Actors Playing Actors Were a Big Hit This Oscar Season

By now we are used to seeing Actors on Actors every awards season, but one aspect of many of the performances that stand out in the best films of 2024 has been seeing actors as actors. Whether it be Golden Globe winners Demi Moore and Sebastian Stan, who in “The Substance” and “A Different Man,” respectively, both play performers whose brains have been tied in knots by society’s perception of their appearance, to “Sing Sing” stars Colman Domingo and Clarence Maclin, and “Ghostlight” star Keith Kupferer all giving Independent Spirit Award-nominated turns in films about men who find healing through the craft of acting on stage. Though each applicable film is executed so differently, they do all point to the creative profession being increasingly compelling subject matter.

“People are drawn to actors because there is this mystery around how do you tap into that thing? How do you do it? How do you become someone else? How was that sleight of hand where I literally know you and then I didn’t know you, but you’re the same person. You sound alike, you move alike, but it’s a different experience,” said Domingo to IndieWire, shortly after a screening of “Sing Sing” in Los Angeles. 

“Maybe people that are making these movies because they’re artists [who] realized that there is a redemption in the art that isn’t in politics or science because it’s a different intangible thing. It can elevate the suffering, the human condition. And when we’re feeling down, we get dumped or whatever, we don’t turn on CNN to pick us up,” said Kupferer over coffee, trying to find the root for the influx of acclaimed projects about actors and/or the craft of acting in 2024. “You watch something that’ll make you laugh or that will make you feel… that’s what I do when I’m feeling terrible. The last thing I want to do is get a horrible dose of reality, politics, or science telling me, ‘Yeah, the world is falling apart.’” 

Cory Michael Smith, who plays Chevy Chase in “Saturday Night,” had a similar sentiment about why actors make for fascinating protagonists “Actors are dynamic people that are sometimes maybe a bit more surprising than other people. To choose a life as an actor is to acknowledge, accept, and access your body, and understand that, as my acting teacher used to say to me, human beings are infinite, that we are capable of really beautiful things and also monstrous things,” said the actor over Zoom. “When you’re portraying someone that allows themself to consider and experience these things as part of their work and their creative expression, I do think it makes for really interesting people. So it’s just fun to watch.”

But as an actor, playing an actor comes with complications. For instance, both Domingo and Kupferer, who have been stage and screen professionals for decades, had to put themselves in the shoes of an amateur. “These are all conscious choices to make the decision of the kind of actor he is, and what his level of experience is. So I don’t think that he belonged on any Broadway stage any time soon. But he was proficient enough and had the passion,” said Domingo of his “Sing Sing” character Divine G. 

“The odd bit about this story is that I’m an actor playing a guy who’s not an actor who ends up being an actor, at least for a little while. And that was fun to do because I’ve been around working class guys, and I know that if they end up in the theater, they’ve been dragged there for some reason,” said Kupferer of his “Ghostlight” character Dan, who joins a community theater troupe production of “Romeo & Juliet” to process the trauma of losing his son. He and directors Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson would have conservations on set to gauge Dan’s progression, as an everyman attempting iambic pentameter. “He starts to let himself go with his feelings.”

He added that, “to play somebody who isn’t an actor, particularly with Shakespeare, it’s easier because if you don’t look at the text and you just cold read it, when they say, ‘Action,’ you’re going to naturally stink on ice because you don’t know how to say it, and it looks real bad. So that was my starting point. And even though I had tiny little lines like, ‘Bring me my sword, ho.’ He’s never said that, and he’s never seen it written down. ‘Who’s he calling a ho?’ That’s what he’s thinking.”

Domingo’s “Sing Sing” character is further along in his acting journey, yet hobbled by his lack of resources as an incarcerated person. For the recent Oscar nominee, playing someone that has been a long time member of the correctional facility’s Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program felt more like experiencing an alternate route his life could have taken rather than embodying a person whose motives are completely foreign to him. 

“It was actually bringing the character of Colman and Divine G together as one,” said the Best Actor contender. “The things that I’ve gleaned from him that are important to him in the world is how hopeful he is and positive, even in such a dark and devastating place like the prison industrial complex. I attached myself to it. I think I would aspire to be that person. I know I have that in me, and the performer in me, the person who seeks to liberate my whole soul, my whole being, with being a creative artist, that’s his.”

It’s particularly telling that these kinds of stories, alternatively about community and isolation, are among the first wave of films coming out of COVID-19 lockdown. “The theater is a community where people are accepting and where it’s not only given this allowance to express your feelings, it’s a prerequisite,” said Kupferer. Its appeal goes back to even ancient times, where the goal for actors was “to tell the human story and have people sit there and watch and say, ‘Yeah, that’s me up there. I get that. I understand that.’ Or, ‘It’s not quite me, but it’s thought provoking and it’s given me a new understanding.’” 

For however exclusive the acting profession can be, the response to films like “Sing Sing,” “Ghostlight,” “A Different Man,” “The Substance,” and even “Saturday Night” have been able to tap into the audience’s deeper anxieties and simple desires to improve their lives, hence them all being among the most celebrated titles of the season.