The Actor's Blinking Syndrome

[Team Fortress Two]

TABS, for short. I made up the term. I don't think the name is official.

Anyways, when I watched Lincoln, I think I was one of those rare people who didn't "believe" in his acting.

I watched In the Name of the Father : same thing. Yes, I watched My Left Foot and thought Daniel Day-Lewis did supreme, but I don't know what went wrong. . . .

I think, most people, like me, can tell a good actor from a bad one.


By how "believable" they are to the character.


Then, I was watching 24, and noticed something similar. I liked the character, I believed in Jack Bauer and who he was, yet I felt something was off.

Then, it hit me. They blink weird. "Huh?", you may ask. Well, they don't do the normal "blinking" of 100% eyelid; they seem to use their muscles below/above to do it also, sometimes.

I was thinking, this doesn't make sense. Why would somebody doing something not normal make me think they aren't acting good? Wait. That's the reason. You can tell a good actor by their believability.

And how do you do this?
By what you see as normal (give or take) and maybe even common to humans.

Tell me if I'm not the only person out there who notices this.

[Team Fortress Two]

Originally posted by Skylx:

In Rebel Without a Cause James Dean was suppose to lunge forward aggressively towards his mother and yell at her but when he got close to her and shouted he blinked and pulled back a bit then recovered. It looked like he subconsciously didn't want to be so forceful with the actress.

But the blinking thing you mention may be due to scenes filmed at different times then edited together to appear as if its proceeding in sequence in the same moment.

I'm pretty sure Daniel Day-Lewis blinks like that normally (squeezing his eyes together instead of straight blinking). He does it in all of his movies; he does when he's getting interviewed.

Donald Sutherland does a less severe version in all the movies he's in.