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There’s a throwaway line in 2012’s The Avengers, after a character’s death, when his partner is alluded to. “There was a cellist, I think,” muses Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark. It’s a spot of pathos amid the punch-ups – but also rather telling. Because when even a superhero blockbuster reaches for the cello, you know the instrument is carrying more than just a melody.
Earlier this month, a trailer dropped for the upcoming Pedro Pascal drama Behemoth!, in which he plays a celebrated cellist returning to Hollywood to score films. Real-life cellist and film composer Hildur Guðnadóttir says the instrument “is definitely having a moment right now. But it’s always been present.”
It’s true. And this cinematic love affair first found its rhythm almost 70 years ago, when Audrey Hepburn played a witty young cellist in Love in the Afternoon. In the decades since, the instrument has become a marker for a certain type of character: cultured, intense, romantic, haunted. Think Alan Rickman in Truly, Madly, Deeply – or the titular cellist in the 1996 Czech drama Kolya, which won the Academy Award for best foreign language film. Even Woody Allen toyed with the stereotype; in Annie Hall, Carol Kane’s leftwing, liberal intellectual played the cello in a deleted scene.
But why, out of every option in the orchestra, did the cello become the instrument of introspection? “It’s the cliche, but it’s probably because the cello comes closest to the human vocal range,” says Guðnadóttir. “It has this ability to play around with notes, too, like human intonation. Press a note on a keyboard and it’s straightforward, definitive. The cello – like our voices – can play with this intonation for expression.”
Put an actor in a scene playing the cello, then, and they can deliver dialogue without words. Guðnadóttir says the only other instrument with this human timbre and “fluidity of intonation” is the bass clarinet. But you’re unlikely to see a protagonist reaching for one – nor a prestige biopic being made of a famous bass clarinettist. In fact, the cello has cornered the market on tragic orchestral stories – perhaps most notably in the Emily Watson-starring Hilary and Jackie.
“That film, the story of cellist Jacqueline du Pré, is the cello film that has stuck with me most,” says Guðnadóttir. And it’s not the only cellist biopic to reach the screen. In 2009’s The Soloist, Jamie Foxx was cast as musician Nathaniel Ayers, but the narrative was restrung, swapping his primary instrument – the double bass – for the cello.
You can see why. Not only does the cello have that uncannily human register, it’s also visually dynamic. A cellist’s bow strokes are physical and expressive, and the performer’s face is rarely obscured – making it a perfect screen partner.
It’s probably why cellists tend to be the beating heart of musical dramas. Guðnadóttir also scored Cate Blanchett’s tour-de-force Tár, in which a cellist becomes the catalyst for the drama. Christopher Walken’s cellist, struggling with Parkinson’s, is the centrepiece of 2012’s A Late Quartet, and Dermot Mulroney (a real-life cellist who played on the scores of multiple Mission: Impossible films) frequently guest-starred in Prime Video series Mozart in the Jungle.
But cellist characters are not confined to musical dramas. The cello’s emotional shorthand has been transcribed across almost every genre: from Chloë Grace Moretz in sci-fi romance If I Stay, to Maryam d’Abo in 007 adventure The Living Daylights, to cellist love interests in sitcoms from Frasier to New Girl. And then there’s the darker side of the cello, whether channelled by Michelle Pfeiffer in supernatural thriller What Lies Beneath, Uma Thurman in neo-noir Jennifer 8 or Jenna Ortega in Netflix’s smash series Wednesday.
“There is a gothic connection to the cello,” says Guðnadóttir, who won her Oscar for scoring Joker, a soundtrack that features the instrument prominently, with its neck being “choked”. “When it’s played in an ugly way – because we yearn for it to be this beautiful instrument – it feels uncomfortable.”
Director Richard Shepard took that darker side one step further in 2018 with The Perfection, a horror set inside a prestigious music academy. When choosing the instrument his two leads would play, he wanted something both sinister and sensual.
“I remember growing up on the Upper West Side of New York City, near Lincoln Center,” he says, “and seeing these young cellists on the subway, lugging these huge cases. It stuck with me. How big it is. How much effort it takes to not only play it, but just move it. When writing The Perfection, we felt that physicality could make a statement. It’s sexy. It’s a sexy instrument.”
The film-makers behind the Allison Williams-starring horror film were determined to make the cello playing as convincing as the scares. “It was really hard work,” says Shepard, “but I’m proud there are only two shots of musicians’ hands rather than actors’ hands in the entire film.”
The cello is an instrument actors can’t bluff their way through – it’s harder to fake than hiding your hands behind a piano or overdubbing a singing voice. Ortega trained for Wednesday and earned Golden Globe and Emmy nominations. Watson trained for Hilary and Jackie and got an Oscar nod. Pascal recently told Vanity Fair that taking on the cello was “literally the hardest, hardest, hardest thing I’ve ever had to learn to do.” If he’s angling for awards, there are few better bets than a deep, introspective stringsman.
And that perception extends beyond the screen. David Cohen, the principal cellist of the London Symphony Orchestra, says that “there’s definitely a stereotype that cellists are the orchestra’s empaths – warm, thoughtful and just a little bit intense. I’m not sure it’s entirely true, but it’s amusing that film-makers so often cast cellists as the emotionally intelligent ones. You rarely see the villain saying: ‘Just let me finish my Bach Suite …’”
Cohen adds that the cello’s versatility often shapes the characters written around it. “It can sound noble, lonely, hopeful or quietly heroic – often within the same phrase,” he says. “It’s the Meryl Streep of the orchestra. And, because it has the depth to suggest sadness without wallowing in it, the cello is also film music’s favourite therapist.”
Catherine Warner is a music therapy practitioner who has long watched the cello play its introspective, insular part on film. But she also points to the instrument’s role in memorable cinematic dialogues. In The Witches of Eastwick, a devilish Jack Nicholson seduces Susan Sarandon’s cellist during a duet, which Warner says “seemed to symbolise Sarandon’s character’s sexual awakening, as well as her discovery of authentic emotional expression – she had previously struggled to bring that into her playing”.
In Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Paul Bettany plays a cello bass line under Russell Crowe’s virtuosic violin flourishes. Warner says this “symbolises a close supportive working relationship whereby the soloist can be freer to express their brilliance”. The cello, then, is a literal baseline: a “straight man” that performs whatever emotional function the story needs.
Warner also returns to something she once wrote in a collection of essays: “Symbolically, the cello can evoke the sense of the instrument being rather like a person.” And this gets closest to explaining Hollywood’s obsession with the instrument. More than any other member of the orchestra, introducing a cello is like casting another actor in a scene. Guðnadóttir even says that “there’s something about the size of it being quite close to the human body – not to mention the shape of the cello almost looking like a torso.”
Pair its resemblance to the human body with its similarity to our vocal range, and it’s no wonder cinema loves the instrument. It’s a character actor in and of itself. It can be embraced, fought, comforted or strangled. Now we just need to wait for the inevitable Oscar category: best bowed string instrument in a leading role. It’s either that, or Pascal runs the risk of having his cello nominated ahead of him.
