3 ms·

I haven't clicked on the link, but I do know that early movie actors came from a theater background, where you can't act subtly. And it showed.

• jfengel 6y ago
  That's interesting, because a lot of the most popular actors today have theater backgrounds: Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Hugh Laurie, Judy Dench, Paul Bettany, and lots of others. It's a stronger tradition in the UK, though some American actors seek out that training as well. It seems to do especially well at teaching people how to be charismatic leads. My theory is that there's something about connecting with an audience and holding their attention when they don't have a camera telling them where to look. It's not about being "big", but about committing strongly to each moment. It's a hard thing to describe without theater jargon, which mostly means that we don't really understand it. We just know it when we see it. Early theater actors did have a very different style, not just un-subtle but athletic and operatic. Audiences then would find today's films underwhelming, without the actors filling the room with their voices and making their emotions as big as possible. That's more about taste than about medium: the same change has happened in the theater, and the naturalistic acting styles pioneered by Stanislavsky were invented for theater, not film.