Great politicians aren’t “authentic”

It’s a performance!

Martin Sheen acting presidential as Jed Bartlet in “The West Wing.”

I find it vexing when people claim voters don’t care about policy or ideology, only that candidates seem authentic.

It’s not that I think this is wrong, exactly. If you ask people what they’re looking for, they do indeed say that they prize authenticity. It’s just that I find it kind of vacuous.

I thought about this while listening to a podcast discussion of “One Battle After Another” in which one guest mentioned how eerie it is that Leonardo DiCaprio so convincingly plays this doting girl dad, given what we know about his personal life. Then another guest cuts in to point out the obvious — that DiCaprio is, in fact, an actor.

Of course, not every movie star is capable of this sort of thing. Tom Cruise is a great Hollywood screen presence, but his range is more limited. A huge share of the well-known Cruise performances fit into a pretty narrow “callow youth” band, and then he aged into a phase where he’s basically just playing Ethan Hunt. Even his “Top Gun: Maverick” character is essentially Ethan Hunt. The fact that a lot of famous movie stars are a bit one-note in their performances means that it can be easy to forget that really good actors can be totally protean.

There’s a funny clip of Daniel Day-Lewis talking about the accent he uses in “There Will Be Blood.” He says something to the effect of, “Luckily for me there are no recordings from the period, so no one can say for sure that they didn’t talk like that.” Which is just to say that his iconic Daniel Plainview voice is completely fake. That’s not his natural speaking dialect, and it’s also not (as far as we know) any dialect that actual people ever spoke. But it’s a great performance in a great movie! It feels authentic, just like DiCaprio seems like an authentically bumbling-but-devoted father. Often you see a foreign actor trying to play an American and struggling a bit with the accent (one of the few flaws of “The Wire”), but lots of actors are great at this. It can be jarring to hear Nicole Kidman’s natural Australian accent, because I’m so used to her portraying Americans.

Notably, though, possessing the factual knowledge that her American accent isn’t her natural speaking voice does not detract at all from her performances.

Which is just to say that while good acting normally¹ feels authentic, it’s not actually authentic, and it doesn’t even particularly require the performer to genuinely fool the audience. DiCaprio isn’t tricking anyone into thinking he’s a real dad, and Kidman isn’t tricking anyone into thinking she’s American.² They’re acting. It’s a skill that most people do not have.

That includes politicians.