Thank you for the summary
@Blue Gem Muslim Queen - I tried to watch it but Ollie framing talking through his approach as "pro analysis" made me cringe too much.
It's interesting that we mostly guessed his reference points. This does explain why Matthias Schoenaerts hushed someone on the set of Django who was trying to move on production and said what Ollie was saying was important. We've clearly got an insight into what he's like on set, breathlessly communicating the choices he's making and throwing out references to theory, in a way that might make make more seasoned actors feel a twinge of sympathy.
I'll admit I'm somewhat impressed at the gall he has to claim that most of his recent performances were deliberately bad because the characters were supposed to be putting on an unconvincing front. Which kind of works for his weird pirate character. But for everything else, he's just so hammy and overacted. If you think of something like, say, Lauren Bacall in
To Have and Have Not unsuccessfully attempt to play the innocent because she's rattled that Humphrey Bogart has spotted her steal a wallet; that's a convincing scene, you can believe the character is trying to be convincing but failing. Or a more accessible example, Helena Bonham Carter playing
Hermione Granger playing Bellatrix Lestrange unconvincingly - it's a fantastic piece of acting because you forget you're not just watching Emma Watson since Helena nailed her mannerisms, and likewise this is how you'd imagine Hermione trying to be Bellatrix. I picked those examples because they're both a bit stylised, whether it's slightly more theatrical film noir acting or Harry Potter's less grounded in reality universe.
Meanwhile, Dracula's Ex-Girlfriend? People don't act like that even if they're being phoney. Its compounded by his completely inauthentic "mask slip" moments. Nothing about his performance is authentic. You as an audience member do not feel you're watching a damaged woman pretend to be a joyous lascivious slut, you're very aware you're watching an actor deliver a shitty performance.
As for his glossing over "non-cognitive responses"... a good performance gets the audience invested in the story and provokes authentic emotions. You're supposed to evoke an empathetic response in the audience. The cognitive response would be poring over acting choices in a scene and going "oh the way the character is moving through the space is a really interesting choice by the actor" but you're not generally watching something to focus on
why the actors are making the acting choices they are, but instead having an affective response. Maybe a cognitive response on top of that ("Why is she acting so suspicious... oh maybe she knows who killed the butler!") but certainly not one about the actor. But it doesn't matter that he chose to flick his chin, stand contraposto and widen up to hiss because he was basing Bella's physicality off of a snake, because he overegged it and it was a shit performance. Recognising it as a shit performance does not mean the audience cannot understand why he made those choices and what his character's motivations were (which is what Ollie implies), he overacted and exaggerated them in a way that was tonally dissonant and came across as unconvincing.
Maybe Ollie's narc empathy is so blunted that he genuinely can't "get" that. Narcs struggle with affective empathy - they might logically understand what someone is feeling or might feel, but they don't "feel" it. They don't see a loved one is sad, feel sad and instinctively want to comfort them (although they might ask how they are, because they know that's a thing they're supposed to do - the trick is they'll only do it the once to "tick it off", or only do it when they've got an audience).
If Ollie doesn't really get emotional responses from movies, I guess he'd just be analysing the characters. "Ah yes, the actress is cowering and looking at the ground in this scene, she must be communicating that this character is scared". That actually goes a long way to explaining his acting choices. Stuff like his 24 hour Shakespeare stream or that recent "one take" YouTube video is a piece of hard work he achieved, and he's extrapolating that to acting. "Good" acting is when an actor has constructed an elaborative narrative about a character and then made a series of rehearsed movement decisions on how to embody it. Whether or not it is a successful performance is not something he can parse. He said his lines in the way he decided his character would say them, he moved around in the way he decided his character would move around, he's making his face look angry to communicate anger or look sad and is speaking softly to communicate he's sad. That means he did Good Acting. People who complain about his performance, citing some unknowable "non-cognitive response" about how he made them feel... they just don't "get it". They're just not understanding the character work he put in or they don't like his character decisions, and failing that, they're transphobic. No wonder he glossed over his explanation.
