Tommy Lee Jones’ wholly uninspiring advice for aspiring actors: “It’s called showbusiness, not show art”
As things stand, the odds of becoming a successful Hollywood actor are very slim indeed.
In fact, out of all registered actors in the US alone, fewer than one per cent will ever get to be featured in a genuine, proper movie. That doesn’t stop people dreaming, though, and so sometimes you need someone to properly stamp down on those dreams and crush them entirely, like Tommy Lee Jones.
For he is someone who, despite having made an absolute fortune and enjoyed an immensely comfortable life thanks to having become a respected film actor as far back as the 1970s, isn’t someone who would recommend acting as a vocation to anyone whatsoever, a fact he underlines by graciously being as unfriendly as possible to anyone who dares to interview him about his work.
Of course that’s not to say that TLJ isn’t very good at what he has done for a career, you don’t win an Oscar among four nominations if you don’t know your way around a movie set, and he has put in some genuinely memorable performances in some historic films, not least the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, Steven Spielberg’s epic Lincoln and 1993’s Harrison Ford thriller The Fugitive, for which the Academy handed him the ‘Best Actor’.
But all of that success over a five-decade period apparently isn’t enough to motivate TLJ to hand down some inspiring wisdom to anyone who might want to follow in his footsteps, or even have the understanding of the opportunities and luxury that the craft has brought him personally. This was underlined when he once had the begrudging chance to speak to some eager theatre students at his old college of Harvard, who were no doubt excited to have a real-life movie star come and speak to them, and equally no doubt utterly crestfallen by the end of it.
“If you have anything else you can do other than acting, do it,” Jones told them generously, a mantra he returned to several times during an hour-long question and answer session, throughout which people probably either just sighed or wandered off at some point, while their hero emphasised that acting didn’t have the security and stability of other professions.
Sprinkling even more magic on the hopes and aspirations of a future generation of stars of the silver screen, Jones also added that his own favourite film performance was “the one that appeared in the movie that made the most money. You’d just have to go back and check the numbers… It’s called show business, not show art”.
You really can’t put a price on that kind of wondrous inspiration; you can almost see the students filing miserably out of the auditorium and deciding to go and work in an office for the rest of their days if only so they can one day be as curmudgeonly as Tommy Lee Jones.
As of this year, by the way, Lee Jones has an estimated net wealth of around $100millon, which has enabled him to buy vast amounts of land in Texas, including a 3,000-acre ranch, plus he likes to play polo in his spare time and so owns a house in Argentina with loads of ponies. All this accrued through acting, which of course is a mug’s game and a waste of time, unless you’re him and you’ve already won at it.
