought to break the constraints Hollywood has placed on them since the days of Charlie Chaplin, who went from playing the Tramp in innumerable pictures to an Adolf Hitler-like character in 1940’s The Great Dictator. Toronto, with its abundance of prestige movies and media — and where a warm reception can spell awards and box-office bounties — is seeing numerous such attempts this year.
The timing of the festival is crucial. In the autumn, more serious fans — not to mention award voters — start paying attention to movies again, so a notable effort to take on more challenging parts can pay dividends.
The role model is Matthew McConaughey, who last year jump-started his renaissance as a serious performer playing an Aids patient in Dallas Buyers Club, which premiered in Toronto. McConaughey went on to win the Oscar for lead actor for his work in the film.
Another popular performer, Witherspoon, is aiming to make a similar jump this year. Witherspoon hopes her recent reputation for frilly romantic comedies will be dispelled by a pair of dramas, the literary adaptation Wild and the Sudanese refugee story The Good Lie.
She is one of several stars to place multiple bets on the table at Toronto.
Sandler hopes his run of studio-comedy misfires is forgotten in light of a whimsical drama, The Cobbler and Men, Women & Children. And Pacino, who has had a string of forgettable roles in capers and crime films, stars in Manglehorn, in which he plays an eccentric Texan who must live with a past crime, and The Humbling, an adaptation of a Philip Roth novel in which he stars as a washed-up actor whose life is energised by a romantic encounter.
Casting these actors against type, of course, isn’t easy. Gere has made his Hollywood reputation playing a certain type of smooth, upper-middle-class figure — which made his turn as a forlorn homeless man in Oren Moverman’s Toronto drama Time Out of Mind a bit of a tough sell to financiers and studios. “I wouldn’t even say the word ‘homeless,’ and I would get all these raised eyebrows,” Moverman said. “People would say, ‘Isn’t he a symbol of white male power?’”
But in an era when constant coverage makes a celebrity’s brand ever more rigid, actors are more emboldened than ever to make these departures.
Chris Evans is beloved by millions for his performances as Captain America in movies that have grossed more than $2.5bn worldwide.
But at Toronto he will seek recognition for a less familiar guise: as the director and star of an independent drama. The man known for saving his country in nifty spandex will unveil Before We Go, a tale of a woman who misses her late-night train from New York to Boston and has a series of complicated encounters.
“I know I’ve spent a lot of my career in a superhero costume,” Evans said. “But I also want to be perceived in another way.”
In some cases, such as Pacino or Bill Murray, it comes as recent turns haven’t been successful. Murray gives what is sure to be a conversation-starting performance as a grumpy, eccentric Vietnam vet in the dramatic comedy “St. Vincent.”
Maguire, another onetime dramatic actor who found mega-success in a superhero franchise, seeks to further expand his post-Spider-Man life. He’ll debut Pawn Sacrifice, a fact-based period drama about chess that he produced and stars in as Bobby Fischer.
“It’s definitely a thing,” he said, when asked about all the men-in-tights taking on dramatic parts. “A lot of it is time. When you’re in a franchise like that, you have years of your future that are determined because those movies take so much time to prep and shoot and market. And when they end you can actually think about what to do next.”
In the decade since her long-running TV franchise Friends came to a close, Aniston has found success on the big screen — occasionally in dramas but mostly in comedies — We’re the Millers, which she costarred in, was the second-highest-grossing comedy of 2013. But recently she’s felt she craved something different. So she chose a role in Cake,in which she plays a member of a suicide support group.
She called the role “100% the most challenging” of her career. “It was just an emotional journey that was quite extraordinary and a physical one as well. Just a hard story to tell.” Stars also know that one serious role begets another. Even as he was shooting Dallas Buyers Club, McConaughey landed the lead role in HBO’s True Detective and then, shortly after, in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming science-fiction epic Interstellar.
The change may also be a response to the rise of the small screen.
“I think now with TV being so good, we get so used to seeing actors play the same parts for six, seven, eight years,” Moverman said. “Cinema can offer something different: variety.”
Still, reinvention isn’t easy. Last year at Toronto, Aniston also attempted such a transition with Life of Crime, a caper film based on an Elmore Leonard novel. The movie came out last week to modest box office.
Evans said he and other actors need to keep in mind that they can only control their own reinvention so much.
“You can stand there and say, ‘I’m going to do all these things differently.’ But if people think your movie is bad, it’s all over.” — Los Angeles Times/MCT
Kidman prefers skydiving over bungee jumping
Actress Nicole Kidman loves to skydive, but she doesn’t find bungee jumping “elegant”. The 47-year-old actress told The Telegraph Review that she loves skydiving because it feels like flying, reports contactmusic.com. “I like a love story too! But I’m also a person who jumps out of a plane. I have those strange dichotomies in my personality,” Kidman said. When asked if she’d ever go bungee jumping, she added, “No, it’s not elegant. I don’t like the idea of being on a cord and hanging upside down. And skydiving is the closest thing to flying.” — IANS
Jennifer Hudson not
in ‘rush’ to get married
Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Hudson says she’s not in a rush to get married to her beau David Otunga. The 32-year-old, who got engaged to Otunga six years ago, admits they’re not planning to tie the knot anytime soon because they’re happy as they are. The couple has a five-year-old son David Jr, reports showbizspy.com. When asked if she was going to get married soon, she was quoted as saying: “There’s no rush. No one is going anywhere.” The Spotlight hitmaker lost her mother Darnell, brother Jason and nephew Julian in 2008 when her sister’s ex-husband William Balfour shot them dead, and she believes the tragedy may be a reason why she’s not prepared to get married at the moment. “I think I am always ready for a curveball. For me, the worst thing that can happen has already happened and the best that can happen has happened and it makes me see how quickly things can change,” said Hudson. “I guess that makes you think a little bit differently. I am so happy and grateful for what I have, but all of it can go in an instant,” she added. — IANS