If you haven’t already nominated your favorite school dance movie scenes, do that here.
I saw Hit Man in theaters last month, the Netflix co-production from Richard Linklater about a mild-mannered college professor who poses as a hitman. Hit Man is an inoffensive, moderately charming comedy-noir, not quite hitting the heights of something like The Nice Guys (2016) but thankfully avoiding the lows of a genre now dominated by Mark Wahlberg and Kevin Hart. While watching Hit Man, I was struck by a sense of familiarity. Not by the plot, which is inspired by a true story, or even by Glen Powell (Top Gun, the poster for Twisters). But by Glen Powell’s acting. Something’s changed since he played the smooth-talking baseball player Finn in Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! His acting’s gotten a whole lot more vertical. Zoomed in. Shoulder-up. He’s doing TikTok acting.
If you’ve escaped the phenomenon of acting on TikTok, here’s a crash course. Acting trends and challenges thrive on the app, where creators can use audio samples to lip sync along to song lyrics or movie dialogue. The vertical format means that TikTok acting is focused primarily on the face, with hands only visible if they’re gesticulating around the upper half of their body. I first became aware of the popularity of TikTok acting around the time of the mafia trend, which I can only describe as the self-tape someone with no sense of shame would make for a Sopranos theme park casting call.
You’ll see the key hallmarks of TikTok acting in these videos. The scenes are short, almost ambient, and the acting is characterized by broad expressions. Physical gestures are constant, but tied to specific words and beat drops, rather than meaning, narrative flow, or character. You can see how this translates to the big screen in this scene from He’s All That, the Netflix remake of certified high school prom movie She’s All That (1999), starring one of TikTok’s biggest stars in Addison Rae and the guy from everyone’s favorite YouTube original series, Cobra Kai. The TikTok background is obvious in Rae’s acting, from the exaggerated shrugs and side-glances to the flat affect.
I’m not going to be an old man yelling at clouds. TikTok acting is not inherently bad (despite the persuasive evidence I just gave you), it’s just another style of acting. Acting trends come and go, and rarely is the change without controversy, as evidenced by the mostly apocryphal story of Sir Laurence Olivier chiding method actor Dustin Hoffman with, “My dear boy, why don’t you try acting?” Acting evolves with the technology we have to capture it; whether that’s sound, or motion-capture, or vertical framing. This isn’t a dismissal of an acting style simply because it’s new or popular amongst twenty-year-olds, it’s an exploration of how style can jump from mediums.
Glen Powell’s acting in Hit Man, which is unabashedly charming and even occasionally smoldering, feels built for the vertical lens. As the even-keeled Gary, his expressions favor comic broadness and obvious legibility, rather than character specificity, and he doesn’t leave much room for audience interpretation. There’s consistency within scenes, but little visible narrative of growth or development across the movie, besides what he tells us is happening in The Informant!-esque monologues. There is no point in Hit Man when you question Gary’s goals or emotions. Every decision is plain on his face.
But that’s the point. For much of Hit Man, Powell is undercover as a series of various assassins that he creates based on stock tropes. He’s not supposed to seamlessly blend into these characters, we’re supposed to tell he’s pretending to be Tilda Swinton if she were cast as Anton Chigurh. For a modern audience, TikTok acting is the fastest way to transcribe these dual realities of his character. The contradictory dimensions of Gary’s personality, like his desire for excitement but fear of uncertainty, are not layered on top of each other. They don’t emerge unevenly as his circumstances change, revealing piece by piece his inner desires. Instead Powell plays his character’s conflicting motivations next to each other, in constant competition but always visible — a duet, to borrow the parlance of the app.
In a landscape dominated by moody, internal young actors, Powell stands in sun-drenched contrast. He does not bury his feelings, he doesn’t brood. He plays characters with unabashed desires, and his acting is all up front — in his endless rows of American white teeth, the smug crooked smile, his dry, clear Texan diction. The music that goes viral on TikTok is confessional, direct, and instantly legible. The acting matches.
At some point, Hollywood will need to contend with a generation of aspiring actors who have gotten their start on social media, and are self-trained to express themselves vertically. There’s already an influx of TikTok actors on both the small and big screen, although viral fame hasn’t yet translated to long-term stardom. And there’s already vertical film festivals — the first one was founded way back in 2014. I don’t think the vertical movie theater is coming to the mainstream anytime soon. But the acting already has.