Acting!

Rob Gronkowski is a fine football player, a future Hall-of-Famer, but his acting, well, it’s a less hall of fame worthy if you go by his commercials for USAA co-starring Sam Elliott that I have been repeatedly forced to endure the last five months during college football games. It’s Oscar nomination day, a day when acting becomes paramount, or more precisely, good acting becomes paramount, and yet, rather than write about any of the nominees, as one traditionally might, I could not stop thinking about Gronkowski and Elliott and how those USAA ads succinctly summarize good acting and bad acting 30 or so seconds at a time.

Academy members like to reward performances where you can really see the performance, figuratively speaking, which is why actors in biopics, or actors putting themselves through some sort of palpable physical transformation, frequently earn nominations, and why Hollywood’s resident experts on acting as being, like, say, Sam Elliott, rarely do. But then, they are all professionals, and whether the acting is more ostentatious or unobtrusive, they have sanded away the rough edges. Gronkowski, on the other hand, is all rough edges; in each of these ads, you can see the performance, literally speaking. He knows he is on camera and overcompensates for it, like Jack Donaghy with two coffee cups, so that you can virtually see him thinking his lines as he says them, causing them all to come out stiff. And because he is concentrating so hard on his lines, he never relaxes his body, causing it to also be rendered stiff, both details amalgamating into an unfortunate embodiment of wooden acting. 

I don’t mean to drag Gronk, I really don’t, because he’s an amateur and he’s not really trying to do anything other than get paid for shilling something. It’s just, his poor acting becomes such a useful counterpoint to Elliott. Opposite the stilted Gronk, you will never more clearly see how effortless, how natural, Elliott is as an actor. Gronk is like seeing a suit that is still being tailored, a performance that is all pins and sewing tape, whereas in Elliott’s performance, all those pesky seams disappear. And if you say, well, Sam Elliott is just playing himself, hey, so’s Gronk, and he can’t do it, can he?