As the editor of MovieMaker, I’m asked to watch a lot of low-budget, DIY, independent movies, and hear a lot of complaints from indie filmmakers about why their films don’t get press coverage, or into film festivals, or into theaters: The industry doesn’t value creativity, the distribution model is broken, corporations are bad. Maybe all these things are true.

But the most common thing I notice in movies that can’t seem to catch a break is just… bad acting. That’s all. And bad acting — which is often also the fault of the screenwriter, the director, or a producer who demanded a role for a nephew — is a dealbreaker. It breaks the suspension of disbelief, and it tells me, the audience member, that I’m in bad hands, with a filmmaker who doesn’t respect my time. So I bail out.

Is it really this simple? Frequently, yes. I talk to a lot of festival programmers, and serve sometimes as a judge for film festivals. We all want the same thing: Not to be gatekeepers, but to help people through the gate. We want every movie to be awesome. We’re especially rooting for movies made for no budget, by people we’ve never heard of. We live for those. When they work, they’re joyous little miracles.

But it’s never as simple as waving someone through. Filmmakers want things from us. For distributors, it’s money and access to audiences. For festivals, it’s a prestigious slot that other filmmakers want as well. For me, a writer-editor, it’s that I spend a few hours of my life watching a film, asking questions about it, writing a story, and making sure that story gets an audience.

So we all take note of unforced errors that tell us when a film doesn’t respect the audience’s time. And the easiest unforced error to spot is bad acting.

We all understand that some things cost a lot of money: great sound, stunning locations, amazing VFX. So we’re pretty forgiving. (I remember a festival film that used offscreen blue-and-red lights to show that the cops were coming, because there was no budget for a police car. It won at the festival.)

But saying a line in an interesting way doesn’t cost any more than saying it in a fake way.

Everyone in the audience knows how people talk and don’t talk. If you throw a person up on screen who sounds phony, we’ll resent your movie.

Of course we understand that acting is hard. On top of that, sometimes you don’t have time for multiple takes. Or the actor is confused about the line. Or the sound was bad on the good take. That’s too bad.

Once the suspension of disbelief is gone, you’ve lost the audience. We’re on to the next movie.

Bad Acting vs. Good Acting

Just to underline this: It’s true that a lot of what we call bad acting is actually bad screenwriting. A bad script asks actors to sell a line that no real person would ever say.

But a great actor can somehow fake-sounding expository dialogue (“The old cabin? We haven’t been up there since mom died!”) sound believable. Or even cool. That’s what separates good and bad actors.

Great actors somehow move past the flaws in the script to connect directly with the audience, almost like a meta mediator — they keep things moving, add elements that aren’t in the text, and make a line better than it is. They don’t just read the words, they have a take on them that deepens the story.

Watching Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, I was especially impressed by the line readings of Tramell Tillman, best known for his role as Seth Milchick on Apple TV+’s Severance. In The Final Reckoning, he plays a military guy – I believe a submarine captain? — saddled with an insane amount of expository dialogue that lays out the challenges ahead for Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise).

I don’t think Tillman has a single memorable line. And yet his performance was absolutely transfixing, because of how he chose to deliver his unremarkable dialogue. You might expect a movie submarine captain, talking to a secret agent, when the world is about to blow up, to bark orders and yell a lot.

But no: Tillman goes quiet. His tone is always measured, calm, almost soft. It reminded me of nothing so much as ASMR. Tillman made a big choice to go small.

Though we really know nothing about his character — where he’s from, what he’s all about, what he wants — Tillman tells us almost everything just with his delivery. His captain has trained himself to be extraordinarily calm because he’s seen so much, and understands the immense stakes of his job.

He’s capable of being so measured because he processes information with incredible speed, and doesn’t allow himself to be panicked or shocked. And he’s learned, perhaps through trial and error, that to lead an undersea vessel packed with nukes, he’ll gets the best results from his team by sounding gentle.

The Final Reckoning has an absurd amount of exposition, but the film works because it’s packed with great actors who can make interesting performances out of lines that give them little to play with.

Some people think a great actor is an actor who can do a lot with a big personal speech. But a truly great actor does a lot with a nothing line, like, “How are we supposed to dismantle the deflector shield” or “haddock’s on sale,” or “it’s snowing.”

Because again: saying a line in an interesting way is free. It costs the same to say “haddock’s on sale” in a wry, self-hating, I-can’t-believe-it’s-come-to-this kind of way as it does to say “haddock’s on sale!” in a bright, chirpy, no-one-talks-like-that kind of way.

The first version of “haddock’s on sale” can tell the audience something about the relationship between two people at a fish market that may not be in the script. The second version just tells us that the screenwriter is trying to make things sound real, which is the most surefire way to make them sound fake.

More Examples

No names, obviously. But recently someone sent me a screener of a movie that started with a character talking to a loved one, dropping all kinds of background information. Not about their feelings — just about their life situation.

It could have been done in a heavy-handed way, I guess — “I took this new job because I’ve gotta pull the full rent since Joel ran off with Casey, but man, working at a morgue sucks!” — and I would have begrudgingly rolled with it, because sometimes a movie just has to get some background out of the way.

But no — this scene just kept going, with the character relaying a bunch of information their friend would have already known, and the actor and director didn’t make the kind of big choices that might have saved things. So my mind started to wander: What lines would I have cut? Did they include this scene to fatten the running time? Would these boring details come up again? Should I be taking notes? I bailed out.

You don’t even need a bad lines to do bad acting. Another movie I recently bailed on started with someone running through the woods, and there was just… so much breathing. So much struggle. So much acting.

And of course — there are actors like Christopher Walken or Nicolas Cage who deliberately say things in an unnatural way to keep it interesting. We love that. That’s a choice. But just reading a line in a showy, shouty way is a bad choice. And making no choice at all is the worst choice of all.

Main image: Courtesy of Shutterstock