Richard Dreyfuss: When Icons Unmask Their Flaws
Richard Dreyfuss, the award winning actor of more than 60 films spanning five plus decades was in the news recently, not for his acting, but for his appearance at a ticketed event in his honor at the Cabot theater in Beverly, MA. The event was billed as “An Intimate Evening With Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe-winning Actor, Richard Dreyfuss, as he shares his stories of a 40 year career in Hollywood”. Tickets ranged in price from $69 — $343 and included a screening of the 1975 film Jaws, featuring Dreyfuss.
While it might be interesting and fun to watch Jaws on a large theater screen, you can also stream Jaws for $4 and watch it from home, so those ticket-buying patrons were paying to see Dreyfuss himself. Even the lowest priced ticket was pricey for a performance that was essentially live Q&A and story-sharing. There was no live acting, singing, dancing, or musical performance.
As the event headline promised, he discussed his long acting career with the audience, but not before first appearing on stage wearing a dress and ranting over his dislikes of gays and women. The rant took the audience by surprise and was not the kind of performance they were expecting that night from the Academy Award Winner. Several patrons walked out, fairly so.
His public display of disdain left many people wondering, what was he thinking? He thought people showed up to hear his divisive opinions on humanist matters that have zero to do with why he was there in the first place? His comments weren’t spur of the moment on stage, because prior to the show he was seen shopping and trying on dresses at several places in Beverly, ultimately choosing one to wear to the event over top of his stage clothes.
Famous entertainers, like all people, form opinions about everything and anything, it’s human nature, and we are entitled to do so. Our minds are flooded daily with thoughts and judgments over events and sequences that aren’t real or are real from a distance or space that is far removed from where we physically are. Thankfully, our conscience is there to steer us back to reality, and hopefully block those biased and possibly offensive thoughts from passing our lips in a public forum, especially a forum for which we are paid to say something that is not probably offensive to at least 50% of the general population.
If you are Richard Dreyfuss, does your fan base care about those divisive opinions? Care enough to pay money to hear them live? I can’t speak for the guests directly, but I’m guessing if some of those guests had known how he would open the night, they would have chosen to spend their admission on something else instead.
People don’t fall in love with who actors really are off camera or necessarily care for their opinions about issues at large. They fall in love with the person they perceive them to be based on the roles they play over time. Even when actors are not formally performing their craft, they are still performing if it is in the public arena.
Performance isn’t about showing up as yourself.
Richard Dreyfuss, with his decades of entertainment experience, understands the importance of a good performance, especially paid performance. Performance isn’t about showing up as yourself. A performance, like the event at the Cabot that was marketed and ticketed in advance, is about showing up in a way that is aligned to what the audience is expecting.
That he would blow off his tacit obligation to the fans who paid to see and experience Richard Dreyfuss, the Actor, live, and instead show up as Richard Dreyfuss, the Old Cranky Guy, ranting over divisive and provocative thoughts and dispelling irrelevant opinions is arrogant and hubristic.
I recall a similar case with another actor, Hugh Grant. He made a career playing handsome and dashing men in movies like Four Weddings and a Funeral, Sense and Sensibility, Notting Hill, even Bridget Jones’s Diary, if you can warp Daniel Cleaver’s self absorbed character into dashing and handsome. Naturally, when Hugh Grant appears publically not in formal character, we expect him to be somewhat similar to the characters he’s played in the past.
When Hugh Grant revealed himself to be the Old Cranky Guy during a live interview at the Oscars in 2023, he lost a lot of the appeal that his fans perceived him to have based on the roles he’s played. Maybe he didn’t want to be interviewed that night, that’s understandable, the Oscars interview line does look tiring. However, he did show up to the event voluntarily, he wasn’t dragged or forced that we know of. He could have just as easily pre-planned some answers to the usual red carpet interview questions that would have perpetuated the perception we have, er, had, of his dashing existence.
And what does a guy like Hugh Grant or Richard Dreyfuss have to be angry about anyway? As a gendered species, they live and thrive in a world created by them, for them. They get paid well for their craft and seemingly have a good life. There’s far worse to be cranky about.
Tom Cruise is another actor who had his own share of revealing his inner self as his outer self, when in 2005 in an interview with NBC, he criticized Brooke Shields over her use of antidepressant drugs to alleviate her postpartum depression after the birth of her baby. He came across as peevish and ignorant, and at odds with the public perception of him as the suave mega movie star we had come to expect.
After the backlash, he later apologized for his remarks. Nowadays, when he’s making a public appearance, he plays the role we expect him to play, the good guy who signs autographs and poses for pics with his fans. He probably has many sharp opinions about all kinds of things that his fans wouldn’t necessarily agree with, and he smartly keeps them to himself.
Back to Richard Dreyfuss. He made a name for himself as a performer, i.e. one who performs. So much so that some people paid a few hundred dollars to listen to him talk about his performance career. Instead of giving the audience what they wanted and paid for, he showed up as himself, and boldly and stupidly showcased his small-minded thinking.
If he hadn’t been a well-known actor with a fan following, he never would have had that opportunity to show up as himself in the first place.
It’s always a little disappointing to discover someone we admire is different from what we perceive them to be. I can’t watch his movies the same way again, which is a shame because his filmography is impressive.
What’s my favorite Dreyfuss movie? It has to be Stand by Me. He says so little in it. And now that I know what he really thinks about women, the less he says, the better.
