Acting, and Reacting

The Off-Screen Life That a Star Brings to a Role Influences What The Audience Takes From It

We are watching a lithe, beautiful assassin packing serious heat and a supreme sense of cool as she teaches a nervous young man how to shoot. Serenely confident in her macha swagger, the assassin, aptly named Fox, embodies all that is predatory, ruthless and lethally sexy.

But as we watch Fox, the antiheroine of last summer's hyper-violent action flick "Wanted," we are also watching Angelina Jolie, whose off-screen persona as humanitarian activist, friend of refugees and mother is every bit as strong as the fictional one. And the ability of viewers to accept those two ideas simultaneously turns out to be crucial to the audience's satisfaction and the film's success. As Fox ruthlessly dispatches bad guys from screeching cars or speeding trains, it doesn't matter that we might have recently seen the woman playing her dressed in a tasteful suit, speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations or taking one of her children to school.

Bloodthirsty killer or global humanitarian? Clearly, when it comes to Jolie, we'll take both.

Welcome to the matrix of stardom, that mental space we navigate every time we encounter our biggest stars on the screen. These are stars of mega-wattage, actors who despite their acting talents are long past being able to melt anonymously into their roles. They are the superstars whose off-screen lives we follow in an ongoing narrative that can be every bit as riveting as their movies.

That ongoing "real-life" narrative forms one of the struts of the stardom matrix, which is propped up by a delicate balance among the stars' off-screen identities, their on-screen characters and the audience's own projections. The question isn't whether we in the audience can forget we're watching a particular actor or actress, but whether we can somehow hold in our minds that we are watching that actor, and still believe in the character. Superstars' performances succeed not in spite of that awareness, but precisely because of it. (No, this phenomenon isn't the same thing as typecasting. The matrix allows for casting against type, often with surprisingly delightful results. And yes, the matrix is like "The Matrix," to a point. The stardom matrix isn't simulated as much as psychological, the hidden code being the almost subliminal way we apprehend sometimes competing, sometimes complementary personas.)

To consider the past year in movies is to behold fascinating, in some cases cautionary examples of the matrix of stardom at work. Why did we accept Angelina Jolie in "Wanted" but not "Changeling"? Why did Robert Downey Jr. triumph when Nicole Kidman failed? How is Brad Pitt managing his matrix in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"? How is Clint Eastwood going meta with the matrix in "Gran Torino"?

And can Tom Cruise's matrix be saved?

The matrix is at its strongest when the stars' fictional characters harmonize with their off-screen selves that we know (or are told we know) from their appearances on morning yak shows, or in magazine profiles. That's why Jolie's matrix was operating so smoothly in "Wanted," where her tough on-screen character jibed, if not with her work with refugees on behalf of the U.N., with the bad-girl persona she has cultivated since her Lara Croft and Billy Bob Thornton days. (Remember those vials of blood? Of course you do. You always will.) Her newer incarnation as a global healer and broody mom (six kids and counting) only heightened the cartoonish glee of watching her character Fox run amok, having popped straight out of Jolie's recently tamed id.

The cognitive dissonance worked in "Wanted," but it was precisely as a mother that we didn't buy Jolie in "Changeling." In that 1920s-era drama, she played a real-life woman whose son was kidnapped and murdered, and who was forced by the Los Angeles police to accept an impostor as her little boy.

Jolie has earned Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations for her role as Christine Collins in "Changeling." But audiences have largely stayed away. Why? The matrix is askew. She's simply too strong for us to believe her as a meek, mousy telephone operator. When we watch Christine initially going along with the Los Angeles police, being pushed around by their investigators and doctors, it doesn't mesh. Not the time frame, not the character, not our Angie!

Two actors whose off-screen stories had gone badly awry mounted exceptionally successful campaigns to set their matrices to rights this year. Viewers loved "Iron Man" this past summer, not only because of its comic book escapism but also because its star, Robert Downey Jr., so deftly addressed and dispelled the images of him we brought with us to the theaters. By then, Downey's battles with drug addiction had become the stuff of tragic tabloid fodder. When we watched him as hard-drinking playboy Tony Stark, we watched Downey have his vodka and drink it too in a presumably sober performance that dovetailed seamlessly with his past indiscretions -- which at their most notorious included crawling into a strange bed while on a bender.

Several weeks later, in the Hollywood parody "Tropic Thunder," Downey proved matrix-savvy again as the Australian super-method actor Kirk Lazarus, who dons blackface to play an African American soldier and says things like "I don't read the script. The script reads me." We witnessed yet another playfully self-referential performance from Downey, this time poking fun at his own vaunted reputation. The punch line, of course, was that Downey, once called the best actor of his generation, was genuinely good as an actor pompous enough to believe he's the best of his generation.