The only two movies Helena Bonham Carter can bring herself to watch: “It’s torture!”
While Helena Bonham Carter isn’t alone in her inability to watch herself on screen, her discomfort comes from a distinctive place, one rooted in all the reasons she fell in love with acting to begin with.
“For me, acting is about getting away from myself. So to look at myself is the last thing I want,” she once said, proving that, like many of her peers, Carter struggles with watching herself because she doesn’t feel like she gets anything out of it, possibly feeling like looking back at something you did when you were slightly younger: it’s not that it feels entirely unnatural and strange to revisit something you’ve done, although there’s always a bit of discomfort in that, too, but it’s more about the pointless act of spending time with something you know won’t be beneficial to you in any way, shape or form.
For Carter, watching her own stuff is the same, and typically goes against everything he loves about her job in a broader sense. For instance, she argues that acting is about escape, and if she watches her own movies, she’s doing the opposite of that.
She also feels like it wastes time because it forces her to sit with something she doesn’t need anymore, for, as she put it, “Most actors I know loathe watching themselves. It’s not like I am going to do exactly the same part next year, so what’s the point? I love acting because I love doing it. You do it so that other people can watch it if they want to watch it.”
This is interesting when you consider that, for most people, life is difficult to imagine without Carter’s movies, as her iconic characters and stories have become a major part of modern culture and a source of comfort for many, such that, whether she is playing one of Tim Burton’s quirky outcasts or more complex, troubled characters, Carter knows how to make her worlds believable and real.
But among those iconic classics, she can only bring herself to watch two of them, Planet of the Apes and Corpse Bride, and in both, she was fully concealed behind either an animalistic suit or the magic of Burton’s CGI. It makes sense, though, considering that Carter finds watching herself “torture”, as she can probably get lost in the worlds of the stories more easily without constantly picking apart every single detail and acting choice she made on set that day.
That said, there’s a deeper, more tragic side to her inability to face herself. There’s the fact that it literally takes the joy out of her job, but there’s also the countless times that she’s faced scrutiny and criticism, either about her appearance or some other aspect of her craft. Many of the films that gave her her career, including A Room with a View, Maurice and Howards End, are ones that opened her eyes to the hostility of the business and its cruel spectators.
“It’s not false modesty,” she told The Guardian, “I hated what I looked like. I did look, as somebody said, like a bloated chipmunk! I had a lot of criticism, and I’ve always been more aware of the criticism than the praise.”
On the bright side, however, Carter’s choice of maintaining a healthy distance between her acting and her projects means she’s more readily available to get under the skin of any new character, protected from the looming fear that she’ll watch herself back and feel that same sense of despair.
