Actors & Liars

I was listening to Kelsey Grammer being interviewed this morning. What an intelligent and articulate man.

Have you ever noticed how the Liberal actors sound like mental deficients...and the Conservative ones sound well-read, well-spoken, well-informed and smart?

Seriously. I'm not talking about how much I agree with their POV (which I do), but how much smarter they are, by all objective standards, than the mush brained Liberals who say things like "Dude! Palin Sucks!"

It was a pleasure listening to this very bright and eloquent man...as opposed to, say, Matt Damon or Alec Baldwin or Babs Streisand or Susan Sarandon or Tim Robbins or Rosie O'Donnell or Whoopie Goldberg...et al, whose only measurable contribution their open mouths make to the political environment is excess carbon dioxide.

But the most interesting thing he said was in response to a comment about actors being able to say things they don't believe in...because they're good at saying other people's words.

He said: "Good actors are really bad liars." He explained that good actors bring truth to their roles, and that's what makes a good performance. That the very art of acting was the ability to find a way to infuse truth into a character, regardless of how similar or different it was to the real personality of the actor.

It was revelatory. An actor can convince you only if he infuses his performance with truth. And that's why bad actors are so unconvincing. They're just parroting a script.

It may not be terminally important as revelations go. But it put paid to the accusations constantly hurled at Ronald Reagan: That he was lying, but because he was a good actor, he was convincing.

I don't (any longer) believe that RR was a stupid liar (though I used to, remember). And I certainly would have believed that a good actor could make any lie sound convincing. But I think I see what Grammer was saying. A good actor, in real life, speaking his own "truth"— which is literally his bread and butter, the thing that he most develops in his personality, to be an effective and successful plier of his trade—is the very quality that would make him a bad liar.

And the biggest confirmation is the abject [true] idiocy flowing out of the mouths of the pathetic, inarticulate, second-rate minds of the Hollywood Left.

The Gunslinger