that persona, within the context of a certain kind of
story. Part of the fun comes from seeing that per-
sona in different kinds of movies, enjoying your
favorite persona interacting with a particular role
or genre. So part of the reason you might go to see
Cruise in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut(1999) is
to see what he makes of Dr. William Harford, a
Manhattan physician facing serious sexual and
moral issues; or, in Michael Mann’s Collateral
(2004), how he portrays Vincent, a hit man; how he
pushes the vulnerable side of his persona and
unfortunately becomes the stereotype of a con-
cerned dad in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds
(2005); or how he manages to sustain a fresh por-
trayal of the character of IMF agent Ethan Hunt in
each movie in the Mission Impossibleseries (1996,
2000, 2006, 2011).
Sometimes an actor with a familiar, popular per-
sona takes on a role that goes against what we
expect—for example, Jack Nicholson as Warren
Schmidt in Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt
(2002) or Cate Blanchett as Jude in Todd Haynes’s
I’m Not There(2007). A major factor affecting our
enjoyment of actors in such roles is not just the
role, but the strange sensation of seeing an actor
whose persona we have come to know well play a
totally different sort of role—in Nicholson’s case,
the normally crafty, strong, menacing man as a
powerless, mundane, befuddled, and cuckolded
insurance salesman. In Blanchett’s career, we are
astonished to see an actor known for her regal
beauty—in such roles as Queen Elizabeth I in
Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth(1998) or Lady Galadriel
in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Ringstrilogy
(2001–3)—undergo a complete physical transfor-
mation as Jude, one of six different interpretations,
by six different actors, of Bob Dylan in Todd
Haynes’s I’m Not There(2007). Blanchett, famous
for her ability to change her distinctly Australian
accent to meet the needs of any role—speaking the
Queen’s English as Elizabeth and Galadriel, or with
a flat, locale-less accent as a Susan Jones, a Califor-
nia housewife in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s
Babel (2006)—hits the mark squarely with her
interpretation of Dylan’s twangy, midwestern
speech. In creating her gender-bending portrait of
a diffident, slightly androgynous-looking singer, she
uses every technique in the actor’s stock besidesWHAT IS ACTING? 291Cate Blanchett’s complete transformation as Bob
DylanIn I’m Not There(2007; director: Todd Haynes), Cate
Blanchett transforms her glamorous self into Jude, a skinny,
ragged, androgynous folksinger at the beginning of his
career: Bob Dylan. In this image, Jude is responding to an
obnoxious British journalist who questions his motives in
switching from acoustic to electric guitar in 1965. To
understand how accomplished Blanchett’s portrayal is,
compare her Dylan with the real Dylan as he appears in D. A.
Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back(1967) or Martin Scorsese’s No
Direction Home: Bob Dylan(2005).