#classical acting

Over the last couple of years I have seen a growing push to cast Jason Momoa as Goliath in a hypothetical live action adaptation of Gargoyles. I understand where the impulse comes from. He is large. He is physical. He looks imposing. For a lot of people that seems to be the end of the conversation.

It isn’t for me.

First, and I will say this plainly, I have never seen a great performance from Momoa when he is required to deliver extended dialogue in English. His line delivery is stiff and uneven. This is not an insult, it is an observation based on a decade of high profile roles. One of the main reasons he worked as Khal Drogo was because the character did not speak English and relied almost entirely on physical presence. That role was designed to play to his strengths. Goliath is not.

Goliath is not a silent brute. He is not a growling action figure. He speaks constantly, and when he speaks, the language matters.

Which brings me to the part that seems to short circuit people when I say it. This is non negotiable to me. Any actor playing Goliath must have real Shakespearean chops. Not vibes. Not intensity. Not a deep voice. Actual classical training and experience with heightened language.

This is not an arbitrary standard. Gargoyles is built on Shakespeare, mythology, and classical tragedy. Goliath is written as a tragic hero in the old sense. He delivers monologues. He wrestles with guilt, duty, faith, leadership, and moral responsibility. His dialogue is elevated, formal, and deliberate. It is closer to stage drama than modern naturalistic film acting.

Keith David did not just have a great voice. Plenty of actors have great voices. He had command of the language. You can hear the theater in his performance. You can hear the training in how he shapes sentences, where he pauses, how he carries emotional weight without rushing it. That is not something you fake, and it is not something you learn on the fly.

To be clear, I am not saying every character in Gargoyles needs to be played by a classically trained Shakespearean actor. That would be absurd. But Goliath is the spine of the series. If he does not feel mythic, tragic, and intellectually grounded, the entire adaptation collapses into cosplay fantasy.

What frustrates me is that when I make this argument, the response from Momoa supporters is usually to ignore it. They either cannot or will not engage with why Shakespearean chops actually matter here. The conversation gets dragged back to size and intensity. None of those things address the core of the role.

Hi Paris! Bestie you have come to the right place.

I talked about this once in the context of Jensen Ackles' acting style but I am always happy to talk about it more!

They’re essentially two different approaches for an actor to bring a character to life, which is largely about connecting with your character’s emotions. Method acting is your I never come out of character approach - it’s all about making the character’s situation so real for you, the actor, that you genuinely feel everything your character is feeling in the moment. You, the actor, become the character rather than playing the character. It’s a scale, and different actors have different levels of how much they commit, but Daniel Day Lewis is a common example bc he genuinely lives as his characters for the whole filming period - he refuses to stop using the accent, he stays in character, he lives in the conditions his character lived in, etc. Method acting was invented by Strasberg in the first half of the 20th century and was super popular with American film stars like Marlon Brando - it’s still used more wildly for screen than for stage, and tends to come up more in America, while classical acting is more British. This is because America is very film focused while Britain is more stage focused; method acting is great for film because the camera is so close to your face that it picks up all the tiny emotional moments going on in an actor's face and body.

That said, classical actors are equally as effective on screen, and in many cases moreso, because stage acting teaches you about keeping the throughline and manufacturing all those emotional changes without emotionally damaging yourself as you do a full run of the show 8 times a week. Film is very stop and go; you do maaaybe 30 seconds of work at a time and then have a break while they switch shots or reset, not to mention you're doing the same moment for multiple takes - method actors stay in character to avoid losing the throughline of their emotions, whereas classical actors have already plotted out the throughline and what they need to draw on for any given moment. Method acting is wildly more emotionally damaging for the actor bc it pulls you into all the difficult, traumatic places your character goes through, esp if it’s something like Heath Ledger’s Joker which requires the actor to go to some pretty dark places, and doesn't allow you the psychological break of keeping a clear line between you and your character. Ian McKellen and Cate Blanchett have a really interesting discussion about this here (Ian talks about how he felt like people could see he was pretending and not really feeling his character's emotions, and Cate says she has literally never noticed), though they aren't super explicit about using these terms, as both are classically trained stage actors who also work in film. I think too there's a lot to be said for the fact that we go to see live theatre with the expectation of expanding our imaginations. We know we're going to sit in a dark room full of strangers and watch people pretend to be other people. But with film and tv, we don't see any of those behind the scenes moments, none of the magic of the story coming to life. It's much easier to believe it's all real. I think that plays in to stage and classical lining up and screen and method lining up; for a lot of actors, film feels like it has to be real because everything is so close to both the actor and the audience.

Classical acting is based in pulling memories and emotions from your own life and applying them to your character. You might think about your first date with your partner to find the emotion to play a scene that’s a first date for your character. This is the Stanislavsky method of acting; you’re still feeling the same emotion, or at least a similar/adjacent emotion, as your character, but you’re pulling it from your own memories and applying it to the character. Creates the same effect for the audience, because no one can tell where you’re getting the emotion from except you, but it requires less of an emotional toll. It can still be really tough, especially if you’re drawing on something that was traumatic for you, but it’s easier to separate from your character.

OKAY @mybrainproblems bestie you came to the right place!

So they're two different approaches to bringing a character to life, which is largely about connecting with your character's emotions. Method acting is your Daniel Day Lewis 'I never come out of character' approach - it's all about making the character's situation so real for you, the actor, that you genuinely feel everything your character is feeling in the moment. It's a scale, and different actors have different levels of how much they commit, but Daniel Day Lewis is a common example bc he genuinely lives as his character for the whole filming period - he refuses to stop using the accent, he stays in character, he lives in the conditions his character lived in, etc. It was invented by Strasberg in the first half of the 20th century and was super popular with american film stars like Marlon Brando - it's still used more wildly for screen than for stage, and tends to come up more in america, while classical acting is more british. (Method acting is also wildly more emotionally damaging for the actor to go about it this way bc it pulls you into all the difficult, traumatic places your character goes through, esp if it's something like Heath Ledger's Joker which requires the actor to go to some pretty dark places, and doesnt allow you the psychological break of keeping a clear line between you and your character.)

Classical acting, by contrast, is based in pulling memories and emotions from your own life and applying them to your character. You might think about your first date with your partner to find the emotion to play a scene that's a first date for your character. This is what Jensen was referencing at the beginning of that post - the Stanislavsky method of acting (the commenter talked about some more of the history of the method and sort of mixed up the terms whrn they talked about Stanislavsky and method acting, but generally they're right). You're still feeling the same emotion, or at least a similar/adjacent emotion, as your character, but you're pulling it from your own memories and applying it to the character. Creates the same effect for the audience, because no one can tell where you're getting the emotion from except you, but it requires less of an emotional toll. It can still be really tough, especially if you're drawing on something that was traumatic for you, but it's easier to separate from your character.

O God, that I were a man!

The interviewer had asked me about my early career as a classical actor. I was explaining the math I did after a few years of acting wherein I realized how terrible the odds were for me in classical theatre. I’d realized I had little interest in performing in contemporary work and that the jobs in Shakespeare for women were so few that I had really very little chance of continuing to work. Then…