When actors become audiobook narrators, something strange happens
Sally Field reading Remarkably Bright Creatures makes you wonder about the distance between performance and intimacy
Why does it feel so different when Sally Field reads a novel versus when she acts in one?
LitHub just posted a video of Field reading the opening chapter of Remarkably Bright Creatures, the Shelby Van Pelt novel she's starring in for Netflix. She's sitting in what looks like someone's living room, book in hand, reading directly to the camera. No costume, no character voice, just Sally Field being Sally Field while channeling Tova Sullivan.
There's something almost uncomfortably intimate about watching an actor you know read fiction aloud.
I keep thinking about how Van Pelt writes Tova's voice in those early pages. The widow who cleans the aquarium at night, methodical and careful with her grief. "She has always been a person who finishes what she starts," Van Pelt writes, and you can hear Field finding that rhythm, that particular kind of stubborn dignity.
But here's what I'm not sure about: does knowing Field will play this character change how the book sounds in your head? I read Remarkably Bright Creatures before I knew about the adaptation, and Tova had her own voice then. Now Field's cadence is layered over my memory of the text.
The book exists, then the casting happens, then the actor reads the source material back to us.
The strangest part might be Marcellus, the octopus whose perspective alternates with Tova's throughout the novel. Field obviously can't voice him in the Netflix version (he'll be CGI), but in this reading, she has to carry his sections too. There's something almost absurd about Sally Field channeling a giant Pacific octopus's thoughts about human behavior.
Maybe that's why these actor readings work though. They remind you that all fiction is performance, that every time you read dialogue you're doing voices in your head anyway. Field is just making that process visible.
The Netflix adaptation premieres next week, and I'm curious how much of this reading voice will carry over into her screen performance. Or if they'll feel like completely different experiences.
