Jordan Peele’s “Nope” is the closest thing to horror I had ever watched until very recently. I am not one to enjoy sitting down and watching someone get hunted down by a masked murderer. However, I made an exception for “Nope.” I had heard people sing its praises for weeks before finally getting myself a ticket to go see it. The pacing of the film was nearly perfect and the performances of both Daniel Kaluuya and Kiki Palmer were fantastic.
Being a great actor is more than just having a pretty face and being able to cry on command. It’s more than memorizing monologues or getting the blocking of the scene down perfectly. To really connect with your audience, making them feel what your character is supposed to be feeling is the gold standard. There’s something elusive about it. There are increasingly few actors who can perfectly embody the roles that they are portraying. The small habits or twitches that a character has and the distinct way of speaking all lend themselves to good acting.
I am of the personal belief that good acting should not necessarily stand out. Some of the best acting performances, in my opinion, go widely unnoticed by award ceremonies like the Oscars, such as Stephanie Hsu’s performance in “Everything Everywhere All At Once.” Kaluuya’s performance in “Nope” was also not awarded — or even nominated — at the Oscars this year, to many people’s dismay.
To properly portray emotion and be a compelling character does not require an actor to speak. Many actors who are deaf or have hearing impairments and portray characters who cannot speak display this very well. Millicent Simmonds and Keivonn Woodard are both young, deaf actors who are incredibly gifted. They are most well-known for portraying Regan Abbott in “A Quiet Place” and Sam Burrell in “The Last Of Us.” Their facial expressions and body language while acting are all that is needed to get the intentions and desires of their characters across.
Kaluuya’s performance did not seem that noticeable until my second viewing of the film. He so fully became the character of OJ, the horse trainer, that my brain forgot. OJ is a very reserved and introverted man. A man of few words. He lets his sister, Emerald, do most of the talking and stands to the side while she conducts business. OJ is perfectly content for his sister to take the reins and take a backseat in the goings on of the family business. The duo create one of the most realistic portrayals of siblings I have seen on screen in a long time. Their characters are a great example of the fact that you don’t always have to like each other to love one another. They do not always get along, far from it, but they never leave one another to deal with the family business alone. They fight and make up like siblings.
Kaluuya has built his career around his ability to play stoic characters that connect with the audience. In “Get Out,” Kaluuya’s character is not as reserved as OJ is but he is bordering on it, reacting in a very realistic way to racial microaggressions and weird goings-on around him. The subtly of Kaluuya’s facial expressions to the things unfolding around him are easily missed if you are not paying attention to his performance. As long as you are paying attention to Kaluuya’s face, you won’t miss much. He is always reacting to things going on in the scenes he partakes in, even if he is not the one the camera is focusing on.
Even Kaluuya’s more expressive roles remain fairly reserved in demeanor. So often, good acting is distilled down to who can scream the loudest or cry the saddest. If you search for “Best Acting Compilation” on YouTube, you will find dozens upon dozens of videos with clips of angry men yelling at other people. Good acting is so much more than that, more than just getting red in the face or punching through a wall. To make an acting performance connect with an audience, an actor should bring a relatable element to the performance. While yes, crying and screaming are all things that we all do from time to time, it’s refreshing to see an actor putting forth a performance that is more like your average person’s reaction.
Kaluuya’s performance brought a quiet masculinity to the role that I was not prepared for in a film like “Nope.” OJ is a good man who is good at what he does, and it shows. He has a good head on his shoulders, which is more than I can say for the vast majority of horror film protagonists. He prefers the company of his family’s horses to the other people in the film. He is a strong man who is highly skilled at his craft while not having the stereotypical toxicity that many other cowboys in the film have. His closed-off nature is less due to his masculinity and more to do with his dislike of people as a whole.
Both Kaluuya’s and Palmer’s characters are refreshing portrayals that subvert the normal behavior of people in their walk of life. They don’t live on a ranch in backwater Texas, and they don’t speak in deep southern accents. Emerald is a bright, outgoing woman who refuses to let go of her feeling that something is wrong on the ranch. Both characters are perfectly acted and have very believable motivations. The wonderful acting really brings the film together and, even though the central character of the film is a massive alien “jellyfish,” it makes the plot almost realistic.