What do Tyra Banks and John C. Reilly have in common?
January 3rd, 2008 by Allen Voivod
Separated at birth, perhaps? No, of course not. But I’ve been thinking about them both a lot lately, for different reasons.
I’ve been mulling over Reilly because, after a tremendously distinguished career in serious movies, has made a bold move into comedy in recent years, with 2006’s Talladega Nights and 2007’s Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. And of the five movies he’s got going in 2008, three of them are comedies.
What I’m dying to know is why he’s making this choice! I think he’s a great actor, and I’m very curious to know what’s motivated the move.
More to the point of the blog post, I think he was the funniest thing about Talladega Nights (better than Will Ferrell in it, who’s honestly kind of rehashing the same character movie after movie), and I think I know why - but it took Tyra Banks to teach me.
By some odd quirk of fate, MTV and VH1 have been airing marathons of America’s Next Top Model, and though we never watched it before, it’s become a staple while a hungry two-month-old baby boy demands his milk from Lani. And the thing that jumped out at me one night, after the models were challenged to act out a random verb/adverb combination pulled from separate hats (i.e. “dance viciously,” “hide dizzily”), was Tyra’s observation about commitment.
Some of the models just threw themselves into it, some barely tried, and one actually got so embarrassed she ran out of the room when she was done. (She was the one eliminated that episode.) And the essence of Tyra’s feedback was that commitment is everything.
No matter what’s thrown at you in your given work day, you’ve got to attack it with complete commitment, dive in, give it your all, don’t worry about making a fool of yourself, just own the moment and roll with whatever life and business throw at you.
That’s why I think, despite very little indication (in more than 15 years of movie making) that comedy was in his blood, Reilly is succeeding at comedy - because as an actor, he commits. Sure, there are things about comedy that most people can learn, but not everyone can master. I’d say utter commitment is one of the keys to mastery, and Reilly seems to have that in spades.
That’s my medium-sized “Aha!” of the week for you, and if you’re getting so-so results from whatever you’re up to these days, maybe a check-in with your commitment level is in order. And that goes for me as well. 
