Typecasting

Criticism, Spring, 2003 by Pamela Robertson Wojcik

FOR AN ACTOR, what could be worse than to have one's work dismissed as typecasting? Critics and audiences alike tend to castigate those who play to type, as if playing to type indicates that the actor lacks talent and can't play anything else, or somehow created a role without effort, and therefore didn't act at all, or, in fitting her performance to a known type, failed to create anything original. Alternately, in acknowledging that an actor is well suited to a role because the role fits his type, we damn the actor with faint praise, or, sometimes, express our admiration for the actor who manages to create the seeming oxymoron of a "unique type."

Of course, most actors reject typecasting. Rare indeed is the actor who admits to being happily typecast. In fact, film actors have decried typecasting almost since the beginning of filmmaking. For instance, silent film actress Louise Brooks viewed typecasting as measure of Hollywood success but also as a limitation of the system: "I just didn't fit into the Hollywood scheme at all. I was never, neither a fluffy heroine, nor a wicked vamp, nor a woman of the world. I just didn't fit into any category.... You see, I didn't interest them because I couldn't be typed." (1) Where Brooks described type in terms of roles, classical British actor Eric Portman linked typing to stardom and the actor's personality. He wrote, "So, personality can make you a film star. Whether you are a film actor or not, will depend on your histrionic talent.... Still, if you have only a little talent, and a lot of personality, you may succeed--as a type. This means you will always be cast for the same parts. Your film life will, then, not be a long one." (2) Bringing home Portman's threat, silent film star Mary Pickford, explaining why she left the screen, suggested the dangers of being successfully typecast: "I didn't want what happened to Chaplin to happen to me. When he discarded the little tramp, the little tramp turned around and killed him. The little girl made me. I wasn't waiting for the little girl to kill me. I'd already been pigeon-holed.... I could have done more dramatic performances ... but I was already typed." (3) For these actors--and I could cite many more--typecasting represents commercial, mass-production instincts that are opposed to artistry and disenfranchise the actor who wishes to perform more complex roles.

However, while the assumption seems to be that typecasting is a sign of an actor's limitation, a concession to commercialism, and the antithesis of art and originality, we also expect actors to stick to type and often reject actors' efforts to play against type. As with typecasting, critics and audiences will frequently view an actor's efforts to play against type as evidence either of the actor's lack of talent--because the actor is unconvincing in the new role--or as gross commercialism--insofar as the role is assigned to a money-making star rather than a better suited but less known actor. In line with this view, in the book Starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan! Hollywood's All-Time Worst Casting Blunders, author Damien Bona chastises Hollywood studios for casting actors against type and seems to view the actors' desire to play against type as the worst kind of hubris. Bona's categories of miscasting include "ethnic impersonators," such as Marlon Brando in Teahouse of the August Moon, because they show a disregard for verisimilitude in favor of star power; "generation gap," including actors who refuse to age gracefully on screen or, alternately, are in too much of a hurry to grow old (think of an aged Mae West in Sextette or a youthful Barbra Streisand in Hello Dolly); "performers whose personas and modern sensibilities were completely out of place when they traveled to the past" (famous examples include John Wayne as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror and Tony Curtis in Spartacus); and, finally, a category called "out of their league," for "movie stars whose attempts at roles different from those they usually played were stymied" by a "too strongly established screen persona." (4)

Typecasting may be, as one critic put it, "one of the theatre's deadly sins" and the "sublimation of the unprofessional in acting," (5) but, as these tangled and somewhat contradictory responses to typecasting suggest, typecasting in film is, to a large degree, inescapable. Insofar as the business of film acting, and especially the star system, relies on recognizability, marketability, and the necessity for known commodities, typecasting will be part of the institution. Further, insofar as the actor represents human characters, film acting relates to changing conceptions of identity and identity politics, and thus the actor will inevitably negotiate stereotypes and represent identities inflected by race, gender, ethnicity, class and national differences. Rather than something imposed on actors and audiences from without, or simply an effect of casting or performance style, typecasting occurs at many varied levels, and is equally something spectators and fans enact or impose on actors. As Patricia White succinctly explains: "Casting and performance are already a reading of type; the audience performs a reading on another level, informed by cultural and subcultural codes, spectatorial experience of the star in other roles, and subsidiary discourses." (6)