I just watched: Die Hard, Love Actually & Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

So, I think we can all agree that the best Christmas movie of all time is Die Hard, right? Good.

Here’s the thing, though: I can’t think of Alan Rickman as anything but Hans Gruber. Can you? Can his mom? This works to his advantage in the Harry Potter series, but in something like Love Actually where we’re supposed to think of him as someone’s husband, it’s just kind of incredible. He’s great in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but the whole time I keep thinking “Why does this funny, depressed little robot sound like Hans Gruber?”

I was at the gym a little while ago (that’s right – I work out), and I caught about a half hour of Hackers. I was struck by how little about Matthew Lillard’s performing style has changed in the 15 years since that movie came out, and for some reason it got me thinking about how an actor’s professional choices impact his future. (Please remember I was at the gym, which it not exactly conducive to thinking the deepest, philosophical thoughts).

For actors, this works two different ways. The first is the most obvious: actors are associated with certain roles. That’s the situation that’s at work in something like Unforgiven, a movie that probably depends over-much on the iconography of Clint Eastwood, and I’m willing to grant that it’s what’s probably happening with Rickman (I actually think there’s something about Rickman’s voice, especially, that makes him a natural fit for a villain, but if we get into that we’re well on our way to a weird “you can’t do that” kind of casting discussion that I don’t want to have, so I’ll let it go). This is also where you get into the potential value/danger of casting against type, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen broken into a systematic argument of why it works sometimes and not others, but it’s clear that it paid off big time in something like Meet the Parents.

The second way is something most of us would acknowledge about our own careers, but have trouble recognizing in actors: the work you do in one job actually trains you not only for the next job you take but for the jobs you’re even qualified to do in the future. And, for some reason, that’s kind of the feeling I started to get about Matthew Lillard while watching Hackers. If a director needs a particularly mannered performance, he pushes the actor that way, and especially if it’s early in the actor’s career, it helps normalize that performance. Suddenly, watching his hair tied up into these sort of pseudo-dread/braid things, playing up the most ludicrous, mid-1990s stereotypes of hacker culture, the years of Lillard’s hammy mugging started to make more sense.