[COLUMN] From Wonder Man to Hamnet to Anacondas, This Year Hollywood is Obsessed with Acting | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains a few broad spoilers for Wonder Man, which is streaming now on Disney+ and is surprisingly good. Nothing too specific, just a discussion of its references. It also discusses the third act of Hamnet, but that third act is the centerpiece of the marketing. Otherwise, it should be a clean enough read!

There is a collective anxiety working its way through the film industry, which feels like an expression of the sublimated fears affecting those who work in the business. In particular, the past year has seen a number of major releases fixated on the craft of acting and the role of a movie star, stressing their importance within the industry.

This past month saw the release of Wonder Man, the latest entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It is a very self-aware series, focusing on the reboot of a superhero property and the path that actors Simon Williams (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley) take to stardom. Perhaps what is most impressive about Wonder Man is how completely the show commits to the bit, declining the impulse of these streaming shows to descend into a color-coded blast battle.

Creators Destin Daniel Cretoon and Andrew Guest commit completely to their premise, focusing on the reality of the life of an actor within the industry. There’s discussion on NDAs and disclaimers. The closest thing that the premiere has to an action sequence is Simon racing across town to a casting call. Simon has to film his auditions and send them in because “almost everything these days is a self-tape.” Josh Gad and Joe Pantaliano play themselves in surprisingly large supporting roles.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe can often seem cynical in the way that it engages with larger culture. The structure of WandaVision, for example, implies that the arc of television as a medium is building inexorably towards a gigantic laser battle in the style of a modern superhero movie. In contrast, in Wonder Man, Simon and Trevor bond over their affection for Midnight Cowboy, and the series ends not with some comic book easter egg, but a loving homage to that classic of American cinema.

It is surprising how much attention Wonder Man pays to the craft of acting, when the job could easily be reduced to a joke or a punchline. Simon and Trevor have very different approaches to acting, but the show slows down to let them actually discuss their philosophies about the work. “An actor needs to think,” Simon insists. “If you don’t understand it, how can you perform it?” Trevor counters, “The real work isn’t digging for subtext or parsing a writers’ intent. The real work is living.”

There is an endearing and abiding sincerity to Wonder Man, which devotes its entire fourth episode to a black-and-white meditation on the career of superpowered performer DeMarr Davis (Byron Bowers), which serves as a metaphor for the industry’s longstanding exploitation of people of color. To put it frankly, Wonder Man is more thoughtful and contemplative than one might expect, building off the stronger ideas buried in Ironheart about the relationship between talent and commerce.

Wonder Man is just the most recent example of this wave of love letters to filmmaking in general and acting in particular. Netflix recently released Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, starring George Clooney as the eponymous ageing movie star travelling to a film festival to receive a lifetime achievement award, meditating on the gulf that exists between his life onscreen and off. The film ends with a montage of Kelly’s – really Clooney’s – best moments on screen, an ode to movie stardom.

Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value is a more cynical European counterpoint to Jay Kelly, focusing on an established director (Stellan Skarsgård) making a movie for Netflix that is loosely inspired by the life of his mother, with a lead part that was written for his daughter (Renate Reinsve) and is eventually cast as an American starlet (Elle Fanning). One of the central tensions of the film is how to get the performance that the film needs, in some ways the difference between a star and an actor.

A different expression of this same anxiety bubbles through the surreal meta reboot of Anaconda, in which failed actor Ronald Griffen Jr. (Paul Rudd) returns home from Los Angeles, unable to gain steady work despite a recurring guest spot on S.W.A.T., and so enlists his childhood friends to travel to the Amazon to make a low-budget reboot of the Anaconda franchise. His best buddy, Doug (Jack Black), is a wedding video director with dreams of making it in the industry.

There are a couple of more tangential expressions of this idea as well. Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet is about the power of performance to deliver emotional catharsis. The climax of the film finds Agnes Shakespear (Jessie Buckley) stumbling upon a performance of Hamlet, the play that her husband William (Paul Mescal) wrote after the death of their son (Jacobi Jupe). William even casts himself as the ghost, and guides the audience – and his wife – through grief to something approaching acceptance.

Craig Brewer’s Song Sung Blue is based on the real-life story of Neil Diamond impersonator Mike Sardina (Hugh Jackman) and the people around him who are willing to risk everything in pursuit of a career in performance and entertainment. There is certainly something self-aware in Jackman playing a performer whose job is to put on a familiar costume and play the hits. Rental Family focuses on American actor Phillip Vanderploeg (Brendan Fraser) living in Japan, who takes a job playing personal roles in the lives of clients, transforming their lives by playing absentee fathers or loving fiancés or inquiring journalists.

“I’m just an actor,” Phillip protests at one point. “I don’t know how to help people.” His boss Shinji (Takehiro Hira) replies, “Listen to what they want and give them what they need. You’re an actor.” It is, like the rest of these recent films and television shows, a love letter to the power of acting and the importance of that gift. Phillip learns firsthand the damage that he can cause if he misapplies or abuses his skill. Acting is serious business.

Of course, Hollywood has a long history of self-mythologizing. It is an old joke that Hollywood loves movies about Hollywood. However, there is something interesting about this crop. As with the recent wave of movies about the importance of producers, agents and managers in the lives of celebrities, including Giant, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere and Jay Kelly, it is striking that there are so many of these projects arriving in such rapid succession and so specifically focused on actors.

There is a very obvious reason for this. After all, Hollywood is two years removed from the end of a massive actors’ strike that disrupted the entire industry. It is arguable that the industry has yet to completely recover. This is not an abstract issue for some of these productions. Wonder Man was shut down by the strikes. Tom Gormican was announced as director of the Anaconda reboot months before the strike began. Jay Kelly was announced just months after the strike ended.

It may not even be the strikes themselves. This anxiety might be an expression of the issues that caused the strikes. To pick Anaconda as an example, it seems likely that in the old days Griffen might have been able to hang on in Los Angeles based on residuals from his guest appearance in S.W.A.T., money that the show would have earned in syndication, but those residuals evaporated during the streaming age and with them a lifeline for jobbing actors.

One of the big issues during the strike was the debate over replacing actors with computer-generated stand-ins, with companies attempting to buy performers’ likeness rights for a one-time fee and then using their digital image in perpetuity. This is to say nothing of the existential threat posed by generative artificial intelligence in the years since the strike, where these machines are capable of generating a photorealistic likeness of pretty much any human being or even their own digital stars.

There is, more broadly, an anxiety over the diminished role of the movie star and, with that, the ability of a star of Clooney’s stature to help bring audiences to movies that they might not otherwise see. In some ways, it is interesting to see Marvel Studios and Netflix construct love letters to movie stardom, given the role that both companies have played in effectively demolishing the institution. It is, to borrow a quote from a fellow critic, like watching “a serial killer wistfully eulogize their victims.”

For every hustling Timothée Chalamet who manages to push Marty Supreme to a record-breaking opening, there is another Glen Powell or Sydney Sweeny who struggles to get The Running Man or Christy off the ground. Given how much the industry needs movie stars to push these sorts of projects, the collapse of an eco-system that can support or produce that sort of talent is an existential threat to the larger industry, and perhaps explains why actors are on Hollywood’s mind.

It’s really interesting to see these anxieties manifested so overtly in so many different ways in so many different projects in so condensed a period of time. Wonder Man suggests that the heroes that Hollywood needs right now are nothing more than a couple of solid working actors.