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One of 2018’s Best and Most Nuanced Performances Has Been Happening on WWE (And No, This is Not a Joke)

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Posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2018 by Siddhant Adlakha
 

Blocking the Beast

Heyman wouldn’t feel out of place on Broadway, but he feels like a born filmmaker too. With a creative say in the goings-on of the company, at least as it pertains to his own work and the way Brock Lesnar is booked, his interview segments have a visual panache that clashes with WWE’s “live sports broadcast” aesthetic. An approach in blocking and framing that Heyman carries across months and years as he builds his relationship with Brock Lesnar.
An interview segment from February 2017 sees Paul Heyman positioned behind Lesnar, who moves toward the camera, which in turn presses in on him. The “advocate” Heyman is off in the background, sometimes moving to be seen from behind Lesnar, as if speaking from over his shoulder. But for the most part, he remains hidden by the foregrounded wrester, as if speaking his doctrine through him (you can watch it for yourself in the video above).
The following November, Heyman cut another promo for a big match, this time sans the champion (and outside his locker room), in which Heyman is the one creeping toward camera. All he technically needed to do was stand still and say the words (as is the case with many of these backstage “exclusives”), but he begins at a safe distance before eventually enveloping the frame as a means of intimidation:
 
I’ll elaborate on what he says in a moment, but consider his blocking, as if calling back to the February interview and commenting on the characters being tethered to one another. Brock Lesnar’s name hovers constantly above Heyman’s shoulder.
There’s a creative tension built into this contrast, embodied by last week’s exchange: “You work for me. I don’t work for you.” While both men end up enveloping the frame in each scene, they also end up obscuring one another, in a long-running tale that came to a head just last week. While they began as allies, side by side, their eventual implosion stemmed from the conflict surrounding which of them ought to take precedence in the relationship: should Brock Lesnar’s every whim and fancy be catered to, thus erasing Heyman’s very existence? Or should Lesnar listen to Heyman’s requests to appear on stage, despite his obstinacy?
Who, in this dynamic, works for whom? As halves to a whole, this has always been the central question of their relationship, told visually over the course of three interviews, the last of which sees Heyman sitting alone, surrounded by darkness. Setup. Reminder. Payoff.

Brief Notes on Acting

Daniel Kaluuya is one of cinema’s best working actors. The Get Out star exemplifies what it means to perform for the camera, mapping out his every thought without needing to speak it. My favourite example of Kaluuya’s work comes in Black Panther, where his character W’Kabi approaches Black Panther with a spring in his step, asking if his father’s killer has been brought to justice as promised. When the Panther admits to having failed, Kaluuya’s excitement shifts to a cold, hard stare of disappointment. It’s a pivotal scene, setting up a future conflict in which Black Panther is overthrown, and W’Kabi’s motivation can be felt in this very moment.
Most character-driven stories are about change, but overarching change rarely feels satisfying without the micro-changes along the way, changes that are often non-verbal. “Acting is reacting,” per conventional wisdom; Michael Caine once famously complained to a director that his character had nothing to say, to which the director responded:

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“Of course, you have something to say. You’ve got wonderful things to say. But you sit there and listen, thinking of wonderful things to say, and then you decide not to say them. That’s what you’re doing in that scene.”
It might sound ludicrous, but as a theatre actor and director myself, I often suggest that aspiring actors look to Heyman’s performances for instruction like acting teachers do Michael Caine’s. Returning to the clip at the very top of this article, it’s neither Heyman’s hunched-over posture nor his unshaven face that draw us in, though they most certainly build intrigue since they depart from his usual appearance. Rather, it’s the moment his teary eyes first meet interviewer Renee Young’s, as she refers to Brock as Heyman’s “client” for the first time since the duo’s breakup. Heyman’s response tells a story of uncertainty, in a way no verbal explanation of the prior week’s events can possibly hope to.
But of course, reacting non-verbally isn’t enough in many cases. Reactions built in to dialogue delivery are often the crux of drama, or at least the mechanism by which drama is delivered (cue the “fuck, fuck, fuck” scene from The Wire, which uses nonsense dialogue as a vehicle for tone and subtext) and Heyman masters this element of performance too.
Anthony Hopkins is known for reading dialogue over hundreds of times, resulting in performances like in Westworld, where each thought feels carefully considered and the impact of each word dissected, as if in search of its true meaning. When there’s a clarity of motivation, the words themselves cease to be a blueprint; the instructions are what’s between them. Heyman’s promos, like the aforementioned locker room clip, follow a similar pattern. Each word and its impact feels meticulously pondered, emphasized as if with pointed intent. 80 seconds in to the clip, he says “I dropped to my knees and thanked God,” an expression reserved for gratitude, but his venomous delivery of the word “God” denotes the religious scale of the conflict he’s selling.

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