TVSquad

Nathan Rabin posed an interesting question over at the Onion AV Club's blog. Are there people you admire as actors but hate as celebrities? The first example Rabin gives is Jamie Foxx, a very talented actor in his own right, but a rather annoying celebrity, too. Rabin mentions catching an awful clip of Foxx crooning some horrendous song from his new album on The Tonight Show. I would add that Foxx also has a cloying habit of belting out songs in the middle of interviews. It's really annoying, like those music majors in college who would have "singing conversations" with one another until you wanted to slowly excoriate both of them with a cheese grater.

This is a difficult one for me to answer, because I figure once the actor has done their performance, they're no longer of any real concern to me. However, that's more than a little pompous and it's not as if I'm impervious to annoyance. In fact, I'm constantly annoyed by things all the time. So, off the top of my head, I'm going to go with Robin Williams, who I neither admire as an actor nor as a celebrity, but he did make me laugh once, quietly, for about .5 seconds, sometime in 1983. I guess that's admirable.

So kids, who do you love to watch perform but want to strangle when you see them any other time? The floor is all yours.