Top stars essay edgy roles too challenging to pass up

CAMERON Diaz has the most daunting thespic challenge of them all.

Actors and film buffs who are on the lookout for examples of strong characterizations need look no further, because the best templates are on view in the recent film “The Counselor,” by the estimable Ridley Scott.

The ace director has come up with an all-star cast, probably because the roles he offered them were too thespically good and challenging for them to pass up!

Imagine a film starring Brad Pitt, Penelope Cruz, Michael Fassbender, Javier Bardem and Cameron Diaz, each portraying a unique and complex screen persona? Yum!

Initial protagonist

As the film’s initial protagonist, title-role player Fassbender makes it a point to come across as a high-priced lawyer at the top of his game. He’s so successful that he thinks he can play for even higher stakes, so he “invests” in the latest smuggling scheme of a Mexican drug cartel. This turns out to be his tragic undoing, because only cold-blooded “professional” criminals can play the “game” at that high a level—and survive.

What makes Fassbender’s portrayal instructive for aspiring actors, or even established thespians who want to further improve their craft, is its rigorous “character arc”: The lawyer starts out super-cool and ultra-confident, but when he gets on the bad side of the real “experts,” who abduct his fiancée (Cruz), he’s reduced to whimpering grief.

He tries to work out a compromise, but is shocked to discover that no such “solution” is to be had, and has to live with his unbearable loss.

This tragic denouement requires the actor to end up as the very opposite of his initial projection and the extremely wide arc that he has to navigate teaches other actors a lot about the total commitment that thespians need to make if they want to do full justice to their assigned role’s “possibilities.”

Pitt’s thespic challenge in “The Counselor” is instructively different: He plays his wheeler-dealer character lightly and even casually most of the time he’s onscreen, because he thinks that his meticulous escape plan will get him through any danger.

Little does he realize, however, that even a “master” conniver like himself can’t hope to play with the really big boys—and he learns that lesson the hard way. Given that character arc, Pitt has to play it cool and blithe for the most part, and scores thespic points by astutely focusing on subtle, revealing details, the insightful “edgework” that makes for great texture in performance.

Brash character

For his part, Bardem is given a big, brash character to portray as Fassbender’s criminal “connection,” and as Diaz’s boyfriend. His specific acting challenge is to play the weary master of crime—while actually knowing very little at all, since it soon turns out that his girlfriend has been pulling the wool over his eyes all this time, and is in fact the master criminal of them all.

Thus, it eventually emerges that Diaz has the most daunting thespic challenge of them all, because at film’s end, her character is a far cry from the silly, shallow seductress she portrayed at film’s start.

Diaz’s thespic achievement is made even more notable by the fact that, for most of her stellar career, she has been typecast in “sexy bimbo” roles. Well, no longer: The actress is such a “sinister” revelation here that it’s certain that she will no longer be dismissed as a sexy screen bimbo—ever again!