There's no dialogue. That's the point. The lake does the talking. I just listen. Professionally.
LOS ANGELES — Chet Valance, the action star best known for punching a meteor in half in all four Thunderjaw films, has stunned the industry by gaining forty pounds of pure gravitas for his first dramatic role, as a man who stares at a lake.
The film, Still Water, is a 148-minute single-take drama in which Valance’s character, a recently widowed man named Dale, looks at a lake in Minnesota while the seasons change around him. There is no dialogue. There is one goose.
“I needed to disappear,” Valance, 44, told reporters at a festival press conference, speaking so slowly that two journalists missed their flights. “Chet had to die so Dale could look at that lake.”
The transformation
According to his team, Valance’s preparation began eight months before filming, when he moved into a cabin, gave up his phone, and began reading “only books without pictures, and then only the parts without dialogue.”
He reportedly worked with two dialect coaches despite having no lines, explaining that “Dale doesn’t speak, but if he did, he’d sound like he was from somewhere near the lake.”
His trainer confirmed Valance gained the weight “through a strict regimen of brooding, long silences at dinner, and looking out of windows in rooms where everyone else was laughing.” Gravitas, the trainer added, “sits mostly in the jaw and the eyes, but Chet’s also carrying a lot in his posture now. He sits like a man who owns a canoe he never uses.”
Awards buzz
Early reviews have been rapturous. One critic called the performance “the most profound thing to happen to a lake since lakes,” while another wrote that Valance “acts with his eyebrows the way other actors act with entire monologues.”
Industry analysts predict an awards-season push centered on the film’s eleventh minute, in which Valance almost blinks.
Not everyone is convinced. The goose, reached through its agent, said it was “frustrated with the narrative” and that it had “carried that third act.”
What’s next
Valance says he is not done exploring. His next project is a sequel, Still Water 2: The Pond, followed by a return to Thunderjaw, for which he will lose all forty pounds of gravitas “very quickly and loudly, using explosions.”