I Saw The Light

A peek behind the curtain of my actor assessments

I have a new piece up at Slate evaluating the work of Tom Hardy, an actor whose appeal has long been lost on me. Here’s the basic idea:

When I was asked by the good people of this website to write about Hardy, I wanted to turn the job down. I don’t like writing takedowns, and his work seemed to me to be the pinnacle of self-indulgence….But as I wrote the email to explain why I was the wrong guy for this job, I had second thoughts. What if instead I tried to like Tom Hardy, or at least understand what other people saw in his work. I’m always telling my students that when they feel most judgmental, they should instead cultivate curiosity. Perhaps this was my “physician, heal thyself” moment.

You’ll have to read it to find out where I come down! Just kidding: I wind up really liking his work, and having new respect for his eccentricity. But I am quite proud of the piece anyway and hope you’ll give it a go.

I’ve done a few of these pieces for a couple of outlets now (including this one about Nic Cage for The New Yorker and this one about Colin Farrell for Slate). They often are not pieces I pitch, weirdly enough, but rather pieces that editors come to me about because I am to some extent “the acting guy” now. I actually prefer this because I gravitate to writing about subjects I am not 100% settled on or sure about. One of the delights of the writing life is always getting to learn things, and most of the actors I can think about covering off the top of my head are ones I know a lot about and already have very firm opinions on.

When you pitch a piece, particularly early on in your career, you have to have done much of the thinking already, because you want to paint a picture for an editor that is as clear as possible. In the perfect pitch, the editor can already see the piece you’re going to write before you have written it. This is for a few reasons: editors are extremely busy, and are juggling many pieces at once, and so the clearer you can be the easier you will make their job. And also, if you are an unknown quantity, the pitch is where you prove you are going to be okay to work with. This is true even if they have read your work, because for all they know, your work is good because the editor you worked with on that piece saved your ass.

This is the part of the job I have always found challenging, not only because I hate rejection (it’s one of the reasons I quit acting) but because I like the process of exploration and discovery. But you really have to have a long-standing relationship with an editor to be able to say “how about you just let me point my attention and intelligence at this and we all know something good will result.”

My process with Forrest Wickman, my editor at Slate, usually goes like this: We agree on an actor. If Forrest is the one who came up with the idea, he has some preliminary thoughts that he sends me about why he’s interested in them or what the news hook could be. Usually I then have my own set of questions about them that I am interested in, and the next phase is about how to bridge our two starting places.

The bridge is usually found through research. I go and watch a few things and get back to Forrest with some additional thoughts that are approaching something like an answer to both of our questions. He has some thoughts about my thoughts in an email that almost always contains the sentence “we’re getting close!” And then we set a date that it’s due by.

I still don’t want to have the piece fully conceptualized by this point, however, because I like dwelling in ambivalence on a subject and grappling with it, trying to grope my way towards clarity. That’s the most fun part of the job. The far harder part is the actual writing of the thing. And it’s only more hard (and less enjoyable) if I know exactly what I am going to say about everything. I used to be an incredibly detailed outliner, for example, but now my outlines are just lists of topics and links to things I’ve found in research that I want to get into. They aren’t even always in the right order. If I’m quite blocked, I will simply take whichever subject line seems easiest and start writing and see if I can start folding the others in as I go. This is my version of a very old trick for defeating writer’s block: if it’s too hard to begin, start in the middle.

With the Tom Hardy piece, I knew because it had a news hook that it had to start with Havoc. I knew that at some point I had also had to talk about MobLand because (a) it’s also new and (b) I was shocked at how much I liked it. Other than that, my list looked something like this:

Quest Narrative Set Up.

Training?

Band of Brothers

Stuart: A Life Backwards

Do I have to talk about the Mad Max feud?

Venom

(Etc.)

Then in a very long notes app document, I had jotted down thoughts as I watched a whole grip of Tom Hardy projects. Some sentences in the piece originate almost word for word in that document. So for example, I wrote down “Venom is The Odd Couple with Hardy playing Felix, Oscar, and the apartment” and that observation went almost verbatim into the piece itself.

My research process on these is to watch as much as I can in the allotted time, within reason. Outlets only pay so much, and I have a book due soon, and a teaching gig and all sorts of other things that need my time and attention. I could not, for example, watch all 6000 movies Nic Cage has been in any more than I could watch every episode of Peaky Blinders and all of Hardy’s films. Also, I am an inveterate over-researcher, and can use research as a means of procrastination, always trying to solve the anxiety that I do not really know enough about a subject to have a real opinion on it. (This is one of many reasons why I cannot help but get pretty annoyed when people complain that I didn’t mention X movie. There are a lot of movies!)

I choose my movie list by asking friends for their thoughts, by reading interviews with the subject to find ones about which they had a lot to say, and by trying to think about which ones have cracked through to the general zeitgeist. I make a list and then I go through it as efficiently as possible. (If a film is bad and also I’m not learning anything from it, I will usually just skip to the scenes the actor is in, or stop watching entirely). I also try to read or listen to interviews with the subject, and if there’s been a big thing written about them already, I of course check that out. My focus is almost always on what they actually do as artists practicing a craft, and so I feel basically free to ignore things like their personal lives unless they have an effect on their career choices or acting technique. I find this very freeing, because issues of artistry, detailed in their specifics, are often where the new stuff is to be written about, the stuff that hasn’t already been chewed over and thought through by dozens of other writers. I will probably never write about Jeremy Strong for exactly this reason. Who wants to be the 75th person to comment on his fully immersive process?

Unlike in the other pieces I’ve written along these lines, the Hardy essay already had a clear structure set up by the quest narrative framing device. I could simply narrate it as my journey to rethink Hardy’s work, and use what literally happened along the way to structure it. I modeled it after the work of my good friend / co-author / podcast co-host / former editor Dan Kois’s way of structure many of his pieces for Slate. It’s a structure that I really learned in working on two pieces he edited: this one about the lost sci-fi author John M. Ford and this one about a conceptual art project that took place on the set of Melrose Place.

If narrative New Yorker pieces often start with a date stamp: “On Tuesday, April 15th, Isaac Butler watched Venom: Let There Be Carnage and laughed way more than he expected to,” and if New York Times magazine pieces classically start with an illustrative scene that ends in some kind of (often one sentence) cliffhanger before simultaneously flashing back and broadening the scope to include the author’s research, the structure in the above two pieces works a little differently. They begin instead with a situation— a friend loans me a book and i love it and then begin reading all these weird stuff online about his estate for example. That situation sets up a question that is explicitly stated. What happened to John M. Ford? Is Tom Hardy a good actor? Etc. And then there is usually a paragraph that ends the A section that gives you a quick overview of the journey you’re in for. “My quest to learn A would lead me to B, C, and D.” Then you do the thing you’ve just promised the readers before leading to a conclusion that connects to a bigger picture idea. In the Tom Hardy piece, it has to do with eccentricity and risk taking and masculinity.

Most of these actor assessments do not have structures that work like that, and so they’re quite a bit more challenging. The Nic Cage piece was easily the hardest, and changed structure three or four times, because it’s more thematic than chronological, and that’s a tough thing to pull off without becoming extremely repetitive. (I have my editor Mara Smith to thank for helping figure that one out). If I’m lucky, the structure works out intuitively. I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to say about Guy Pierce for example, until I wrote the paragraph that ends the piece. Then I saw that the seeds for the ending could be planted in other places, and went through and reworked it.

No matter the subject, it always comes back to structure for me. Structure really is where the work lies for nonfiction, since you cannot change the plot or the characters or the details of what happened. It is in the structure that thought is made manifest on a far deeper and subtler (and therefore more powerful) level than in the text itself, because while the text may explicitly describe the thoughts, the structure is where you get the movement between them. It is structure that embeds the thought process, and if you do it right, your thought process becomes the reader’s thought process, for a little while. The greatest essayists for me are the ones where, after you finish reading their work, your own thinking sounds in your head like their writing. Even if it’s only for a few minutes. Then they have become a part of you. They have expanded your consciousness by adding a little bit of theirs. When I first started reading nonfiction seriously—not until my twenties, and only then essay collections by novelists I loved—it was this that brought me the most pleasure, and it was a pleasure I could not usually find in other forms of reading. It is giving that experience to other people that I am always chasing. With any luck, I’ll get there, at least once or twice.