Forrest and Macready's Different Acting Styles

HEATHER NATHANS: Forrest appealed to a kind of American sense of manners and naturalness and emotional accessibility, the same way that Andrew Burstein writes about in Sentimental Democracy, when he talks about these kinds of virtues of emotional openness coming to embody Jeffersonian democracy.

You move away from the intellect, because intellect, not everyone can access. But honest, deep emotion—that, everyone can access.

So the performer who is touching these emotions—the performer who seems genuinely in touch with his passions and can unleash those in this unrestrained way on stage—he can embody these kind of "American" virtues, whereas someone like Macready, who has a more formal aspect to him, and maybe is a more intellectually driven performer, doesn't appeal in the same way and seems cold, seems restrained.