There is, or there should be, an unwritten rule for filmmakers: Any actors in your movie who are not playing themselves need to be less famous than any actors who are playing themselves.
I just watched the trailer for Robert De Niro’s new movie, What Just Happened?, in which he plays a Hollywood agent, managing such talent as Bruce Willis.
Actors like De Niro (and Pacino, Hoffman, Nicholson, Connery, etc.) have achieved such a status that they are essentially playing themselves in any given role anyway. Can you name, off the top of your head, any character that De Niro has played in the past ten years? No, because the characters all disappear inside the celebrity.
It is nigh-impossible for the human brain to watch a scene and say, “that’s Bruce Willis”, without also saying, “that’s Robert De Niro”. And there goes your suspension of disbelief.
There are two ways to fix this: Get someone more famous to play themselves, or make the Actor role a fictitious character. “More famous than De Niro” is a tall order, so we’re looking at option B, here.
Sidenote: I’m not a De Niro expert, but if I had to pick a time in his career where he stopped playing characters and became one himself, I’d pick Analyze This.
