The Rambling Actor's Blog /

I made it! We’ve all heard that typically American colloquialism. I know what that saying may mean to actors out there or to those of you hoping to be successful in this nearly impossible career to sustain when not “working”, but maybe you haven’t taken the first few scary steps yet. I’ll try and deflate whatever fears you may have about the outer world of the craft which is all business and not entirely “just” your business. The only business one as an actor should consider is the world we create for our portrayals. When I refer to the outer world, I mean the world the character will live in during our portrayal. Whether in a theatre or in front of the camera, you and your character must become one being, in order to know the outer world of the character, the one that has nothing to do with the business you’re attempting to break into. Let’s say you haven’t even thought about auditioning or let alone gotten your head shots done and printed… what to do as an actor? Study, read, learn, research the history and find the clues that will lead you to the source of it all, the craft of the craft. Look for the masters of acting, directing, and theatre and find their works: Shakespeare, Stanislavsky, Uta Hagen, Strasberg, Meisner, Meyerhold, Grotowski, even the Knight Sir Lawrence Olivier has such books of uncanny first-hand relations of stories in the world of acting. The history of theatre and acting is abound in all its glory, from the contemporary Western world of theatre and film to the dramatic leaps and bounds of the ancient Greeks, it is all still out there. From the many histories we get the many teachers, those who pushed the envelope with new content, new directions, and new destinations for the art.

The key is to never stop learning, never give up the curiosity that can one day fill you with the true desire to actually take off on your own and apply all that you’ve acquired. There are thousands of ways to become an actor: schools, workshops, community theatre, improve troupes, and then you’re your plain old curiosity. Forget achieving the modern equivalent of “I made it!”, what will happen to you will happen to you whenever it does, aspire for a rather more formidable challenge, like say, creating a world for that character you have to deliver on as an actor on a stage or for the lens of a director. Prepare yourself in every possible way to achieve your goal and then let it breathe. One has to be able to truthfully answer every possible question asked of your character by anyone at anytime for this to be a worthwhile goal. Letting it breathe means to not force it after the subtle inner manifestations of relationship have been established for your character. Run it by your director, a teacher, or your trusted peers. Then the real fun starts: your first meeting with the garb of the character, Oooh the first exterior layer to hide in, a sure way of losing yourself if not yet ready. If you are in charge of your costume, good for you, but for working actors it can be a little different. Whether in theatre or a film set, there will be a Costume Designer and their dressers and assistants. You pray that your character looks the part as you dreamed it and that the costume designer has the right kind of talented mind to read your mind as well as zeroing in to serve the vision of the director. Well you may be disappointed but fear not, the truth of your character is what you say it is, and if it must be in something you never saw your character dressed in, then let it be. Become the vision, the semblance of the life the director and the world of designers at his fingertips believe you are to be.

Learning to immerse oneself in the world created by the designers and serving the vision of the director calls for very little rigidness and more of a pliant playful mindset, only then can the actor find the last color set to the palate of actions, lines, emotions, reactions, and fabricated memories needed to place the finishing touches of living in the world of the story. Sometimes it may just take a hat, a picture, or even a mustache to get that feeling of the outer world, but most oftentimes it is the entire picture painted from the onset of the actor’s involvement in the realm of imagination till it meets with the other minds renderings of the story and character to finally near its completion. There are many schools of acting, many styles if you will, but in the end all knowledge is better than just posing the same way for the rest of your learning life as an actor. It is my assessment, up till now, that I grow by what I read in some ways, in other ways by just improvisational performance, and that I sometimes learn less by sticking around too long. But that’s just me. To be or not to be… let him be!