Whisper Acting
We decided to watch the second season of The Wheel of Time (A fantasy adventure show on Amazon) and by the middle of the show, we were laughing our faces off. This was not because the show is funny. It is not. It takes itself very seriously. But we were cracking ourselves up due to the near universal use of Whisper Acting. The Wheel of Time is hardly the first show to go all in on Whisper Acting but they go hard and it happened to be the show where it started to become ridiculous.
We started talking about it because the dialogue was so hard to hear or understand and yet the action sequences were loud and aggressive. We’ve read many of the articles and watched the videos about the trends in sound design that make this happen and have led to an extraordinary percentage of people using the closed captions or subtitles when watching TV. It’s partly the sound design, sure — but it’s also the acting.
So many people are whispering. Like, so many. Is this what they’re teaching in acting school these days? If so, I kindly request them to stop.
Whispering is a film technique. We don’t use it in the theatre much, as we have to be heard and a stage whisper is, in fact, very demanding to do. But on film, when everyone is wearing a mic, whispering is easily done. In fact, it’s much easier than saying one’s lines full voiced, as it can cover some gaps in performance or make a line reading sound intense, without any real effort. It’s fairly easy to cover bad acting with whispering. I suspect in the case of The Wheel of Time, it’s not because the director is trying to cover bad acting — because they’re all very good otherwise — but maybe because they think the whispering makes things seem more dramatic or intimate? Or maybe because it’s the trend of the current moment? Or maybe everyone’s afraid of using their voices now? I don’t know why they do it but I do know I felt a palpable relief whenever anyone used their actual full voice in this show.
The extra difficulty with everyone whispering in a fantasy show is that there are a lot of made-up words, a lot of made-up names and places and when we can’t really hear the sounds of those made-up places or people, we have no idea what or who anyone is talking about. That’s when it starts to become funny. That’s when we start whispering to each other. (“Where did he say he was going?” “I don’t know. It was so quiet, sounded like stosthiesfdfkha?”) That’s why when there was a long lead up to a scene between the Aes Sedai and her warder, I couldn’t resist adding some whispered dialogue as it ramped up, saying “I can’t wait to have a dramatic whisper scene where we just whisper angrily at each other.” Then the warder came in and he started whispering, and we fell out of our chairs laughing. It got even funnier when the whispering man banged his fist on the table in the middle of whispering. Like, you’re not trying to be quiet, obviously. This is just too funny. We missed the whole scene, we were laughing so hard. I don’t think that’s what the showrunners were going for.
One of our favorite whispered moments was when a big group of guys were riding their horses through some dry hills. Despite the fact that horses are loud and the outdoors eats sound, these guys were still whispering to each other. That one wasn’t just funny, it stretched the bounds of credulity. Just a bunch of dudes whispering on horseback as their horses loudly clip-clop over the ground.
Listen, I understand the power of a whisper. My favorite technique for getting a room to quiet down is just to make little whispering sounds because almost everyone wants to know the secret and a whisper sounds like a secret. But if you whisper all the time, you lose all the whisper’s power. If you whisper all the time, people will stop listening — especially if you’re telling us about (inaudible) who is going to (inaudible) in order to rescue (inaudible).
Please Film and TV makers, I beg of you, save your whispers for only the moments in which they are absolutely necessary. It’s become a style of acting now somehow and it’s just silly to keep doing it. If whispering is all your actors can do, get better actors! Or else I’m just going to laugh through your very serious shows.
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