Movie actors are brands. Movie actors are people. Brands have to evolve or they die. Look at how Blackberry’s insistence on being the corporate business person’s favorite accessory is now dying a slow and painful death as the prehistoric, life-negative, nothing-sexy-about it tier-one smart phone in the market. I have a Blackberry, and I suffer every day as I watch my friends whirl around the web like figure skaters and I can’t even visit YouTube. The brand of an actor is no different, except that rather than a product upgrade or slick new messaging, what is required is that the actor has to grow as a human being on the inside and constantly redefine themselves, or else we’ll just get bored as they star in stupid movies, make bad personal choices, and their presence ceases to inspire us.
You heard it here first. Christian Bale’s brand hangs in the balance.
Not that

Martin Scorsese has balls. How many Italian-American directors do you know would risk making a low-budget film about Jesus Christ’s final days that not only depicted him as a man severely tempted by the perils of human weakness, but have him and the surrounding cast of legendary characters in ancient, dusty Jerusalem all speaking in American accents straight from the boroughs of New York (The Last Temptation of Christ)?
And then, how many of these Italian-American directors would later follow up with a film about the young Dalai Lama in Tibet, cast entirely by Asian actors with not a single white face in sight, all of them also speaking only in American accents (Kundun)?
Marty Scorsese, that’s who!
In all seriousness, Scorsese takes artistic and philosophical risks with his work that most directors wouldn’t even dream of doing. And most of the time, he hits his targets so hard on the