Conor McGregor’s work in the remake of the seminal film, Roadhouse (Patrick Swayze, 1989) should give any cinephile hope for the future of the craft of acting. it is, without question, the performance of the year and I, for one, was mesmerized.
From the moment you meet his character, Knox, you are assaulted by the actor’s full possession of the role. Entirely naked, McGregor drops from a balcony, having recently serviced a wayward Italian wife, and walks into the nearby bazaar. Wild-eyed and seething with mayhem, McGregor peels the clothing off a suitably sized shopper, sets the bazaar on fire, then takes a call (where he kept that phone is a mystery).
We next see McGregor swaggering into town on Glass Key, Florida, where the Roadhouse bar is being savaged by local thugs, all kept in check by Jake Gyllenhall’s character, Dalton, a murderous MMA fighter on the run from his past. Eventually, the two meet and fighting ensues for the rest of the movie.
McGregor’s choices as an actor should be considered instructive. Where a trained performer would have relied on subtle gradations of form, perhaps through minor and delicate gestures that would inform but not telescope the character’s malevolence, McGregor relies on a frank and perfunctory absence of nuance. His portrayal of a psychopathic hyper-muscular dick-forward killer comes from a place of authenticity. It is his lack of training, his lack of talent, and his lack of all faculties outside of leering that bring to life the character of Knox by, instead of portraying a sociopath, just actually being a sociopath.
Other movies have attempted to employ non-actors in key roles, with some success. Who can forget Barkhad Abdi’s role as a Bengali Pirate or R. Lee Emery as the drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket? McGregor’s Knox is as real as real could get if real was a mannequin in a forgotten 80s department store in an abandoned mall in lower Wisconsin. There is nuance. There is shading. There is homicidal glowering. McGregor never studied Stanlislavski. He is as real as a wild dog. He walks onto the set, humps everyone he sees and shits everywhere. Brilliant.