Where There's a Wil

From time to time, I visit Wil Wheaton's website. You know Wil Wheaton. He's the one who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Legions of Star Trek fans hated him because, even if the fan base consisted largely of geeks, a geek never wants to see a smarter geek, especially a prodigy.

If you know Star Trek, you know that Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek based Wesley Crusher on himself. Roddenberry was, apparently, a bright kid, and wanted a character that was also smart. His full name is Eugene Wesley Roddenberry, though surely he would have preferred the name Crusher, which to him, was surely ever so much more masculine than Roddenberry.

Wil Wheaton left the show around the fourth season or so, partly because the producers wouldn't give him time to act in films, and partly because the fan despised him.

He's done a fair bit to rehabilitate his image with his website, though, as any visitor to his website can attest, it hasn't produced a lot of acting opportunities. To Wil's credit, he seems to be a real geek, creating and managing the website himself. I doubt too many celebrities understand the ins-and-outs of maintaining a website as much as Wil.

The acting business, to me, in a nutshell, is learning to feel your emotions on screen. An actor needs to be able to summon these emotions on demand, and so, unlike the rest of the populace, they don't need to hide their emotions as much. The rest of us learn to repress those feelings. It's not that we do it deliberately. It's just that actors have more incentive not to hide it.

True, not every actor is that good at it, and there are stoic actors, as well as emotive ones.

You can, for instance, get this sense just by how Wil reacts to the illness of his cats. Having owned no pets nor grown up with any (though for a few years, one of my roommates had a cat), I can't attest to the feelings one can have to a pet. I know there are plenty of owners that are very attached. Yet, I'm sure there are many who see a pet as a pet.

Wil is clearly in the first camp, and I wonder if it's because he's an actor. It's possible that he's always had this kind of personality, and such personalities succeed in acting (though, again, he probably wishes he were more gainfully employed).

And that leads me to my last point. Remember how your parents told you "beauty is only skin deep", and tried to say it's what's inside that counts? While that's fundamentally true, it's not always practically true. Why can't Wil Wheaton get jobs like other actors? Perhaps it's because Wil looks like Wil. He's skinny. He's geeky. No one's going to mistake him for Russell Crowe. Heck, no one's going to mistake him for Ashton Kutcher, and that man is a goof (though his 15 minutes may be passing soon).

It's even worse in sports where players are picked based on how fast they run, how tall they are. When a coach or GM wants a player, it's not just the inside that counts, but a laundry list of physical attributes, that they often have little say about. Personality counts---I've seen it, but looks and physique obviate the need to be charming and wonderful.