Dirk Benedict
Dirk Benedict
Dirk Benedictis an American movie, television and stage actor who played the characters Lieutenant Templeton "Faceman" Peck in The A-Team television series and Lieutenant Starbuck in the original Battlestar Galactica film and television series. He is the author of Confessions of a Kamikaze Cowboy and And Then We Went Fishing...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTV Actor
Date of Birth1 March 1945
CityHelena, MT
CountryUnited States of America
I maintain you can make a film/TV star out of a can of sardines.
I wanted to be Anthony Hopkins and ended up being neither a film star nor having a career on the stage.
Harrison Ford was pretty content as a carpenter who thought it would be nice to work on TV and ended up being the biggest film star in the history of cinema.
The only difference from one $100 million budget film to another is which of the 12 box stars are getting $20 million to be in it.
It is all about marketing; that is where the real craft comes in. The best actors do not necessarily become the biggest stars. And vice versa.
That's Hollywood. Boom! From star to forgotten actor.
As children get older, they are supposed to gradually stand more and more on their own and eventually completely leave the nest. My boys are definitely starting to do that. Soon I might actually go on a date.
I went from being a big TV star on the lot, with my own parking space, my own table in the commissary, to a complete nobody! When I went to get my stuff, they wouldn't let me on the lot.
The neurosis of all this ageism is that Harrison Ford, Eastwood, Redford, Newman, etc., etc., have been playing heartthrobs until they need more filters than a pack of Camels. And their girlfriends are in their 20s. But being a Movie Star changes all the rules.
Festivals today are driven by female perspective. My film is about heterosexual men over 40. And it was very much alone.
Sadly, there are no rules by which an actor learns his craft. Would that it were that easy. I spent four years studying acting in college and another two years in English Classical training and ended up working a lot on TV.
People think surviving cancer is tough, or surviving a divorce, but NOTHING compares with fighting with American Culture when you want to raise your kids free of junk food. Read Junk Food Nation. A great book.
Dialogue is my forte. Whether that is because I am an actor or merely talented in that regard I have no idea. Nor do I care. When I write, I always feel like I am just taking dictation-following the characters around and writing down what they say.
We had many intellectuals and industry people who looked down on us, as if it were beneath them to even watch us. Nowadays, those comparisons aren't made.