Question Cordelia's failing acting career

[Ethan Reigns]

I may have fallen into the trap I was talking about earlier. In Ats, she begins in a dingy apartment with one hanging light bulb and not much else you could see. She is the typical actress of yore, parked by the telephone waiting for her agent to call. She goes to a party where she meets up with Angel again and he tells her he may have a permanent job for her. This is her beginnings in the company where no human survived. She goes to the home of a director where there are no mirrors and deduces that he is a vampire. She tries out for a commercial where she cries through the whole presentation, a weird choice and another scene where Angel pulls her off the set.. We see her successful in her own television show, Cordy, where she is the popular host. Not a bad outcome, but she left it.

Her acting career is pretty typical with a lot of simple bit parts until her TV show. Then, she is established as a competitor to Oprah, except it's not real and she returns to Angel Investigations.

 

[Anyanka Bunny Slayer]

Charisma did do a very good job of Cordelia acting badly.

Charisma wasn't acting. 😄

 

[AlphaFoxtrot]

I recall listening to one of the DVD commentaries with either Maxi or Jane who said something along the lines of, "Any of you kids who want to go into acting, take a good long look at the extras, because they all want to be actors too. That's really the problem with Cordie, she doesn't have a any high school theater experience, she didn't go to college for acting, she should be at the bottom of the food chain.

Besides, all the great talents of her generation went into either Channel Awesome or the Sand Snakes from Game of Thrones.

 

[NotASlayer]

I recall listening to one of the DVD commentaries with either Maxi or Jane who said something along the lines of, "Any of you kids who want to go into acting, take a good long look at the extras, because they all want to be actors too. That's really the problem with Cordie, she doesn't have a any high school theater experience, she didn't go to college for acting, she should be at the bottom of the food chain.

There's this bit on acting from Evil Brit on TV Tropes:

"In Hollywood at least, this may be a product of different acting traditions. Simplifying wildly, Americans go into movie acting to be rich, famous, and loved by the audience; Brits go into acting because they like acting, and some who do well at it then go to Hollywood for the money. With, on average, more training, more experience, less need to be loved, and a cheerful interest in any well-paying gig, they can often make excellent charismatic villains. Of course, it seems that there are also people in Hollywood with a cultural aversion to Britain who are all too happy to cast them in these parts."

The rough, and as it says over-simplified, result, is that someone like Cordelia has no interest in the acting bit itself, only what she can gain from the acting, and is therefore not willing to put the effort needed in to be successful. Because they have no real interest in the work and the process needed to be successful, only the end result.