Just thinking out loud here about the theory that certain actors have no self – which makes them brilliant at playing other people, but leaves them dangerously empty at the end, as it were, of the day. These people – parasitically, I guess – use their successive roles to assume, to inhabit, an identity, but eventually their sense of emptiness draws them toward heroin as another (more reliable) filler…
See, first, druggy Peter Sellers:
[Jonathan] Miller — who had been a member of the “Beyond the Fringe” team, another 60s quartet influenced by Sellers and the Goons — called the actor “a receptacle rather than a person. And whatever parts he played completely filled the receptacle, and then they were drained out. And the receptacle was left empty and featureless. Like a lot of people who can … change their characters, he could do so because he hadn’t any character himself.” (Kubrick famously said, “There is no such person as Peter Sellers.”) [Peter] Hall adds this cogent caveat: “It’s not enough in this business to have talent. You have to have the talent to handle the talent, and that, I think, Peter did not have.”
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Then see these thoughts on Philip Seymour Hoffman in the New Yorker:
[Sometimes] the price of remarkable creative vitality is a wasting away of mortality. Or, to put it another way: without the need to flee from pain by transfiguring it, you would not have the energy to endure the suffering, the solitude, and the uncertainty that are part and parcel of artistic expression.
This comes dangerously close, I know, to the banal romantic notion that all genuine artists must suffer, which is accurate only in the sense that people are by definition gregarious and that making art, even if you are an actor plunging, in public, down into your depths, is solitary, even asocial, in its untrammelled freedom. Still, the link between suffering and creativity seems less romantic than pragmatic. There is something to Aristophanes’ satiric parable in which humans were once whole and were then split down the middle, and thus spent their lives seeking their other half. We would not love or desire if we had everything we needed. Some artists, like Hoffman, would not escape into their creations if art did not mend what life had painfully shattered.
It’s a different model, I realize. Sellers, we hear from his friends (and he said it himself) had no self at all; Hoffman, by this account, had half of one.
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UPDATE: Russell Brand:
In spite of his life seeming superficially great, in spite of all the praise and accolades, in spite of all the loving friends and family, there is a predominant voice in the mind of an addict that supersedes all reason and that voice wants you dead. This voice is the unrelenting echo of an unfulfillable void.