Coolness and Autonomy: The Paradox of Trying Too Hard
On the set of The Thomas Crown Affair, director Norman Jewison became increasingly frustrated with his star actor Steve McQueen. Jewison kept imploring him to play the role with more visible charisma, more swagger. McQueen refused. He underplayed everything. He let silences hang. He did less when the script called for more. Jewison’s frustration reportedly reached a boiling point just before he watched the dailies. It was then that he could see that McQueen, by refusing to perform coolness, had become the most magnetic thing on screen. It wasn’t a technique or performance. He seemed constitutionally uninterested in trying to impress anyone, and that particular quality, that specific absence, turned out to be the thing nobody could look away from. We recognize this dynamic instantly when we see it. The person at the party trying too hard to seem indifferent, the band making a show of not caring about record sales, the startup founder who won’t stop telling you how little they care about what VCs think. An obvious attempt to seem cool and detached …
