Paying attention to that one guy

It's interesting to watch how we treat character actors. They're our favorite part of the movie but they seem to wind up being, "oh, that one guy, that one guy who does the eye thing!"

That's not to say it's a bad thing, a lot of them don't want the tabloids telling everyone that they're secretly an alien and also Oprah. But what's really interesting is that as soon as they leave the screen, we stop caring about their lives.

I think that's because they've gotten to a point where we don't see them as actors...we see them as people caught on screen. We don't want to know their name or their dirty secrets, they have the power to go live their life by forcing us to keep them on the screen.

Yeah sure a lot of character actors have parts that are too small for us to care about. But think about the ones who have become leading roles. Christian Bale, I think, is the best example. We want to see the Wall Street hotshot, the magician, the Batman. We don't want to see a chain-smoking Welshman who has to force himself to work out. We care more about Bale's characters than his real life...isn't that interesting he can make us do that.