I agree with RK - having known quite a few actors myself, they are simply people and their intelligence varies. Are actors emotionally stable would have a different response from me though :)

Also, I try not to judge people too much on one interview. Many things can affect how they behave on the day - and being a good interview subject isn't really a valid indication of intelligence, it simply means you give a good interview! One of the most painful interviews I ever saw was with Rowan Atkinson. Despite being a highly intelligent man (try not to judge him on Mr Bean) he came across as a stuttering fool with nary an idea in his head.

We do tend to be very eccentric.
We just can't hear you.

Well you should listen better. :)

Huh?

Exactly!

But our eyes and brains.... huh?

I bet there are some smart actors and more dumb actors.

IMO there are smart actors and there are dumb actors just like anybody else. Certain actors you can tell are just smart, like Kevin Spacey for example. What pisses me off though are regular people, who basically either got lucky in life and caught a break, or knew somebody in the industy, became super successfull and now they think that it was there pure genius which got them where they are and everyone should do everything the way they do it.

Whoa! Damn. Just damn.

I believe you, and have the highest regard for Mr Atkinson's thinking apparatus.

Taking umbrage here. Many active Mensans have little formal education. Generally, the group is not that dissimilar to the socio- economic environment in which it exists. If there are lots of boring stupid reactionary people around then the local group will have lots of boring stupid reactionary members.

Since I'm easily bored, it's my chosen responsibility to make a meeting or party into something more entertaining. You definitely haven't been to anything I've ever hosted, and probably nothing I've attended.

If your intent was to show that scores on tests are not relevant to real world applications of intelligence, you could have done so without denigrating a social organization that doesn't suit your needs.

I've been a member for thirty-five years, with more than half that in central Florida.

As a nurse, my experience makes me question the veracity in claims of penile girth and length attributed to Milton Berle, James Woods, and Wayne Newton. It's just not genetically likely that any one of them has or had the award winning dimensions.

Actors are just people. I know quite a few. Some of the cleverest people I've ever met are actors. I also know of at least one who is thick as pigshit.

one of the best trainwreck interviews i've ever seen was conan o'brian interviewing jeniffer garner, she starts telling a story about how she got accidently punched in the lip during a fight scene and her lip swelled up to the point she "looked like one of those african ladies". then later in the interview conan uses the word "snuck" and she very patronizingly reprimands him by saying "snuck" is not a word and because he graduated "Harvard", should know better. of course when they came back from commercial conan was sitting there with a dictionary pointing to the word snuck.

Sounds about right, coming from her. She seems like the type who would go on and try to be cutesy clever.

But, as has been pointed out, perhaps in other interviews she shines and she was just nervous. She's not my fave. Sometimes it is the interviewer, as well. Carson could make the biggest dolt look good, or at the very least give us a sense that they were loveable lugs.

I think that the actors who come across as intelligent are the ones who are just being themselves, not trying to bolster whatever image they have been trained to project. I've seen interview shows with men and women actors who I didn't really feel one way or another about, and after the interview I thought they were pretty cool. I've seen both men and women actors I thought I liked who came across as self-centered in their interview and it changed the image I had formed.

Though I think intelligence can have much bearing on conversational skills, it's not always the case. And some actors aren't much beyond their "acting."

certainly personalities come across much different in interviews. That's one reason I love at The Actors Studio. Kyra Sedgewick's personality is more bubbly than you would think, for instance, based on the characters she plays. James Wood, regardless of the size of his dick, was one of the more fascinating people I've seen interviewed.