I want to be civil about this, and I will try, though the piece I am answering did not extend me the same courtesy, so understand that whatever civility and grace survives to the end of this page arrived here against real resistance.

Two weeks ago a man named Joey Vaelwick tried to sit for an interview with me. I was unavailable because of an extenuating circumstance (which he failed to explain). He then went home and wrote four pages about the human being he says he could not find. I have read the article more than once, which is more attention than the writing earns, and I have decided that the kind thing, the generous thing, is to assume he simply did not understand me because he did not interview me. So I decided the best thing to do was to help him. Let me do the thing his whole segment claims to do and cannot, which is tell you what happened and who I actually am.

He makes a great deal of my contract. He counts the pages for you, four, as if paper were proof of vanity. Every serious person in the pictures travels with terms. The terms exist because they protect the actors and establish a relationship with the other employees, so that when you get to the stage you can fully focus on the art. He quotes three of mine as though they were confessions. Let me give them to you plainly so you may decide for yourselves whether a man should apologize for having one.

He says I require my character to win every fight. This is true, and I will tell you why. People come to the theater, they sit in a dark room, and for two hours they would like to watch someone who does not lose. That is not weakness. A hero who loses is a mirror, and people did not pay to look in a mirror. I give them hope, and I have always given them that. And here is the part Mr. Vaelwick’s sort will never grant, because granting it would cost them the whole game: it is the harder thing to do. Any actor can play a broken man. Flaws are cheap, and nuance is what you reach for when you cannot hold a room without it. To stand up there as the thing people wish they were, to be the ideal and never once let it crack, is far heavier than slouching through a part stitched out of failings. That is the weight. That is the burden. And Mr. Vaelwick, who has never stood in front of a full house and been asked to be its better self, does not know the first thing about how heavy it is to carry.

He claims I require the romance to end in my favor, that I cannot, by contract, be the one who is left. He reports this in a tone of great discovery, as though he had found a body under my floor. Yes, it is in the document. I have never understood why a man should sign up to spend three months pretending to be someone, only to have that someone humiliated in the last reel for a screenwriter’s idea of poignancy. Any fool can write a man being left, it takes no craft at all. What takes craft is the other thing, the harder thing, the thing I have built a career on, which is a man who stays standing. He calls that fear, I call it the only discipline in the business worth having. I notice he was very moved by it, so moved he built his whole four pages around it.

And then there is the box office, which he could not wait to discuss, and to watch me sit and squirm over. He could have had the truth of it, too, if he had thought to ask me instead of asking everyone else. So here it is. Art is a constant thing, and while one piece may not move the audience or the critics the way the executives anticipated, one must consider the whole of the work. I am a work of art, and I will go on being great whatever Joey Vaelwick writes, and I will go on being great long after his byline is forgotten. I have been in this a long time. I have watched rooms fill up and I have watched rooms stay empty. I want to be very clear, because he will read this too, and he will look for the tremor in it, and there is no tremor in it. I am not troubled.

What troubles me, if anything troubles me, is the ease of the cruelty. He never sat with me for a minute, and still he made a specimen of me. I guess it was easier than the truth, because it is simpler to invent a frightened little man behind a cape than to reckon with the one who has outlasted every critic who ever tried this. What he doesn’t realize is that I will outlast him too. He was handed a philosophy and he printed a diagnosis, which is what a lazy journalist reaches for when he cannot understand the thing in front of him.

So I will end this the way I end everything (which I am sure he will find unbearable). I simply decline to continue a relationship with a publication that has shown me what it does with a man who will not perform for it. On this page, in my own words, in front of everyone, so that there can be no later version in which the Chronicle decided it was finished with Cassian Swiggity. It was the other way, and this article serves as the record.

Cassian Swiggity

Cassian Swiggity is an actor. His new picture is playing now. He suggests you go and see for yourself what a room does when it is given the chance, and he thanks the very few of you who already have.