MovieChat Forums > Jamie Clayton Discussion > Sorry, but her performance in this serie...

Sorry, but her performance in this series is awful.


I don't know, maybe it's Lana and the emotional history they share, who knows, but she is SO bad in this it's hard to believe anyone could think otherwise. I'd like to root for her success, but as filmmakers its unfair to your audience and art to make casting choices based on politics rather than performance.

I am living in the Bay Area and love how gay Sense8 is. John Toll's credit sequence that starts and ends in SF after flying around the world 100 times is magnificent and my favorite subplot is the Mexican beard menage e trois, so my judgement of her is totally not political for me. Maybe this lady needs some training or to work with other directors, but I just hope she doesn't listen to the sycophants and activists who are showering her with praise here and likely elsewhere, and knuckles down and gets to work on her craft.

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I don't agree actually.
Yes her acting may have seemed a bit wooden and withheld and you might not think she was fully inside her character, but she is playing the part of someone who was undermined by her own mother, attacked by her friends acquaintances and only really supported by her lover. She was defensive, self-doubting, trying to be strong but accustomed to being put down, trying not to internalise that experience but inevitably having some of it touch deeply and hurt her.
This sort of experience can create emotional distance and lead to controlled behaviour in real people. I thought she got this background across exceedingly well and responded realistically to the drama with grit determination and restrained emotional responses.

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Sorry, I have to disagree, but I've never seen her before and have nothing to compare to.

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I felt a lot of emotion from her portrayal of Nomi,
I think she was really wonderful.

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I agree with you. Her acting was so bad that it was actually distracting for me during the first couple episodes, but I'm now 6 episodes into the series and it's not bugging me so much. Either I've just really gotten into the show, or her acting chops have improved considerably after a few episodes.

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Ots terrible, directors just pushing their own mental health / crossed wires into the show.

The whole gay pride/ tranny angle is so pathetic.

Dobt mind the African guy who lives in a country whete AIDS is rife, people are killed for nothing, almost no way to escape and people simply starve to death. BUT OMG people "dying" for the gay cause / im a miss understood transvestite, cut me a bloody break, some people in the world (Africa) struggle to survive on a daily with out worrying about your bs first world problems.

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Her performance is actually fantastic. This is the first time ever that a transgender character is portrayed by an actual transgendered actress as well as being directed by a transgendered director. I myself am a trans lesbian and have watched pretty much every movie I could find about the subject, always written and directed by men or women who appear to have little or no knowledge of what it actually means to be transgendered and casting either men dressed up like women or CIS women pretending to be trans when there are many talented transgendered actors and actresses out there that could competently play these roles.

Many of her scenes in Sense8 finally touched on what it truly feels like and the emotions I've personally went through in my life which brought me to tears many times during the course of the series. It's extremely uplifting and empowering to see such a wonderful performance that truly nails it on the head finally.

Being transgendered is finally gaining acceptance and understanding, although at a very slow pace, and there is a lot of confusion about what being trans really means. Since they always lump it in the LGBT grouping, many people confuse gender identity as having something to do with sexual orientation, which are two totally separate things in every person on this planets life. In Sense8 I feel that they did a good job of keeping those two things as each being looked at separately. I was extremely excited when I heard that Andy had come out as Lilly now, so we now have the Wachowski Sisters. I went to film school and got a degree in Film production because I was so inspired by the movie Bound when they were still the Wachowski Brothers.

Very excited that we are going to see more of this great show in season 2!

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I agree with you, scarletnow77, Jamie is terrific in the role. I worked with a transgendered woman who was lesbian and love your comments. Gender identy and sexual orientation are separate and Sense8 is enlightening an international audience.

By the way, I actually met an interviewed the Wachowski sisters years ago when they were male-identified during their work on Bound. I found them amazing.

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Actually Laverne Cox was the first transgendered actress to assay a trans role, in Orange is the New Black. And her acting is far superior to Clayton's (who didn't start acting until her 30s... it shows in her wooden performance, which has nothing to do with the character's insecurity and repression).

Zackary Drucker, in a supporting role, performed in TransParent in 2014 (as did Ian Harvey, a trans man). Michelle Hendley also played a trans character in the charming LGBT coming-of-age comedy Boy Meets Girl in 2014.

And while it's gratifying to see more trans performers succeeding, that shouldn't minimize the remarkable performances by many cis performers from Felicity Huffman to John Cameron Mitchell to Jeffrey Tambor. Or for that matter, the many straight roles played by LGBT performers. If we insisted that every role be played by a person of that gender/color/sexuality, well, we wouldn't have color blind casting. Can't have it both ways, despite affirmative action, lol.

And "competently" playing roles sometimes isn't sufficient. I want brilliant performances.

A good actor/actress is a good actor/actress. BTW, you might want to search clips of the marvelous trans cabaret artist Justin Vivian Bond aka Kiki, whose has dazzled audiences for two decades.

More to your point, it's important to see trans directors succeeding and bringing their unique visions/perspectives to the screen.

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