The Name's the Same
the greatest actor of our time -- no, it's not john malkovich
Note: This piece is so far away from any semblance of standup that it’s best to be its own thing. But fear not, my final two in the series will be the most standup-ish of all the non-standups.
I don’t know about you, but when I see a movie where the character’s name is the same as the actor’s, I’m very impressed. I mean it’s got to be a challenge, right? To be called you, but you are not you, but you share the same name, so when another character speaks your name…well, it seems like a big deal to me, a non-actor. Now this doesn’t include, say, John Malkovich playing “John Malkovich” in Being John Malkovich, since he’s playing a version of himself. I’m talking about where a character happens to share the same name as the actor or actress.
To be frank, I find acting to be a fairly magical profession to begin with. The only time I’ve ever acted was in Performing Arts 280, Introduction to Acting, a class I took during my final semester of college. As someone who assiduously avoids discomfort, this was the first time I purposefully chose to do something that I knew I would find physically and psychologically challenging. If given a choice, I’d prefer anonymity over a spotlight, so in retrospect, I must’ve signed up for this class as a sign of my pending maturity: grow up and embrace the unease.
The instructor of this class, David, was himself a working actor who was all about the prep, having us walk around the room while shaking out our limbs, instructing us to lie down on the floor so we could imagine ourselves baking on a sun-scorching beach. I did these things, begrudgingly, but couldn’t get into any of it, and I could see it pissed him off. Still, when the time came to perform the final scene of the semester, where I played Tom Wingfield of Tennessee Williams’ classic The Glass Menagerie and my scene partner played Amanda, his mother, I required none of the acting exercises to get into the flow. It was an incendiary exchange of dialogue, a petulant son raging against his overbearing parent, and the words I’d memorized came out of my mouth not due to regurgitation, but because the they fit my emotions like a key fit into a lock. I have no doubt this very occurrence is the intoxicating drug of genuine actors and actresses: sentences you forcibly made yourself remember come out of your mouth as if they are your own words.
As revelatory as that experience was, it was enough for me, because it was exhausting. I was cooked after that five-minute scene! Some of the classic plays ran more than three hours, not including intermission. No thanks.
Now I can see that I’ve gone off on a very long tangent here. So let me bring this back to the question at hand – actors challenging themselves to the highest by playing characters with the same name as theirs.
1) The most storied thespian of our time, Meryl Streep, has never played a character named Meryl. That may disqualify her as the GOAT.
2) Robert De Niro hasn’t fared much better, as the only character named Robert he’s played was on Saturday Night Live, when he assayed the plumb role of Robert Mueller, the Special Counsel who investigated Donald Trump. This doesn’t count because he’s playing a real person, and because it was fairly terrible.
3) Daniel Day-Lewis has one worthy credit, playing the milkshake-obsessed Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood.
4) Cate Blanchett has three, but none of them qualify. In The Aviator, she played Katharine Hepburn, Hollywood legend, so like De Niro above, no go. Then she played a version of herself in Coffee and Cigarettes. And she’s excellent in the goofy Bandits, but her name is spelled Kate with a K. Close but no cigar.
Now you might be wondering – if not these four towering figures in acting, who deserves the crown? And here is where we bring it all back to the beginning – Being John Malkovich.
In that film, Charlie Sheen plays Malkovich’s friend. Charlie has been:
1) Charlie Crawford in Spin City
2) Charlie Harper in Two and a Half Men
3) Charles Swan III in A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III
4) Charlie in Mad Families
Maybe Charles Swan III doesn’t count since it isn’t Charlie, but he spent a total of eleven years in television, playing two eponymous characters, so he deserves it one hundred percent – even if Charlie Sheen’s real name is Carlos Irwin Estévez.