The Cameos You Almost Miss: When Writers Turn Up on Screen

Writing is Acting by Another Name

My wife spots him first while my attention is focused on the bucket of theatre popcorn (medium, salt and caramel mix).

I look up and there he is. Pico Iyer, great travel writer, essayist, novelist, columnist, humanist, and in recent years, friend and correspondent. While the rest gasp when Timothee Chalamet appears in Marty Supreme, we gasp when Pico does.

He looks comfortable as Ram Sethi, world TT official. Pico plays table tennis regularly in Japan where he lives. He wonders in Autumn Light, if he could “have ever foreseen, in bright youth, that my ideal of an exhilarating Saturday night would one day involve hitting ping pong balls…”

He learned that competition can be “an act of love,” as he says in one of his popular TED Talks (watched by millions). Director Josh Safdie watches, too, and, as Pico writes in the New York Times: “(Josh) had come away thinking that no-one might be better suited to playing a humourless, uptight, domineering British ping-pong official in 1952, trying to contain a feisty and impudent upstart from New York based on the ping-pong legend Marty Reisman.”

Back from the movie, I write to Pico, congratulating him and saying that in the period of the movie, an Indian, Ranga Ramanujam, had indeed been the president of the International Table Tennis Federation.

“Now I realise that Josh Safdie must have been even wiser in casting me than I knew!” he writes back.

As Pico says, “I’d always felt that writing is acting by another name; even in non-fiction, I’m trying to get into a foreign soul by finding the corner in me that rhymes with something in him.”

Perhaps that explains why writers take on acting roles. Spotting a cameo has been a pastime of mine. I remember John le Carre in one of his movies, sitting at a restaurant across where the action is taking place. I watched Lawrence of Arabia multiple times to catch George Plimpton as a Bedouin running across the desert (I didn’t succeed!).

Plimpton had a role in Good Will Hunting as a psychiatrist. And in Warren Beatty’s Reds, with another writer Jerzy Kosiński who told Beatty the latter was having a panic attack. Beatty said later, “I found that my feet were sweating profusely…Kosiński was hiding under the table pouring hot tea into my shoes very gradually.” I don’t know if that story is true, but it ought to be.

Truman Capote plays the eccentric millionaire Lionel Twain in Murder by Death, his blind butler played by Alec Guinness. Martin Amis writes in his autobiography, Experience, of playing a boy in High Wind in Jamaica. “I talentlessly played one of the children…. I played chess with my co-star, the consistently avuncular Anthony Quinn….” During filming, puberty hit, and Amis’ voice had to be overdubbed—with that of a young girl’s.

The cast of Then She Found Me included Helen Hunt, Bette Midler and Matthew Broderick. And Salman Rushdie as Dr Masani, an obstetrician not using enough gel while operating an ultrasound machine.

Norman Mailer appears in Ragtime, Gore Vidal in Gattaca, William Burroughs in Drugstore Cowboy, Kurt Vonnegut in Breakfast of Champions, Arthur Miller in Eden (he was 85 then), Stephen King in Creepshow (among others), Graham Greene in Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night, John Cheever in The Swimmer, Susan Sontag and Saul Bellow in Woody Allen’s Zelig, Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall, John Irving in The World According to Garp, Maya Angelou in Poetic Justice, Chuck Palahniuk in Choke, Lee Child in a couple of his character Jack Reacher movies, Hunter S. Thomson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and possibly Ayn Rand as an uncredited extra in one of Cecil DeMille’s extravaganzas.

When Arundhati Roy wrote the script and acted in In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, the Booker was many years in the future, and either profession could have claimed her.

One who had thriving parallel careers was Girish Karnad, the multi-faceted playwright and Jnanpith Award winner who also acted in films from Samskara to Vidura in Kannada, Tamil, Marathi, Malayalam, Assamese and Telugu.

Tailpiece

Pico had a significant role in Marty Supreme. But give in to the popcorn or an urge to chastise someone behind you and you might not get to see some of the blink-and-miss roles mentioned above.

Suresh Menon is an author and columnist. His most recent book is Why Don’t You Write Something I Might Read?

This article appeared in Outlook's February 21 issue titled Seeking Equity which brought together ground reports, analysis and commentary to examine UGC’s recent equity rules and the claims of misuse raised by privileged groups.