Perhaps as James Bond's slightly disreputable brother? Just saying.Well, this is certainly good news. I'm happy for James Marsters. But the fact that getting a gig on Caprica is, other than an arc on Smallville, one of the better things to happen to Marsters since Angel wrapped (Dragonball Evolution emphatically does not count) reminds me of a perpetual question I have: why is it so hard for actors who do amazing television work in long-term roles to get other work? Before I get to the question of typing, or overassociation with a single role, let's look at the evidence, shall we?
Since beginning and ending his astonishing run as Jimmy McNulty, Dominic West has played 1) a cad in Mona Lisa Smile, 2) a rapist in 300, 3) a villian in Punisher: War Zone, and 4) Oliver Cromwell in a British miniseries. And that's not counting his role as a delivery guy. Sonja Sohn? Arcs on Brothers and Sisters and Cold Case, and a role in Step Up 2 The Streets. Michael K. Williams is getting some minor work, but nothing yet that I've seen that is worthy of his talents. Lance Reddick is doing fine, but then, he's one of J. J. Abrams' creepy special snowflakes, so he was always going to be okay for work. Idris Elba's getting jobs, too, but starring in Tyler Perry's Daddy's Little Girls isn't exactly defining in the way playing Stringer Bell was. David Boreanaz finally escaped from the shadow of Angel and Joss Whedon's good-hearted-but-misguided conviction that Boreanaz was better at drama than at comedy, and now he's doing fine on Bones, but he certainly hasn't gone as far as his looks might have once suggested was possible. Sarah Michelle Gellar suffered an even worse fate: were it not be for Japanese horror remakes, she might as well have gone into a dignified retirement. Jennifer Anniston escaped being Rachel on Friends, sort of, but only by trading her fictional drama for real-life tsuris: she's as trapped in a narrative then as she was now. James Gandolfini arguably gave one of the defining performances of this generation of television as Tony Soprano, but he's done his best work in sort of weird indies since, and he's only now getting another shot at a huge, meaty role playing Hemingway in a very under-development project to be released in 2011.
I do think that getting trapped in a role is a real danger, especially for someone like Anniston, who was genuinely a mainstream cultural icon as Rachel. But for actors on terrific, but much less-watched shows like Buffy, or The Wire, or hell, True Blood today, I think that's much less the case. People might recognize Sarah Michelle Gellar because they saw her on posters and ads, but that doesn't mean they associate her with a certain kind of snappy dialogue and a specific sort of bad taste in boyfriends. Similarly, Dominic West went to fascinating places with McNulty, but we've got to admit that a fairly small cross-section of America went along with him. If it turns out an actor is genuinely able to just play that one role, it's one thing. But I don't think the associations stick with too large a percentage of American audiences to make these actors unhireable in prestige projects.
So what's the problem? Is there just less good film work than television work available? We are living in a fairly remarkable age of television, and I have to admit I've felt somewhat disaffected, overall, by the movies in comparison. There's also the extent to which actors like Kate Winslet have a somewhat unfortunate lock on prestige roles, which I think contributes to a kind of reverse typecasting problem. It's not that I look at Winslet and think "The boat! Leo! Iceberg ahead!" but pretty much no matter what she's doing, I think Kate Winslet. But casting someone like her, or Cate Blanchett, while it may guarantee a good performance, severely narrows the opportunities for other wildly talented actors, and creates a kind of monotony in serious, critically-acclaimed movies. It's too bad, and I think it blocks the opportunities for actors who have proven their chops in a deep and sustained way on television.
And I suppose another problem that's a bit of a twist is this. It's not that roles like Spike, or McNulty, or Stringer, or whoever, only prove an actor can do one thing. But they don't provide a lot of opportunities for an actor to prove, within a single role, that he can do multiple things (exceptions within Buffy for magic, of course.) In other words, an actor who slogs through a bunch of middling movies may end up proving that he can be an okay action actor, an okay romantic lead, etc. But an actor who does an amazing, deep, long-term portrayal of a cop, or a punk-rock vampire, only gets to prove that he's an awesome law enforcement officer, or an awesome creature of the night. Credit gets awarded to the film and TV actors differently in a way that seems to unfairly disadvantage television actors.
Obviously, there are exceptions to this dilemma; I'm well aware of that. But James Marsters should have jobs. Dominic West should get to star in that Austen interpretation he's dreaming of. And someone should give Anthony Head a job, if only to rescue him from the clutches of fare like Repo: The Genetic Opera. I mean, really.