Why Actors Score Big By Keeping It ‘Real'

Truth-based performances — thanks to their perceived difficulty and (with luck) the campaign support of the figures they portray — confer an advantage to stars that doesn’t always extend to the films they inhabit.

- Caryn James

Channeling Jackie Kennedy’s breathy voice and aristocratic accent (straight from Miss Porter’s school for well-bred girls), Natalie Portman in Fox Searchlight’s Jackie is the clear front runner for the best actress Oscar. Tom Hanks, in an awards-ready performance, is as heroic a figure as ever but with transforming white hair and mustache in Warner Bros.’ Clint Eastwood-helmed Sully. The real-life Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who saved 155 lives by landing a plane on the Hudson River, by now is a familiar on-camera interview subject, so it’s easy to see the physical similarities between him and Hanks — and why they matter. Playing a real person is irresistible awards bait, as if actors get points for coloring inside the lines of an actual man or woman.

The acting competition this season includes a raft of other performances based on real people, even if their faces don’t come to mind so quickly. Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae are brilliant mathematicians who worked for NASA during the 1960s in 20th Century Fox’s Hidden Figures. Michael Keaton is McDonald’s mastermind Ray Kroc in The Weinstein Co.’s The Founder. Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton are an interracial couple in Focus Features’ Loving. Dev Patel plays a long-lost Indian boy who finds his way home in TWC’s Lion, and Andrew Garfield is a pacifist who enlists in the army during World War II in Mel Gibson’s return from directors jail, Lionsgate’s Hacksaw Ridge. And those are only the actors with a realistic shot at awards attention.

Some hopefuls lost ground early, victims of lackluster reviews and deadly box office.Warren Beatty shrewdly plays the myth as much as the reality of Howard Hughes in Fox’s