sus

Well-known member
When I asked Brian Cox, who plays Logan, the patriarch, to describe Strong’s process, he struck a note of fatherly concern. “The result that Jeremy gets is always pretty tremendous,” he said. “I just worry about what he does to himself. I worry about the crises he puts himself through in order to prepare.” Cox, a classically trained British stage actor, has a “turn it on, turn it off” approach to acting, and his relationship with Strong recalls a famous story about Laurence Olivier working with Dustin Hoffman on the 1976 film “Marathon Man.” On learning that Hoffman had stayed up partying for three nights before a scene in which he had to appear sleep-deprived, Olivier said, “My dear boy, why don’t you try acting?” Cox told me, “Actors are funny creatures. I’ve worked with intense actors before. It’s a particularly American disease, I think, this inability to separate yourself off while you’re doing the job.”
 

luka

Well-known member
i always got the sense that it was to do with americans sense of shame at being actors. you get the same histroninics and compensatory behaviour with american writers... im talking about men here, ashamed they do a gay or girly hobby
 
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sus

Well-known member
Recently, Strong, concerned about press reports suggesting that he was “difficult,” sent me a text message saying, “I don’t particularly think ease or even accord are virtues in creative work, and sometimes there must even be room for necessary roughness, within the boundaries dictated by the work.”

Jeremy Strong reminds me of Stan, this profile's great

 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
i always got the sense that it was to do with americans sense of shame at being actors. you get the same histroninics and compensatory behaviour with american writers... im talking about men here, ashamed they do a gay or girly hobby
Reminds me of something in Martin Amis's autobiographical novel - is it Saul Bellow? - anyway, somebody somewhere wrote or said that America is proud of it's authors who committed suicide, because it shows that the American culture is too rugged for sensitive ponces like Hemingway to survive.

But I also think you could say that British people (being repressed) are ashamed of being actors, and so ironise it and talk about "technique" vs. the idea you're channelling your own emotion.
 

sus

Well-known member
Jeremy Strong reminds me of Stan
He walked me to a nearby forest, having picked up a macchiato in town. (A self-described “coffee snob,” he had travelled through Italy with his own grinder, and had beans delivered from a roastery in Aarhus.) The woods were thick with towering birches. Strong’s leg ached, but he insisted that we keep going. He asked if I had read the Milan Kundera novel “Slowness.”
 

sus

Well-known member
We broke through to an empty beach. Strong stood on a dune and looked out to sea in a Byronic pose, clutching the fuchsia macchiato cup in one hand. I asked about the sense of “wanting” he had mentioned the evening before. “I think my life has been animated by wanting,” he said. “I felt like there was so much to prove, both to myself and to the community, for so long. But, in a way, I got that out of my system.” As we turned back to the troll forest, he added, “Now I feel like I’m up against myself in the ring.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
i always got the sense that it was to do with americans sense of shame at being actors. you get the same histroninics and compensatory behaviour with american writers... im talking about men here, ashamed they do a gay or girly hobby
Not an American thing but I feel (and I'm sure I've said before) that actors and musicians etc often feel a sense of shame or similar next to sportsmen whose ability is objectively real and undoubted compared to that of an actor whose popularity is really very much subject to the whims of the public. There are people out there who say "Messi is a fraud" or such... but they are fucking idiots. Usain Bolt's gold medals mean that he is (was whatever) objectively faster than everyone in a way that is quite different from the way a Best Actor Oscar validates its winners.
 

mixed_biscuits

_________________________
Not an American thing but I feel (and I'm sure I've said before) that actors and musicians etc often feel a sense of shame or similar next to sportsmen whose ability is objectively real and undoubted compared to that of an actor whose popularity is really very much subject to the whims of the public. There are people out there who say "Messi is a fraud" or such... but they are fucking idiots. Usain Bolt's gold medals mean that he is (was whatever) objectively faster than everyone in a way that is quite different from the way a Best Actor Oscar validates its winners.
At least actors know they're in the entertainment business.
 
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shakahislop

Well-known member
salt, americans seem to really like salt

and they like food to have a sloppy consistency

these are strange American things
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
I love salt... surely every single person in the world loves and needs salt. I gotta say I don't find that particularly strange in the grand scheme of things.
 
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sus

Well-known member
I love salt... surely every single person in the world loves and needs salt. I gotta say I don't find that particularly strange in the grand scheme of things.
More expensive per ounce than gold, in some premodern societies.
 

Leo

Well-known member
a modest amount of salt can enhance flavors, but US food in general, particular processed food, is overloaded with salt.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Yes in a sense.... but in line with what Gus said above, once upon a time salt was super valuable, and it was super valuable cos it was necessary for the only known process that could preserve food. And as a result it was not just useful but expensive and heavily taxed and it's often being argued that salt was the first ever cryptocurrency, and I'm sure that you all know that the tax on salt was the proximate cause of the revolution in India and... well, I could continue. But the point is, apparently, when only curing with salt could preserve food our consumption was a hundred times higher than it is today and so eating "too much" salt has to be the food problem about which I'm most sanguine.

I saw someone on twitter the other day getting all overexcited cos someone had given them chocolate with salt in it and they thought it was the weirdest and most disgusting thing ever. To me that marks the guy out as a little provincial if I'm honest. I consider salted chocolate and salted caramel as pretty standard food items... and that's not cos I'm some weird pretentious hipster, it's more cos you can walk into any supermarket in a tiny town in Portugal (or the UK) and find fuckloads of it for sale. The Nordic countries are groaning under the weight of salted liquorice and so on and so forth too. I just don't think that the US has a particularly peculiar lust for salt. Though whatever, don't want to pick a fight with Lion/Shaka alliance, if you guys say it's a Strange American Thing then who am I to argue really?
 
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