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Beyond the biopic: Let's return to original characters for best actor Oscar contention

Mike Wills
By Mike Wills
27 Feb 2025
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While it is undeniably a great acting skill to inhabit a familiar person and make them credible for the viewer, too much of it lies in looks, prosthetics, hair, make-up, clothing and accent.

The smart money for Sunday night’s (Monday morning South African time) Best Actor Academy Award is on either Bob Dylan or Donald Trump.

Teen dream Timothee Chalamet is nominated for portraying the self-absorbed young minstrel in A Complete Unknown and Sebastian Stan is up for portraying the even more self-absorbed property huckster in The Apprentice.

On current form the other nominees need not bother to prepare an acceptance speech because 11 out of the last 20 best actor Oscars have gone to people playing real, famous people like Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy last year), Richard Williams (Will Smith in 2021), Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek in 2018) and Winston Churchill (Gary Oldman in 2017).

Going only a bit further back, you get Abraham Lincoln, Ray Charles, Idi Amin, Stephen Hawking and King George VI all taking their bows on screen.  

The current Academy voters are complete suckers for impersonators. And it is just the current lot. In the first 77 ceremonies, only George C Scott as General Patton (1970) and Ben Kingsley for Gandhi (1982) won by playing roles that demanded they be a convincing doppelganger — unless any cinemagoers really knew what Benjamin Disraeli looked and sounded like in 1930, or Louis Pasteur in 1936.

The Best Actress award has also been recently distorted. Reese Witherspoon as June Carter Cash in I Walk The Line in 2005 was the first female impersonator to win, and since then four out of 18 have gone that way — Queen Elizabeth II, Edith Piaf, Margaret Thatcher and Judy Garland were the roles.

(In this piece I do not count winners playing real people whose image is unknown to the movie-going public like Matthew McConaughey in The Dallas Buyers Club, Adrien Brody in The Pianist, Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf or Julia Roberts as Erin Brockovich.)

Personal opinion


It’s very much a personal opinion, based on zero acting experience past an exceptional turn as the female lead in Gogol’s The Inspector General at the age of 15, but I think this exaggerated reward for impersonation is lazy stuff from the Academy voters. While it is undeniably a great acting skill to inhabit a familiar person and make them credible for the viewer, too much of it lies in looks, prosthetics, hair, make-up, clothing and accent.

To start with, the casting is largely determined by physicality, not talent. Chalamet could not be Churchill any more than Jamie Foxx could be Idi Amin, not to mention Eddie Redmayne as Ray Charles or Gary Oldman as Freddie Mercury.

Even Meryl Streep, who can do pretty much anything including an Oscar-winning Thatcher in The Iron Lady, would really have to stretch to be Edith Piaf. (As a side note, this makes Lin-Manuel Miranda’s achievement with the lauded stage musical Hamilton all the more astonishing as his entirely black cast become America’s Omo-white founding fathers in a very believable way.)

Playing a famous person in a movie is, in some ways, painting by numbers. You have the template, now imitate it. Get the small details right and then everyone says “they were so convincing as …” and gives them a gong rather than assessing their all-round performance.

Rami Malek’s win for Bohemian Rhapsody seven years ago — where he beat out Christian Bale’s version of Dick Cheney — was particularly egregious in this regard. With the help of his innate appearance and some false teeth, he did a tidy job as the Queen frontman in a routine biopic, but he didn’t even sing.

At least Chalamet performs Dylan’s early music himself very credibly in a fine performance in A Complete Unknown, as did Taron Egerton in an excellent turn as Elton John in the under-awarded Rocketman.

Narrative arc


I reckon it is a far greater skill to make a fictional character and the world they inhabit believable than it is to adequately recreate a real person. On the same theme, it is harder to write a compelling original screenplay than it is to rehash a “true story” where you have the narrative arc on a ready-made plate.

Obviously, this is all massively subjective stuff, and no one should ever take the Oscars too seriously,  but the Academy Award-winning roles that stick in the mind as truly great creations among the male actors are invented characters like Tom Hanks’s Forrest Gump (1994), Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter in Silence of The Lambs (1991), Russell Crowe’s Maximus in Gladiator (2000), and just about everything Jack Nicholson did in his prime, including Randle McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which won in 1975.

Among the women, it’s Liza Minelli as Sally Bowles in Cabaret (1972), Diane Keaton as Annie Hall (1977), Olivia Colman as Queen Anne in The Favourite (2018) and just about everything Frances McDormand has done, including Marge Gunderson in Fargo which won in 1996. DM

 

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