The best acting is a kind of alchemy

Jamie Lee Curtis, Jenny Slate, Stephanie Hsu, Tallie Medel, James Hong, Michelle Yeoh, Andy Le, Ke Huy Quan, and Harry Shum Jr. accept the Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture award for "Everything Everywhere All at Once" onstage during the 29th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards at Fairmont Century Plaza.

Hugh Grant has been refreshingly acerbic about his children’s acting abilities. Expressing horror about any of them ever treading the boards, he joked he was enormously relieved
at various school plays where they were all “hopeless. Completely talentless.” So. Actors. Who’d be one? The mental fortitude required to exist in that world of constant rejection, the self-belief needed to pick yourself up and keep slogging it out at auditions while knowing that your profession is not a meritocracy. Career success so often rests on the whim of a director assessing how you look, no matter how much talent you may have. It’s a job, in its narrowest iteration, with a complete lack of autonomy. With instability as its constant companion.

I’m not talking of course about those few, those lucky few, who’ve made it, although they too must ache for roles that went to rivals. What’s the strategy for coping gracefully in the industry? How does Naomi Watts react when her good friend Nicole Kidman lands yet another role that could have gone to her; is the smile of joy a touch… tight? This world feels ruthless and fragile and rarely honest about the mental toll it must take.

Vietnamese-US actor Ke Huy Quan has already been honoured this awards season for his quietly bewildered work in Everything Everywhere All at Once. He started his acting career as a kid in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but gradually the work dried up. In an emotional Golden Globes speech in January, the 51-year-old said that being a child star had stunted his confidence. “As I grew older, I started to wonder if that was it, if that was just luck. For so many years I was afraid I had nothing more to offer. No matter what I did, I would never surpass what I achieved as a kid.” It’s thrilling that his work is now being recognised.

The best acting – the best art, in any form – makes us feel, as Quan does in his latest film. It’s a glimpse into the vulnerable complexity of what it is to be human. There’s a connecting truth in the greatest performances, as if the actors are haunting the fragile underbelly of our own psyches. Presenting a mirror to who we really are but may not necessarily show to others; we know this, we’ve felt this too, and we feel it now, watching this performer. The best of it is a deeply intimate alchemy.

Watch Barry Keoghan give what is, to me, the performance of the year in The Banshees
of Inisherin as a lost boy whose soul is stripped bare. In a scene that’s gone viral he articulates to an older woman, falteringly, excruciatingly, a hope for requited love. Who hasn’t been there, felt that? The fragility, the yearning in Keoghan’s performance is masterful to a point where it doesn’t seem like acting; it is enchantment, he is that person. He grew up in 13 different foster homes as a child and it feels like his whole past inhabits his work, his face, his stillness.

Director George Miller once told me that the best actors he’d worked with were the
best prepared – they knew their material so well that they were completely relaxed when they came on set, and could then play, magnificently, within the role. “You’ll begin to act when you can forget your technique – when it is so securely inside you that you need not call upon it consciously,” legendary acting coach Stella Adler once explained.

The best acting shows us what it is to be human. It is the soul glimpsed, in all its vulnerable complexity. Google the clip of Keoghan being rejected in Banshees and I dare you not to be moved. I hope he triumphs at the Oscars this month, hope it’s those who haven’t had the easiest of rides who are recognised. It’s why I’m rooting for both Quan and Keoghan – but unfortunately, they’re up against each other in the same category. Impossible choice.