A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness.

When I was a kid who got into watching films very early, the actors I’d see in movies had somehow always been there. A large part of this was that 99.9% of what I’d watch was on TV, so early on already I’d see all those films with the likes of James Stewart, Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn (or indeed Audrey Hepburn), Shirley MacLaine, Steve McQueen, and so on. When it came to newer films that came out in the late 1970s or 1980s, it may have been a different set of stars – Sigourney Weaver, Dustin Hoffman, Bruce Willis, Kathleen Turner, Harrison Ford, and many, many more – but somehow it still felt to me at the time that these had always been around.

Because, for someone born in 1975, they kinda had.

Since I was a pint-sized movie snob from an early age onwards, I didn’t much watch children’s films (other than the animated Disney fare that came around every Christmas), and even past the age of 10, I wasn’t particularly interested in films and TV series aimed primarily at teens. This meant that I didn’t really see all that many young actors in their first leading parts. The first time I became aware of River Phoenix, for instance, was his appearance in Stand by Me, and even that I only saw years later, once it was shown on television. Same with a young Johnny Depp (I was faintly aware of 21 Jump Street, but I never watched a single episode, and when he starred in Edward Scissorhands, he was still young but by no means only just starting out). One of the only stars-in-the-making that I remember seeing very early on was Jennifer Connelly, who I first saw in Labyrinth, and even she had been in a few things by that time. (Admittedly, I didn’t see Once Upon a Time in America when I was a preteen.)

Do you know that moment when you’re watching a film or a TV series, and there’s a performance that stands out: an actor that you don’t remember ever seeing before, and you wonder if they just came out of nowhere? If it’s a young actor, it’s obviously not all that surprising, but I’m talking about the actors in their 30s, 40s, even 50s, the ones that must have been working for years, even decades, but somehow they were invisible – until they play, say, a psychiatrist who murders people and turns them into succulent dishes to die for. I had seen Anthony Hopkins in films before Silence of the Lambs, even films I liked a fair bit, such as Richard Lester’s Juggernaut, but he would have played relatively small, unremarkable parts. (Come to think of it, I also didn’t register his Juggernaut co-star Ian Holm much at the time, or indeed Julian Glover; they only popped into existence for me when I saw Alien and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade a while later.) But after seeing Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter, I couldn’t not wonder: where had he been until 1991? Had he been in anything I’d seen? At the time, I couldn’t even check on IMDB in the absence of an actual internet, so it would only be when I rewatched Juggernaut years later that I’d realise: he’d been there all along. And then I’d catch up on the likes of The Lion in Winter, A Bridge Too Far, The Elephant Man, and it’d become clear to me that Hopkins didn’t just become a star out of nowhere: he’d been putting in acting work of note for a long time before he seemingly popped into existence for 16-year-old me.

It’s different these days: pretty much ever since the internet became A Thing, I’ve been reading about films and cinema voraciously. I’d read reviews, previews, essays. I’d follow Film Discourse, at its best and at its worst, and because of that I became more aware of up-and-coming stars. I might still not see them in their first appearance, but much of the time you can’t really miss the buzz.

But it’s not the young stars anyway where the question is most interesting. Someone like, say, Steve Buscemi seems to have been around forever. He’s been appearing in films and series since the mid-’80s. The first film I remember noticing him in was Living in Oblivion, and then, soon after, Fargo, and since then I’ve filled in many of the blanks in his earlier filmography. (I still can’t quite imagine a truly young Steve Buscemi.) Was there ever such a thing as a truly young Steve Buscemi? (The picture above suggests that there was indeed.) Philip Seymour Hoffman (still the saddest before-his-time loss for me) popped up on my radar with Boogie Nights, and he cemented his position with Magnolia. What did he do before those films? (Trust me to watch Twister for the first time in 2024.) Carrie Coon seemed to appear fully formed with her performance in The Leftovers, though in hindsight I do kinda, sorta remember her in Gone Girl as Ben Affleck’s exasperated sister. Brendan Gleeson I first noticed in his wonderful, poignant performance in John Boorman’s The General – and unexpectedly, while he’d been acting for about ten years at that stage, he became an actor relatively late in his life, so it didn’t feel like I’d been sleeping on a fantastic actor.

I think that for me it is mostly actors such as these: not the big, sexy stars with their big, sexy star vehicles, not the Brad Pitts (I can’t remember whether I first saw him in Thelma & Louise or in a Lewis ad) and Julia Robertses (I suspect my first Roberts film was Flatliners, which I found more interesting than Pretty Woman – at least until I’d watched it), but rather the ones that grab my attention because of the parts they played and the films they appeared in, films you watch without all of the media hubbub and PR hullabaloo trying to sell you movie tickets. (Hey, I’m still that movie snob I was as a kid, I just take up more space… and so does my film collection.)

And it’s really this which prompted me to write this post in response to Mege’s Six Damn Fine Degrees from last week. In his post, Mege mentioned Paddy Considine’s first directorial Tyrannosaur prominently. When I saw Tyrannosaur – on DVD, not at the cinema -, I already knew Peter Mullan, primarily from his performance in Ken Loach’s My Name is Joe – but I’m not sure I’d ever consciously seen either Olivia Colman or Eddie Marsan. I’d seen films they were in, I’m sure, but they didn’t much register. And what better way to be introduced to actors such as Colman and Marsan than in a film such as Tyrannosaur, delivering such pitch-perfect performances? At that point, it no longer matters whether I’ve seen these actors before: they go from barely existing in my mind (did I see Marsan in a mid-’90s episode of the BBC soap Casualty, or Colman in one of the SharespeaRe-Told stories? who knows…) straight to the list of artists that make me look up and take notice when they appear in pretty much anything. Even when we only discover an actor years into their career, it’s a fun moment worth savouring: that moment when their face and name burn themselves into your personal watchlist.

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