The NY Times Magazine February 10, 2008 : Ellen Page by Ryan McGinley

[MissMagAddict]

Breakthroughs: A Short Film by Jake Paltrow

2008 Oscars Portfolio: Photographed by Ryan McGinley

Shooting Stars: Behind the Scenes Video of the Portfolio Shoot

Breaking Through by Lynn Hirschberg

In 2005, at the Sundance Film Festival, a star was born, but almost no one noticed. Well, actually, a few studio executives who saw “Hard Candy” raved about the performance of the unknown Ellen Page — she played an avenging, psychopathic 14-year-old who entices and then violently tortures a would-be pedophile. But the movie was so relentlessly disturbing (at one point, Page’s character ties her enemy down and slowly begins to castrate him) that when “Hard Candy” was released the following year, no one went to see it. What the audience missed then is what they later found in “Juno” — the birth of a different sort of actress. Unlike her glamour-girl peers who double as tabloid superstars, Page, who is now 20, is a tomboy — her on-screen persona is sharp, clear-eyed, determined and self-consciously original. In “Hard Candy,” she managed to be adorable and persuasive while wielding a large knife; in 2007, that same spirit and charm animated “Juno,” a kind of fairy tale about a pregnant 16-year-old who decides to have the baby and give it to the couple (in the end, half the couple) she chooses. In “Juno,” the lack of realism — no one questions Juno’s decision — and the lack of politics are trumped by the overwhelming appeal of Page’s acting. She is so alive on screen — so unique, so ingratiating — that she makes the character, and the entire film, believable.

As is often the case with cinematic breakthroughs, Page had two of them: the first, “Hard Candy,” was her initial artistic birth; “Juno” then deftly married artistic cred with popular acclaim. Page is now a star. With breakthrough performances, as with almost everything else in life, context is everything. Diane Keaton was in three Woody Allen films before Allen wrote “Annie Hall” as a love letter to her quirks. Despite her brilliant comedic turns in the other films, “Annie Hall,” was, and is, the Keaton performance that cemented her cinematic identity. Just as Juno MacGuff probably has high-school girls trading their Uggs and belly-baring T-shirts for tartan plaid Converse sneakers and red hoodies, Annie Hall spawned legions of loyal followers. I, for one, started wearing a fedora and sewed copies of her outsize dresses. I think I may even have said “la-di-dah” once or twice.

But it’s not just a high-school-girl thing. Daniel Day-Lewis was so taken with Clint Eastwood’s performances in the Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns that he copied his way of walking, “trying to be loose-limbed and mean and taciturn.” And more recently, I’m certain that young men everywhere identified with Seth Rogen in “Knocked Up.” Although Rogen had his artistic breakthrough with “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” two years ago, he achieved mass appeal this year as a funny, lovable, shlubby every-guy who won the beautiful blonde.

Rogen was sleeker and more confident in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin”— he had a hipster aesthetic that was also goofy, which made him fascinating. For “Knocked Up,” he softened the edges of that character, which increased his popularity among the male moviegoing constituency, who, more than anything else, like to think of themselves as hilarious.

With comedy, especially, breakthrough performances often become templates: a cinematic persona is born, and that persona moves from scenario to scenario. When Will Ferrell played Ron Burgundy in “Anchorman,” he forged a certain absurd, overconfident, slightly dim, hugely funny personality that has re-emerged, with slight variations, in “Talladega Nights” and “Blades of Glory.” Ferrell may switch from Nascar to figure skating, but he sticks with the same character. The same is true of Vince Vaughn (the brilliant motormouth of “Wedding Crashers” is nearly indistinguishable from the character he plays in “Fred Claus”), Owen Wilson (slacker deadbeat extraordinaire, ever since “Starsky and Hutch”) and Ben Stiller, who broke through in “There’s Something About Mary” as the nerd who experienced every one of the (male) audience’s most humiliating anxieties and still got the girl. Stiller has been playing that part — more or less — ever since.

The constancy of these cinematic personas may be why comedy is so overlooked by the Academy Awards. It’s nearly impossible to be funny on camera, but that degree of difficulty is rarely acknowledged by the kinds of groups that give out prizes. They prefer a different type of breakthrough performance — something more shape-shifting. While Diane Keaton did win the Oscar for “Annie Hall,” she was playing a character in a Woody Allen movie, a film set in New York City, with self-consciously tongue-in-cheek references to the theories of Marshall McLuhan and Sigmund Freud. Seth Rogen’s performance in “Knocked Up” or Michael Cera’s in “Superbad” — the character Cera plays in the end-of-high-school comedy has a new sort of gentle rhythm — may be defining, but the movies they are in have a preponderance of penis jokes. Funny as these films may be, they do not appeal to the academy’s sense of its own sophistication.

It’s not surprising, then, that Cate Blanchett, who disappears into every character she plays, is nominated for two different movies this year: she metamorphoses into Queen Elizabeth I and Bob Dylan. Blanchett’s artistic breakthrough was in 1997’s “Oscar and Lucinda,” in which she starred opposite Ralph Fiennes as a misfit adventuress. Few people saw the film, but her performance was transfixing, and when she was chosen to play the young queen in “Elizabeth” in 1998, her command of the screen was assured.

Similarly, Jennifer Jason Leigh has a way of fusing herself with the women she plays. Her artistic breakthrough was in “Georgia” (1995), in which she played a drug-addicted, would-be-rock-star sister of a successful singer. This year, in “Margot at the Wedding,” she again plays the less-accomplished sibling, but the dynamics of Leigh’s performance could not be more different. It is hard to tell where Leigh ends and the character in “Margot” begins, which is why a breakthrough in a dramatic performance does not always lead to the creation of a persona.

This wasn’t always the case. In the past, especially during the glory days of the studio system, stars were invented before they were put into films. The breakthrough was the invention of the star’s on-screen (and, supposedly, off-) personality. Bette Davis was tart and willful; Clark Gable was sardonic and dashing; Cary Grant was suave and sophisticated (and so on) before they were cast in the parts that made them known. Their breakthroughs came the day they were signed to the studio. Now we live in a time of endless self-invention, and that requires a different kind of career planning. Unlike comedians, dramatic actors do not usually write their own material, and they no longer have the studio to create vehicles for them. As a result, breakthrough performances — both artistic and commercial — become crucial indicators of success and longevity; a breakthrough can guarantee that scripts will come your way. When, say, Amy Ryan, a long-respected New York stage actor, burst forth this year as a stoned, slutty mother in “Gone Baby Gone,” her professional life changed. And the same is true for Josh Brolin. He had to persuade the Coen brothers to cast him in “No Country for Old Men,” but now he’s being offered nearly every plum role. He’s about to play Dan White opposite Sean Penn in the story of the gay activist Harvey Milk, and Oliver Stone wants to cast him as George W. Bush in his biopic of the president. “Before ‘No Country,’ my most famous role was in ‘The Goonies,’ ” Brolin told me. One part can alter everything. “I remember when that happened to me,” Jack Nicholson told me several years ago. “I’d been working for 12 years, and then the part in ‘Easy Rider’ changed my life. Very few people have ever had the experience where they sit back and say, ‘I am a movie star.’ I knew it at the first showing of ‘Easy Rider’ at the Cannes Film Festival by how the audience reacted to the movie. A lot of people would say, ‘I know I’m a movie star, but, oh, I wonder what’s going to happen. . . .’ I knew it then: I was a movie star. And it was great.”

[MissMagAddict]

contined...

As always, timing is everything. Nicholson was not the first choice for “Easy Rider” — Rip Torn turned the part down when the producers refused to pay him $4,500 (the entire budget of “Easy Rider” in 1969 was less than $400,000 — it went on to make hundreds of millions). Throughout his career, Nicholson has consistently reinvented himself, and the image forged by those roles — whether it’s his breakthrough lead performance in “Five Easy Pieces” or a supporting part (another kind of breakthrough, after his career hit a rough patch) in “Terms of Endearment” or the romantic lead in “About Schmidt” in 2002 — all represent a kind of ongoing acting challenge.

When actors have the opportunity to make their own choices in material, it’s easy to cast narrowly and protect the franchise. If you think of Bruce

Willis, he’s still playing the role he did in “Die Hard,” his breakthrough film, and even Harrison Ford has never strayed far from men like Indiana Jones.

George Clooney, meanwhile, could have stuck with some version of the debonair Danny Ocean in the “Ocean’s Eleven,” “Twelve” and “Thirteen” franchise, but he chose, instead, to pack on weight and play a self-destructive C.I.A. operative in “Syriana” in 2005. The film was his artistic breakthrough, but Clooney has been subverting his leading-man image for years — goofing on his good looks in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and, in this year’s “Michael Clayton,” showing the underbelly of a man who would, on the surface, seem to have every advantage.

Appearance has a way of dictating character, especially in the movies.

Johnny Depp, whose breakthrough performance was in “Edward Scissorhands,” in which he wore kabuki makeup and had long gardening shears for fingers, has continually hid his ridiculously beautiful face beneath layers of foundation and wigs. In “Sweeney Todd,” he is cadaver-pale, and the gray streak in his hair seems to extend to his eyes. Depp has managed to integrate his extreme maquillage with his characters. But most aspiring leading men, like this year’s James McAvoy in “Atonement” and Jim Sturgess in “Across the Universe,” would be discouraged from hiding their physical assets. In fact, Ryan Gosling, who was nominated for an Oscar for his breakthrough performance in “Half Nelson” last year, was recently fired from the cast of “The Lovely Bones” when he showed up for work carrying the extra weight he felt was appropriate to the character.

It’s tricky: great acting requires some element of submersion in the life of another, and yet audiences also gravitate toward beauty. “It’s naïve to think that wearing prosthetics and gaining weight is acting,” Charlize Theron told me recently. Theron won an Oscar for her performance in “Monster,” in which she wore prosthetics and gained weight to play Aileen Wuornos, a prostitute turned serial killer. “Monster” was Theron’s artistic breakthrough — her initial star-is-born moment had a lot to do with her endless legs being prominently featured on a billboard on the Sunset Strip for her first major role, in “Two Days in the Valley.” But Theron, like Clooney or Depp, was hungry for a challenge, a chance to be seen differently.

“Looks alone won’t get you that far,” Theron told me. “It may get you in the door, but there’s always somebody younger, somebody prettier. You have to rely on something else. And by that I do not mean prosthetics.”

Makeup or not, if Sturgess, who is British, or McAvoy, who is Scottish, can perfect an American accent, their options will probably be limitless.

Sturgess, who managed to reinvent classic Beatles songs in “Across the Universe,” has a relaxed charm that is reminiscent of Paul McCartney circa “A Hard Day’s Night.” And McAvoy, who showed off his boyish intensity in 2006’s “Last King of Scotland,” has a subtle touch with heavy dramatics. The movie world is short right now on leading men in their 20s, and these two would seem to be poised for a still-larger breakthrough, if they can massage their accents.

Language may also be an obstacle for Marion Cotillard, who played the legendary French chanteuse Edith Piaf in “La Vie en Rose.” In what is a particularly striking breakthrough performance, Cotillard shifts in age and mood from Piaf’s early days as a hustling street urchin to her death at 47.

Cotillard has starred in hit films in France and appeared opposite Russell Crowe in “A Good Year” in 2006, but “La Vie en Rose” is, much like Penélope Cruz’s performance in “Volver” in 2006, a breakthrough, because suddenly she was seen as a serious actress. Yet no French actress — including Catherine Deneuve or Isabelle Adjani — has ever cracked the accent barrier in America. Cotillard is determined to try: she has taken intense Berlitz classes to learn pitch-perfect English, and she has already been cast in a big-screen adaptation of the musical “Nine,” which will also star Javier Bardem.

Cotillard’s ability to mesh utterly with the life of Edith Piaf is not unlike the sense of commitment and attention to detail that dominates Daniel Day-Lewis’s work. “I remember when I first saw ‘My Beautiful Laundrette,’ ” Paul Thomas Anderson, the writer-director of “There Will Be Blood,” said. “I thought, Wow that guy is amazing! And then I saw ‘A Room With a View’ and ‘In the Name of the Father.’ It took me a very long time to realize that Daniel had been in all three movies. I couldn’t believe it was the same guy — the men were that different.” When “My Beautiful Laundrette,” in which Day-Lewis played a gay street punk, was first screened at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the audience reaction was not unlike that of viewers to Jack Nicholson in “Easy Rider” when it played at Cannes. Day-Lewis became a star as the film unspooled.

It took a little longer for the world to catch up — probably somewhere around the time Day-Lewis won the Oscar for “My Left Foot” — but that sort of audience delay was also true for one of Day-Lewis’s heroes, Robert De Niro. In “Mean Streets,” which was his fifth major role, De Niro is captivating as Johnny Boy, a self-destructive small-time gangster. Like Day-Lewis, who works infrequently and with great intensity, seeming to rearrange completely his molecules for every character he plays, De Niro, in all of his early screen appearances, had the impact and excitement of a cinematic breakthrough. That’s no longer the case — De Niro seems to work for the money now rather than for a burning desire to tell a story.

Nevertheless, his legacy of roles, from the young Vito Corleone to Jake LaMotta to his more recent role as a master thief in “Heat,” are clearly inspiring to generations of actors, just as Brando’s breakthrough performances in “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Last Tango In Paris” were once thrilling to De Niro.

Paul Dano, who had a breakthrough performance this year in “There Will Be Blood,” is an inheritor of that cinematic legacy. In 2001, he played a messed-up teenager who is willingly seduced by a pedophile in “L.I.E.” It is a stunning performance: Dano manages to show both the boy’s power and his vulnerability. In “The Ballad of Jack and Rose” a few years later, he exuded a dark, almost Goth sexuality, and in 2006, he remained mute for much of “Little Miss Sunshine” but still filled out every scene he was in. In “There Will Be Blood,” he plays a small-town, very ambitious evangelist, and his main adversary is not the devil but Day-Lewis. Dano replaced another actor three weeks after filming began, and yet it’s impossible to imagine anyone else in the part. With his pale, almost spectral face and tall, lanky frame, Dano can seem haunted.

The audience hasn’t quite caught up to Paul Dano yet — he’s still too different for immediate acceptance. It can take a while — as it did for Ellen Page — for a screen persona to find its home. In this issue, we aimed to document the cinematic year through that prism. Most of the performances we decided to spotlight were those of newcomers — from Tang Wei, who was torn between a sense of duty and longing in “Lust, Caution,” to Michael Cera in “Superbad.” But there were other breakthroughs, like the 82-year-old Hal Holbrook, who serves as the voice of reason in “Into the Wild,” and, in “Away From Her,” Julie Christie, who last won the Oscar for Best Actress for “Darling” (1965). Christie works so infrequently these days that the director, Sarah Polley, had to spend eight months wooing her before she said yes to the part. In the film, Christie dropped her British accent to play a happily married woman who is afflicted with Alzheimer’s. As the disease strips her memory, she forgets her husband and falls in love with another patient.

Like all breakthrough performances chosen for this issue, there is something singular and timely about Christie’s work in “Away From Her.” Similarly, Casey Affleck’s depiction of Robert Ford, the man who killed Jesse James, reworks the mythology of the West in present-day terms, while Sienna Miller, long a gossip-column staple herself, turns the glare of the media inside out in “Interview,” a meditation on the vagaries of celebrity culture. Our goal in spotlighting these 15 breakthrough performances was to combine the shock of the new with a sense of history. It’s important to remember that change can occur at any age — it requires a complex cocktail of talent, opportunity and, most of all, a particular part at a particular moment.

[peppi]

Casey Affleck in "The assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford." Photographed at the Aquarium of the Pacific, Long Beach, Calif.


Julie Christie in "Away From Her." Photographed in London


Jim Sturgess in "Across the Universe." Photographed at the white cliffs of Dover.



Michael Cera in "Superbad." Photographed at Bronson Caves, Los Angeles


Sienna Miller in "Interview." Photographed at Herfordshire House, Coleshill, Buckinghamshire, England


Marion Cotillard in "La Vie en Rose." Photographed in Montauk, N.Y.

ontd

[peppi]

Seth Rogan in "Knocked Up." Photographed at the Los Angeles County Arboretum, Arcadia, Calif


James McAvoy in "Atonement." Photographed at the Chelsea Hotel, New York City


Hal Holbrook in "Into the Wild." Photographed in Beverly Hills, Calif


Paul Dano in "There Will Be Blood." Photographed in East Stroudsburg, Pa.



Ellen Page in "Juno." Photographed in Malibu, Calif.


Tang Wei in "Lust, Caution." Photographed at Spa 88, New York City

[peppi]

Amy Ryan in "Gone Baby Gone." Photographed in Orange County, New York


Jennifer Jason Leigh in "Margot at the Wedding." Photographed at the Glynwood Center, Cold Spring, N.Y.


Josh Brolin in "No Country for Old Men." Photographed in Pismo Beach, Calif


ONTD

[adorefaith]

the cover couldnt be better..

i also adore the photo of marion cotillard..

[adorefaith]

wow..i just saw the pics of jennifer jason leigh..magical..

[jackieonassis]

gorgeous photos! i hope they have this at the supermarket later

[hufnagel]

I believe that photographer also shot Kate Moss for a W issue from summer 2007 - with Naomi on the cover. June? July?

Beautiful, except for Ellen Page's puckered and smug face and her 'talent'

[adorefaith]

woah..someone's a bit bitter...

[MissMagAddict]

Originally Posted by hufnagel

I believe that photographer also shot Kate Moss for a W issue from summer 2007 - with Naomi on the cover. June? July?

Ryan McGinley photographed Kate for W June 2007

[unipine]

can't wait to get this lovely portraits..
thanks MMA!

[moussemaker]

I don't like these pictures at all. The "Great Performers" portfolios of the last years were much better.

[Ferdinanda]

Sienna seriously?

Where's my lovely Cate?

[peppi]

^It's breaktrhough performances..
Cate has broken through ages ago