“No emotion at all”: The actor that Dave Grohl thought was terrible
There’s the common belief that every musician wants to be an actor and every actor wants to be a musician. While some artists like Jared Leto have been able to have their cake and eat it too when it comes to record sales and major blockbusters, Dave Grohl has always been more than happy to get goofy when he cameos in movies, usually playing the goofy counterpoint to Tenacious D in their films or getting up to goofy shenanigans in his music videos. Even if he doesn’t consider himself the best actor in the world, he knows he’s ten times better than some of the leading men in Hollywood.
When looking at Grohl’s “acting method”, a lot of it comes from him being an absolute goofball whenever the camera is on. There might be a few more serious videos in the group’s catalogue, like the cinematic shots in ‘The Pretender,’ but anyone who played the captain in ‘Learn to Fly’ or was willing to ham it up on ‘Long Road to Ruin’ isn’t someone that’s looking to generate any Oscar buzz for his specific thespian chops.
Even when the band made their own vanity project horror movie, Studio 666, Grohl was shocked that they even managed to make something that had so much of a budget behind it. That didn’t mean that they were suddenly going to take things seriously. They may have had actors who knew what they were doing, like Jenna Ortega and Will Forte, but looking at any frame of Grohl in the movie will tell you that he’s clearly having a lot of fun with the whole thing.
This is strange, considering how serious his background is with Nirvana. Half of the grunge icons’ greatest works came from them delving into dark topics, and most of the best movies from the time reflected that as well. While Cameron Crowe’s Singles managed to capture the Seattle scene perfectly, almost by complete accident, seeing movies that became popular around that time, like Fight Club, became the unofficial bible for the tortured teenage boy who felt no one understood them.
And it’s not like the movie doesn’t hold up, either. The dichotomy of Edward Norton and Brad Pitt going back and forth inside one guy’s head is still one of the better ways of depicting the voice inside your head leading you to violence but looking back on some of the biggest movies from around that time, Grohl felt that Pitt was far from the actor’s actor that he was made out to be.
Despite having some of the biggest blockbusters of the time to his name, Grohl made it abundantly clear that Pitt was far from his favourite actor, saying, “I think Brad Pitt is fucking horrible. I think he is such a bad actor. There are times when the audience can’t even understand what he’s saying. It’s so monotone – no emotion at all. It’s like listening to Stephen Hawking’s junior buddy computer explaining the theory of relativity.”
But that might be selling Pitt a bit too short. There are times when playing the stoic badass can get monotonous, but ever since the late 1990s, he has grown into one of the more adventurous A-listers in the industry, whether that’s making Once Upon a Time in Hollywood or trying his hand at making an action movie like Bullet Train.
So, really, talking about Pitt’s years as a badass heartthrob is like judging Grohl’s career based solely on his work as the drummer behind Kurt Cobain. There was certainly some noteworthy to be found there, but if you stop after Nirvana ended, you’re drastically underselling what he can do.
