LOS ANGELES: Television is increasingly opening its doors to Hollywood stars, as Monday’s Emmy Awards will attest, but TV royalty still struggle to make the transition to the silver screen.
Seasoned actors Matthew McConaughey, Kevin Spacey, Jon Voight, Jeff Daniels and Woody Harrelson are all nominated this year for Emmys after having built much of their careers in film.
McConaughey, a favorite to win a lead actor Emmy for his role in HBO crime drama 'True Detective', is riding high after winning an Academy Award for last year’s ‘Dallas Buyers Club’.
‘House of Cards’ hero/villain Spacey already has two Oscar statuettes. Voight, nominated for Showtime’s ‘Ray Donovan’, won a best actor Oscar a generation ago, while Harrelson (True Detective) is a two-time Oscar nominee.
For them, having a go in a successful broadcast or cable series adds gritty prestige to their glittering careers.
But cross-pollination in the other direction has proven more difficult.
Heart-throb George Clooney, who shot from the show ‘ER’ into the Hollywood mega-star firmament, ‘was the last one who really did it’, said Glenn Williamson, a professor at UCLA's School of Theater, Film and Television.
In contrast, though Jennifer Aniston parlayed her ‘girl next door’ appeal from hit show "Friends" into several big-screen roles, the 1990s comedy’s other stars have had stunted success in the transition.
The same holds true for stars of more recent TV mega-hits like ‘Desperate Housewives’ and ‘Lost’.
Some stars have thrived on television without ever becoming bankable in Hollywood: Julianna Margulies, David Duchovny and Robin Wright are among those who earned numerous film roles but never won the accolades there that came with TV.
With blockbuster series ‘Mad Men’ and ‘Breaking Bad’ coming to an end, it remains to be seen whether their respective stars Jon Hamm (nominated this year for best lead actor) and Bryan Cranston (also nominated, and who has already won three times) can successfully make the jump.
That leaves small-screen producers for web series, cable, video on demand and broadcast TV to pick up the slack.
The result, many argue, is high-quality television. It’s no surprise that you see movie stars of the caliber of Kevin Spacey or Matthew McConaughey on TV.
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