When I watch Shakespearean actors, or stage actors, I have great respect for the difficulty in what they do. That said, movie acting, with multiple cuts and the lack of pressure of a live audience doesn’t seem nearly as impressive. There are many former athletes who have gone on to significant success in television or movie acting, and they clearly weren’t spending years honing their craft as actors. I’m sure there’s a significant gulf between the best movie actors and the average Hollywood and television actors, but it seems to me that we’ve overblown the difficulty of what many actors do.
CGI is at the cusp of making the movie/TV actor the next buggy whip maker! And acoustic technology is at the point where we can reconstruct the voices of say John Wayne & Merle Oberon.
It can’t happen soon enough!
I’m impressed when actors and actresses can perform well in one sustained scene, filmed by one camera, but such scenes are rare.