Maybe it’s a failure on my part, but it occurred to me the other day while watching an episode of “Reilly, Ace of Spies” that I see the actors in two different ways.
For the lead characters, played by actors I recognize and am familiar with in other roles, I marvel at the skill that allows them to portray the character they are playing. However, because I know the actor, while they can, on occasion, come vanishingly close to being the person they are portraying, they are still an actor.
In contrast around them are the real people who occupy the small parts of the story. Of course they are all actors too, but because I don’t know them my belief in them as real people is complete. From time to time I will remember that the girl who the hero had a brief affair with isn’t a real person, she too is an actor, and the father protecting his daughter’s virtue as a side plot in the story is just acting, and in many ways doing it better than the star.
Is this just my gullibility or do we all have this tendency to be utterly convinced by the hundreds of wonderful bit part players that there are out there?