It’s commonly known that it’s hard to break out of the TV world and enter the big screen world. In a lot of cases it’s because they’re identified with their TV roles, in some other cases it’s because of a limited amount of talent. I could start with listing a huge list of examples but I’m not going to do that. I would like to focus on just two, one a bit older and the other one very current.

Michelle Trachtenberg is best known for her part of Dawn Summers on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. After the show she continued to mainly star in movies; larger productions, independent productions and also some TV movies. Basically just doing a decent selection of roles; gaining experience. She just never really had movies where she really stood out. It’s not that she did extremely bad or just can’t act; none of the roles were that challenging really.

But for any actress that wants to be successful you just need a blockbuster once in a while. So the most logical step after doing independent productions is doing bigger movies. However Michelle seems to be taking a different road now, she was supposed to star in a new TV show. But this project The Hill has been shelved for now. The next project that will be released is an animated movie that has been in the making for decades, Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight. Apparently there’s a big fanbase for this movie, but seeing it took this long to produce my bet would be that it flops with the general public.

After that she has two more projects lined up; another independent movie and also a made for TV movie. Looking at that her career seems to be at a standstill right now, but why? I like Michelle, but in her case it might simply be that she never really did anything worthwile. I’ve never seen her in a role where she really stands out and a casting director will look at past performances when selecting someone for a role. It’s almost like the movie studios see her as a TV actress and looking at her future line-up she seems to be accepting that career.

A more recent example is Alexis Bledel; her show Gilmore Girls ended its seven season run just before the summer. So what now? She always has done movies in between Gilmore Girls season; mostly independent productions. She of course has been in Sin City but then again who in Hollywood hasn’t been in that movie.

Her second highest scoring movie behind Sin City in her career so far is The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants. That movie apparently made enough money to warrant a sequel, I don’t see how; the movie was mediocre at best. The idea to have a Greek character portrayed by a Hispanic actress is weird anyway. But it worries me that she only has that one project lined up.

Of course the information the general public sees isn’t always accurate so she might have other things in the works. In her case it might also be a good idea to do some more independent projects, so she can expand her horizon a little bit. The main problem she will be facing is that she’s Rory Gilmore; Gilmore Girls was a popular shows and a lot of people will just see her as Rory.

That’s also the kind of other roles we’ve seen her in so far; the rather shy nice girl. If she manages to do some roles that make her really stand apart from Rory Gilmore she’ll probably be fine. If she doesn’t manage to get roles like that she might end up with a similar fate as Michelle Trachtenberg; a return to TV. But what do I know, they both might surprise me and will be holding up Oscar statues in a couple of years.

Written by bvang

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 10th, 2007 at 10:32 am and is filed under Alexis Bledel, Editorials, Michelle Trachtenberg. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.