The Outstanding Actor: Seven Keys to Success 9781350152366, 9781350152359, 9781350152397, 9781350152373

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword to the second edition Lily James
Foreword to the first edition Damian Lewis
Introduction
Getting to outstanding
Part One Outstanding in your work
1 Warmth
2 Generosity
3 Enthusiasm
4 Danger
5 Presence
Part Two Outstanding in your life
6 Grit
7 Charisma
Part Three Outstanding in your career
8 The path to success
Video and audio resources
Notes
Further reading
Index

Citation preview

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR SECOND EDITION

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ken Rea is Professor of Theatre at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. He began as a professional actor and director in New Zealand, working with some of the country’s leading theatres and on television as well as running his own company, The Living Theatre Troupe. Later, in the UK he was artistic director of Jet Theatre and Koru Theatre. In addition to his work at Guildhall, he has taught in the national drama academies of China, Indonesia, India, Italy, New Zealand and Canada. He has also worked as a movement coach with many theatres including the Royal Shakespeare Company. He has been a regular feature writer for The Times and was for fifteen years a theatre critic for The Guardian. His book A Better Direction examines the issues of director-training. His plays produced in Britain include The Brave Magicians of Mangalore and Voyagers. His adaptations performed in London include the Swedish classic Pippi Longstocking and the Italian Renaissance comedy The Deceived. In the corporate world Ken trains business leaders of global companies. www.kenrea.co.uk

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR Seven Keys to Success

KEN REA

METHUEN DRAMA Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Methuen Drama logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2015 This edition published 2021 Copyright © Ken Rea, 2015, 2021 Foreword copyright © Lily James, 2021 Foreword to the first edition copyright © Damian Lewis, 2015, 2021 Ken Rea has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Charlotte Daniels All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-5236-6 PB: 978-1-3501-5235-9 ePDF: 978-1-3501-5237-3 eBook: 978-1-3501-5238-0

Series: Performance Books Typeset by Integra Software Service Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Tine

vi

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements  viii Foreword to the second edition Lily James  ix Foreword to the first edition Damian Lewis  xi Introduction  xiii Getting to outstanding  xvii

Part One Outstanding in your work  1 1 Warmth 3 2 Generosity 23 3 Enthusiasm 54 4 Danger 69 5 Presence 106

Part Two Outstanding in your life  129 6 Grit 131 7 Charisma 157

Part Three Outstanding in your career  179 8 The path to success  181

Video and audio resources 216 Notes  217 Further reading  221 Index  222

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As an actor you will always be part of a team. So it is when writing a book and I’m grateful to have had such a formidable team behind me, challenging me to make this book better. My thanks to Jenny Ridout at Bloomsbury Methuen Drama for having faith in the book at the outset and to Meredith Benson for nurturing this second edition so encouragingly. Also to the Research & Knowledge Exchange Committee at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama for supporting the initial project. To Jaqueline Burns for showing me how it could be more accessible. To my research assistant Patrick Osborne and to Clare Sandford and Katrina Bullen for transcribing the interviews. And my thanks to Tom Edkins and his team for filming the exercises for this second edition, and to my actors, Lucie Fletcher, Mhairi Gayer, Matt Nikitow, Joe Potter, Caleb Roberts and Karina Weidman, whose joy and enthusiasm so beautifully illustrated the values of this book. And to those who read drafts of this book, and gave such candid feedback: John Adamson, Emily Berrington, Matthew Burgess, Richard Goulding, Andrew Hawkins, Hans Herklots, Tine van Houts, Wyn Jones, Dick McCaw, Andrew Rajan, Fran Regis, Chris Ryman, John Sloboda, Ralph McAllister, Eliot Shrimpton, Virginia Synders, Ben Wainwright, Eleanor Wyld and especially to Simon Haines for his meticulous editorial comments on both editions. My thanks to the experts I spoke to for generously and honestly sharing their views and allowing me to quote from them: a full list appears on page xiv, and to the BAFTA Guru series for permission to quote from some of their guests. Just as I have passed on my knowledge to actors, so I thank those I have learnt from throughout my career, especially Mike Alfreds, Carlo Boso, Philippe Gaulier, Keith Johnstone, Jacques Lecoq, Yoshi Oida, Zygmunt Molik, Monika Pagneux, Koichi Tohei and Ralph McAllister who set me on the path to teaching in the first place. Thanks also to the generations of students I have taught at Guildhall and around the world: this book is built on your courage and enthusiasm. Finally, my warmest thanks to Julian, Helena and my wife, Tine, for their endless support and encouragement.

FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION I first encountered Ken somewhere along the dark and grey-carpeted corridors of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama acting department. I remember thinking ‘Who is that man?’ He had an anarchic, almost mystical presence; he was always on the move, catching our eyes as he went. Then later he would stride into classes with his unmatchable energy, his sparkling blue eyes reflected off his blue T-shirt. We never knew what to expect or what each class would bring and we were left feeling revitalized and inspired. I often try to recapture those feelings – catapulting headfirst into the unknown because I’m sure it’s where the best work comes from. The thrill of performing and storytelling was instilled in me from a young age. When I was a kid my dad would rent a camcorder for special occasions and my instinct to steal the attention and basically flirt in front of the camera was strong! I feel guilty about the hours of wasted footage of me singing the same song over and over again complete with choreographed hand gestures. I used to visit my grandparents’ house and watch My Fair Lady on VHS and hit pause throughout the entire film, scribbling down the lyrics as I went. But the idea of simply ‘being an actor’ felt too far-fetched, too rare; it felt ‘other’ and I didn’t really have the slightest idea how to go about it. At Guildhall I truly believe Ken taught us how to channel those instincts and impulses into something focused and acute. To turn what felt unachievable into something real and possible. Now, I often struggle to hold onto that childlike freedom and purity. At times, I have felt overwhelmed by the pressures of the industry, falling prey to people’s ideas of me and the characters I have played. This can stifle my creativity and cloud my intention as an actor, especially when it sometimes feels we have to be actor/activist/self-publicist/writer/model/producer all at once! But it is also a job where we are constantly learning and endlessly surprised. Collaborating and creating something true and vital with a group of actors is always the greatest reward. I also feel that now, more than ever, there is a feeling of unity, particularly after the #MeToo movement, for a younger generation, for women, for just good people to take over the reins. Out with the old seedy patriarchal systems and in with the new! It is an exciting moment to be a part of.

x

FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION

Throughout this book Ken explores how it is possible to stay open and curious and to arm yourself against the struggles, demands and reality of the industry today. His teachings, alongside very honest and candid in-depth conversations with actors and industry professionals, help to demystify the art and provide us with the knowledge and tools to stay active, keep going and ultimately inspire us to take charge of our own destiny. In fact, I just re-read the final chapter and I feel ready to conquer the world! Ken taught me that the qualities of warmth and generosity are the ultimate power. In my experience, if we can hold onto this unique strength people will want to work with us and audiences will want to watch us. There have been countless times before an important meeting or audition where I have connected to my ‘underarm energy’, and it truly gives the strength to move mountains (and hopefully win me the job!). I have stood in the wings before a show connecting to my ‘ki energy’ before taking those final terrifying steps onto the stage. These are all practices Ken breaks down and demonstrates with video recordings of former students, which help all the more to bring his teachings to life. I will always remember one particular exercise where Ken challenged us to be a ‘dangerous exciting actor’, and if the other students in the class became bored by our endeavour they could simply turn their backs. Well, as you can imagine desperation and utter chaos ensued. There’s still a dent in the wall from where my classmate Dave threw his chair against it! Once we were all exhausted and out of ideas Ken perfectly demonstrated that all of that energy can be distilled down to a moment of being totally alive and present and generous to your other actors and the audience. If you can find all that chaos but keep it in a structure, that’s where true danger lies, and anything becomes possible from moment to moment. I have never forgotten this lesson, and it is the feeling I seek as an actor. It is why I love to act. It has always seemed to me that Ken’s lessons were like a treasure chest full of knowledge, provocations and challenges to be met. His dedication and passion to discover what it is to be ‘outstanding’ to be brave and generous, to be ‘present’ and to succeed as an actor is his life’s work. It seems to me if anyone has conquered this elusive quest, if anyone has found the key values, the tools and teachings to master this (and the universe!) … it is Ken Rea. Throughout this wonderful book we have been given the map to the treasure and the keys to what lies within. Enjoy! Lily James Student 2007–10

FOREWORD TO THE FIRST EDITION I spent three years at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama studying to be an actor. I wanted to act professionally, and Ken Rea was one of my teachers. I acted as a boy all through my schooling. I had been in five Gilbert and Sullivan productions by the age of twelve, played a pirate and a peer. I had won prizes for my ‘Bottom’, I had even played the messenger in The Bacchae: a three-page speech in Ancient Greek. I also stood in front of the whole school one summer’s day when I was 11 and forgot the entire third act of the school play. My mouth flopped open and shut like a fish as I stood on stage and tried to cover up the fact that Mrs Woodgates was having to play my part whilst wedged behind the piano at the side of the gym. It was, the headmaster said, ‘The worst first night in the school’s history’. Enough, you might think, to put one off acting for good … So, what is ‘acting’? What is it ‘to act’? And why would anyone want to do it? Especially if you may have had the decidedly mixed start I had. Is it showing off? For some, yes. For my 10-year-old self, almost certainly. Is it being in control? Possibly. The theatre audience is captive. They can’t leave. Well they can but they rarely do. Mostly, as Ken says in this book, they want to be there. They want to listen. This is often equally true of filming when, each take, the crew becomes your audience. Is acting therapy? I know, personally, that it can be. ‘Doctor Theatre’ has worked his magic many times. The confluence of physical action, spoken word and imagined thought can, at best, feel like a meditation. A ‘zone’ that is, quite simply, extremely pleasurable to be in. In Ken’s fascinating book, he examines these impulses and recognizes that these may have been true for each of us at different times. He talks about games and exercises that can free you up as a performer, that give you, like an athlete, a state of readiness so you may seize your moment when it comes: either in character or as yourself. He talks about energy and enthusiasm and how these can be nurtured in you so you will be more hireable ‘in the room’. He talks about ‘presence’, that thing that makes you exciting. And whilst it may be innate in some he explores how it can be kindled in others through passion, spontaneity and a commitment to what you’re doing. So, what are we doing as actors?

xii

FOREWORD TO THE FIRST EDITION

If stories are the mechanisms by which we better understand the human experience, then actors are the storytellers. As Ken states in this book, his aim is to make you a better storyteller. There isn’t a student that has been taught by Ken Rea that can’t do a passable impression of him gesticulating and saying in a nurturing and caring way, ‘Yes, yes … warmth … generosity … ’ – his key words; the words that are central to every bit of teaching he does. Ken understands that acting, storytelling is a shared experience, an act of generosity, something communicated with warmth and openness. You can’t fault the logic. Aside from the obvious power you will have as a performer, if you share your story warmly and generously (yes, even as ‘the baddie’), rather than in a cold, selfish (narcissistic) way, there is a broader point being made here isn’t there? That stories are not only something you share, they are gifts. Something to be given to your listeners, to your watchers. It’s a privilege to be one of the storytellers, to be one of those able to provoke, challenge, incite, educate and entertain an audience with the force of your narrative. And so with storytelling comes great responsibility. This, of course, is what is most important, most exciting about being an actor, as Ken understands so well. Because at the moment of true conviction, true commitment, the moment when the actor truly shares their story in an open and generous way is the moment that he or she has the best chance of being ‘great’. Free from tension, unselfconscious, totally ‘in the moment’. Present. The acting G Spot. This is a wonderful book with a unique take on how actors can get better and improve their chances of success. If we can all perform with half the warmth and generosity with which Ken has been teaching for the last forty years, then we will have fulfilled our responsibility as storytellers, and audiences all over the world are in for a real treat. Damian Lewis Student 1990–3

INTRODUCTION

In my forty years at Guildhall, one of the world’s top drama schools, and at national drama academies around the world, I’ve helped train over 2,000 actors. Most have gone on to have very good careers and perhaps twenty of them have also become internationally famous: Ewan McGregor, Joseph Fiennes, Dominic West, Paapa Essiedu, Hayley Atwell, Michelle Dockery, Damian Lewis, Lily James, Orlando Bloom, Daniel Craig, to name just a few. One question has fascinated me over the years: What were those twenty doing that the others were not? I’m going to explain to you specifically what those actors were doing that made them successful and I’ll show you some of the techniques I taught them. I’ll be dealing with both personal traits and performance skills, because being an outstanding actor involves what you do not only on stage or screen, but also in your everyday life. What I’m examining in this book are not the core skills – such as strong vocal technique, a released, expressive body and a coherent acting process – but the qualities on top of those, which make someone truly outstanding. What I’ll also show is that these qualities don’t just rely on your innate talent: you can consciously develop them in your work to step up to the next level of success. And the point of the book is to show you exactly how. In most cases it’s a matter of adopting new habits and values. My whole aim is to help you do more exciting work and have more control over your career as an actor. I’ll give you techniques you can immediately put into practice, whatever level you’re at, on your own as part of your personal preparation, or with a scene partner or a group when you’re rehearsing together. But let’s be clear at the outset: this is not a book about how to be famous, because being an outstanding actor is not about fame. This book is about success in acting, by which I mean doing the kind of outstanding work that will excite audiences, whether you are in a community theatre inspiring small groups of people, or commanding a fee of $10 million for your latest movie. Whatever your aim, the principles in this book will apply to each of you. Being outstanding means achieving a level of excellence and a degree of individuality that will set you apart from average actors. To give you a practical

xiv

INTRODUCTION

framework for this, I’ve distilled everything down to seven qualities. These are the key practices of very successful actors, yet even those people don’t always fully understand what they’ve stumbled upon or how they do it. One night, as Sir Laurence Olivier came off stage after a performance of Othello that was so astonishing, even the cast applauded him at the end of it, he shut himself in his dressing room and refused to see anyone. An actor knocked on his door and asked what the matter was: ‘Don’t you know you were brilliant?’ ‘Of course I know,’ said Olivier, ‘but I don’t know why!’1 What this book can do is help you to recognize, in a systematic way, some of the good things that you may have already stumbled on through your own experience as an actor. You know a lot of it already but may not have found a way of putting it into practice or taking it further. I’ll show you how. The ideas in this book are taken from my long experience as an actor, director, drama teacher and theatre critic, and my experience of training thousands of senior executives throughout Europe to develop their presence and charisma. I’ve also drawn on my research in related disciplines, such as sports, music, dance, positive psychology and business theory, to understand how talent is nurtured and what propels someone to the top of their field. There will also be ideas taken from theatre cultures around the world. The advice I give you in this book is based mainly on what works when I’m training actors. The exercises have been tested, honed and proven over many years. To test my own ideas on the qualities of outstanding actors, I’ve talked to leading professionals at the top of their game: Rufus Norris (Artistic Director of the National Theatre), Sir Nicholas Hytner (director and former Artistic Director of the National Theatre), Anne McNulty (casting director), Dallas Smith (agent), Michael Billington (former chief theatre critic for The Guardian), Yarit Dor (intimacy director), Mark Simon (networking provider), Tine van Houts (media trainer) and actors: Dame Judi Dench2 and Jude Law, as well as several of my former students: Hayley Atwell, Ewan McGregor, Damian Lewis, Dominic West, Eleanor Wyld, including for this second edition, Emily Berrington, Sam Blenkin, Orlando Bloom, Paapa Essiedu, Freddie Fox, Mhairi Gayer, Natasha Gordon, Lily James, Maya Sansa, Lesley Sharp, Ben Wainwright and Ashley Zhangazha. I’ve also drawn on my earlier interviews and conversations with Peter Brook, Sir Peter Hall, Terry Hands, Felicity Kendall, Yoshi Oida, Sir Antony Sher and Robert Stephens, as well as conversations that Sir Ian McKellen and Al Pacino held with us at Guildhall. Additionally, I’ve questioned hundreds of drama students to find out what their ideas were. The results of this research will give you a completely fresh view on what it takes to become an outstanding actor. When I’ve asked all of these people what makes an actor stand out and what advice they would give to actors, what has

INTRODUCTION

xv

be open. In the course of this revised edition, I’ll unpack those ideas and show you how you can achieve them.

The videos For this new edition I’ve included video recordings of some of the key exercises with a group of my former students. This can give you the impression of sitting in on some of my workshops. Not only will it help bring the work to life, but you can now see exactly how the exercises work and are developed in the course of a session. You just click on or type in this link for the videos – https://vimeo.com/ channels/1486142 – and this link for the audio files – https://soundcloud.com/ user-348637583/sets/the-outstanding-actor-2e.

The exercises The purpose of most of the exercises is to give personality to your acting and the confidence to explore choices you might not normally have thought of – to push you outside your comfort zone, perhaps to surprise yourself. These exercises are proven ways of helping nurture the very qualities I’ll be talking about in the book, such as openness, warmth, generosity, playfulness and risk-taking. But this comes with a cost. In my process, to get to a sublime level of outstanding, you must first pass through childlike playfulness, because this allows the openness that will make an audience empathize with you. To do this may often mean you risk looking silly. But in that ‘silliness’ is an openness that, when focused in the service of the text, engages your audience, transports them and causes them to identify with what your character is going through. This in turn releases your individuality as an actor.

What difference can you make? At the core of this book is a question you need to consider deeply: given your circumstances – your culture, physicality, gender, age, personality and life experience – given all those things, what difference can you make to your destiny as an actor? This leads us to two broad issues: first, what are you doing during your training or in rehearsals to develop yourself, and secondly, how are you managing your career? The exercises I describe will help you in two ways: some will focus on doing more exciting work and others, which are not performance-led, will help your personal development. The issues are crucial because you can be hugely

xvi

INTRODUCTION

talented and brilliantly trained, and yet still not have a good career. The key is simple: you must be proactive rather than reactive. You can’t afford to drift through your career waiting for opportunities to come, because the odds are, they won’t. By being proactive you can make a difference. I can’t guarantee you success, and of course logically there isn’t room for everyone to be the most outstanding actor of their generation. But if you follow the principles I’ve set out in this book, and if you apply the exercises and techniques – on your own or in rehearsals – they will certainly help you on the path to success. I know this because I’ve proven it with over two thousand actors from around the world.

GETTING TO OUTSTANDING The path to outstanding performance Although any judgement about acting is largely subjective, my research shows that outstanding actors tend to project certain traits that are different from those of the average actor. They exude higher levels of confidence and energy. They demonstrate greater detail in their performance, giving it a freshness and individuality that make them appear unique. This combination will usually be the result of tremendous drive – the energy and the will to succeed. But the meticulous work will be concealed by a surface effortlessness: they make it look easy. The sum of these features will produce a charisma that makes the actor magnetic, grabbing and holding the attention of the audience. Before we go into more detail on the qualities themselves, let’s take a broad look at the nature and context of success. As any actor entering the profession quickly discovers, the chances of immediate success are slim.3 I was once contacted by an actor who, four months previously, had graduated from drama school as a Gold Medal winner. He had an agent and had been put forward for several auditions, but had still not got an acting job. The reason given was usually that he lacked experience. Despite getting a part-time job as a barman, he had suddenly found himself with a great deal of time to fill in and his self-confidence rapidly diminishing. The pub manager commented that when he started the job he glowed with presence and charisma, but slowly all that had drained away. Then one of his close friends told him, ‘You look like shit.’ That was the tipping point that made him ask for my advice. ‘It’s much tougher than I thought it would be,’ he confessed. ‘What can I do?’ That question goes to the heart of this book: given a high degree of talent and the best training, what can you do to succeed?

Talent and effort There’s one thing you need to know about the nature of success that can make a huge difference to your career: your precise attitude can determine whether you

xviii

GETTING TO OUTSTANDING

will ever become the actor you want to be. So, what is the right attitude? Before you go any further, take a moment to answer this: ●●

●●

Do you believe you were born with a certain amount of acting talent and you can’t really change that? Or do you believe that your innate talent for acting can be substantially altered?

A variation on these two questions led Stanford University professor Carol Dweck to develop her concept of fixed mindset and growth mindset, an idea that has brought proven results to musicians, dancers, chess players and athletes. Now, actors can benefit from it too.4

Fixed mindset According to Dweck, if you believe that your talents and intelligence are set in stone, and will be like that for the whole of your life, you have a ‘fixed mindset’. This means that if you make a mistake or fail at something – say a particularly bad rehearsal, or a stinking review in the papers – you’ll be likely to interpret this as a threat, which can badly erode your self-confidence. As a result, you’re likely to avoid future challenges by playing it safe. Therefore, it’s a waste of time auditioning for that part at the National or on Broadway because you would just make a fool of yourself. And furthermore if you believe your talent is decidedly limited, you’ll feel that there’s little point in trying to get better. This also creates a need to prove yourself again and again. For people with a fixed mindset, says Dweck, ‘every situation is evaluated: Will I succeed or fail? Will I look smart or dumb? Will I be accepted or rejected? Will I feel like a winner or a loser?’5 And how did you get these beliefs? They were probably formed by your parents, teachers and other adults who encouragingly told you when you were very young that you were so clever, smart or talented. Naturally, you grew to accept that.

Growth mindset On the other hand, if you believe that the amount of talent you’ve been dealt is just the starting point for your development, then you have a ‘growth mindset’. You regard your basic talent for acting as a quality that can be cultivated through your efforts. You see yourself as a work in progress rather than a finished product. You can change and grow through hard work and experience. As a result you’re more comfortable about accepting challenges and you embrace failure as an acceptable step towards success. As Dweck says, ‘The

GETTING TO OUTSTANDING

xix

passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset.’6 So when you’re knocked back – for example, you didn’t get the part you wanted in the audition – you cheerfully pick yourself up, learn from the experience and decide what you’ll do differently next time. The fixed mindset makes you concerned with how you’ll be judged; the growth mindset makes you focus on improving.

The power of the growth mindset Can you start to see how crucial this attitude is in rehearsals, where you are groping your way towards solutions through trial and error? Or in managing your career, where you’re trying to get bigger and better parts? The outstanding actor takes risks and is comfortable with the failure, as you’ll see repeatedly from the examples I’m going to give you in this book. To borrow an example from sports, it was calculated that the ice skater, Shizuka Arakawa, ‘tumbled over more than twenty thousand times in her progression from five-year-old wannabe to 2006 Olympic champion’.7 This suggests that Olympic champion ice skaters fall down thousands of times more than average skaters. Similarly, as the experts I spoke to confirmed, the outstanding actor develops a creative fearlessness, and is inclined to take more and greater risks than the average actor. The good news is that, once you know about this, you can consciously change your attitude from being trapped in a fixed mindset to being comfortable with risk in a growth mindset. It’s about creating a new set of habits. And if you are a director or teacher, the crucial point is to praise effort towards progress, not talent. That alone can change the results you get. For example: ‘You’ve really put a lot of work into that scene. Good. Now, let’s try it again and see if you can give the character more attack.’ Take a moment to compare how the two mindsets would make you react to these situations: ●● ●●

●● ●●

●●

You auditioned for a part in a TV drama and didn’t get cast. After opening night you were mentioned unfavourably in some of the reviews. You’re in your last term at drama school and you don’t have an agent. You’re in a production at the National Theatre and everyone is vastly more experienced than you are. You’ve been given your first leading role in a high-profile production.

The fixed mindset will lead you to see these situations as threats that you may want to retreat from, while the growth mindset will help you to see them as healthy challenges.

xx

GETTING TO OUTSTANDING

Effort and success We’ve seen how effort and hard work can alter your level of talent. Further research tells us that talent isn’t as important as you might think anyway, because there is a causal relation between effort and eventual success. It’s been found that in just about every field, outstanding people simply work much harder and more effectively than average people.

The power of practice K. Anders Ericsson, one of the world’s leading authorities on expertise, found that innate talent has very little to do with it. What counts is what he called ‘deliberate practice’ – sustained efforts to do something you can’t yet do well. After studying ‘elite’ musicians, dancers and sports people, Ericsson concluded, ‘Expert performance is acquired slowly over a very long period of time as a result of practice and … the highest levels of performance and achievement appear to require at least around 10 years of intense prior preparation.’8 This equated to about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.9 Furthermore, Ericsson found that elite performers tend to start at a remarkably young age. To test his findings, I asked fifty musicians at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama when they first started learning music. Sure enough, the average age was 6.7 years old. This means that by the time they reached Guildhall, most of them had already put in their ten years and had achieved a level of mastery. Furthermore, Ericsson also found that the higher the level of performance, ‘the earlier the age of first exposure as well as the age of starting deliberate practice’.10

Practice and the actor How does this apply to actors? Here the principle is the same, but the time frame is different. While a violinist can put in countless hours of private practice, actors normally need to work in groups, or be in productions if they are to develop many of their skills. Their situation is closer to the training of sports teams. To test Ericsson’s theory further, I asked fifty-six average ability young actors (in the first rounds of auditions at Guildhall) when they first started acting classes or tuition. And I asked the same question to two groups of eighteen high ability young actors (each group had been selected from 2,600 applicants for Guildhall).11 What I found surprised me. The average starting age in the two high ability groups was 9.4 and 9.7, respectively – much older than the musicians – while the average starting age for the auditionees group was even older: 11.2. This suggests that, while elite actors start learning earlier than average actors, they are still going to be much older than elite musicians and sports champions

GETTING TO OUTSTANDING

xxi

by the time they have achieved their ten years of deliberate practice. And with high levels of unemployment in theatre and film, it takes even longer to clock up the equivalent of ten years’ acting experience. This may explain why we don’t consider actors to have achieved mastery until they are well into their thirties. What this also means is that, to achieve career success you need to get as much work as you can, as soon as you can – and keep working. Even work in low-paid fringe productions will give you the experience to build your skills.

The market conditions for success There are two main factors that influence your success as an actor: doing the job well and getting the job in the first place. While you need passion and motivation to be an outstanding actor, you also need to be realistic about conditions in the job market, because you’ll have limited control over most of them. But with clear strategies, you can make the best of your circumstances. We’ll look at some of those conditions now.

Age Your career as an actor is potentially very long and each age brings its own opportunities. In Britain and America there has been a strong demand for young actors who conform to a certain look, which is why agents visiting drama school showcases are keen to snap up the most immediately employable. This suggests that getting high-profile work before the age of twenty-five can provide a springboard for a long-lasting career, simply because it is likely to lead to other work, which in turn will speed up your experience of performing, and lead to mastery of the craft. As the director Nicholas Hytner observed, that can even override a lack of training: ‘Conventionally good-looking actors of both sexes get more opportunities in their twenties and therefore are better when they’re in their mid-thirties.’ But the pendulum always swings in the opposite direction: consequently, there is a counter appetite in the industry for actors who don’t conform to this type but look more ‘real’. Take, for example, television dramas in the fantasy genre, such as Game of Thrones. At the same time, success often attracts success, which can make it very difficult to break into that next level if you don’t already have a credible track record, especially in the film industry. The casting director Anne McNulty observed that ‘the parts will almost always go to the people who’ve already got parts and are getting parts. So the successful become more successful.’

xxii

GETTING TO OUTSTANDING

Class In Britain, class and wealth can affect your chances of success. Much has been made of the fact that successful actors such as Damian Lewis, Dominic West and Eddie Redmayne all went to Eton, and many others such as Hugh Grant, Benedict Cumberbatch and Helen Bonham Carter were also from prominent public schools. Furthermore, the high fees charged by drama schools and the scarcity of scholarships meant that students from poorer backgrounds were often unable to take up the training in the first place. This influenced a trend towards a more affluent class of drama students, which in turn affected the supply of trained actors entering the profession. However, with the emergence of initiatives such as Open Door, which gives free access and mentoring to potential drama students from low-income households, the talent pool has been transformed. With this widened access, leading drama schools have been able to accept a much more diverse intake of students, which in turn brings a new energy into the industry. For example, in the 2020 cohorts at both LAMDA and Guildhall, more than a third were supported by the Open Door scheme.

Partnerships with directors If you’re lucky enough to get good work with a famous or ‘rising star’ director and that director likes you enough to want to work with you again, it can shoot your career forward like a rocket. Think of the creative partnerships between Robert de Niro and Martin Scorsese, Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott, Marcello Mastroianni and Federico Fellini, Toshiro Mifune and Akira Kurosawa, Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog, Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman, Grace Kelly and Alfred Hitchcock, Tim Burton and both Helen Bonham Carter and Johnny Depp. Such partnerships, based on mutual respect and complete trust, mean that actors can reach the height of their potential and they’re grateful for what they have.

Getting the right part Part of your success as an actor will depend on having the right role and undoubtedly some types of role attract more attention than others, especially in film. The Oscars, for example, reward a certain type of performance: one that tends to be flashy, revealing a high degree of acting virtuosity that often involves physical transformation. Incidentally, you can greatly increase your chances of an Oscar by playing a real-life character. Between 2001 and 2019, over a third (seven out of nineteen) of Best Actress award winners played real-life characters, while in the same period more than half (twelve out of nineteen) of Best Actor award winners did the same.

GETTING TO OUTSTANDING

xxiii

Having a troubled childhood Strangely enough, some very successful actors, especially film actors, had troubled or transient childhoods. They were difficult and unsettled as children, and saw themselves as outsiders. Marlon Brando was sent to a military academy, from which he was expelled. Jack Nicholson was suspended from school three times, while Meryl Streep, a plain and gawky child, was bullied and beaten by other children.12 Joseph Fiennes, brother of Ralph, whose family was constantly on the move, recalled, ‘I went to something like 14 schools. From the age of about five to twelve, I was a hideous little terror who beat people up.’13 Johnny Depp, known in his earlier days for wild drinking and hotel-room smashing, had a tough childhood. ‘I wouldn’t say my youth was the perfect model in terms of raising a kid,’ he says. ‘It was a relatively violent upbringing. If you did something wrong, you got hit. If you didn’t do something wrong, you got hit.’14 The psychologist Brian Bates suggests that there may be a gene or psychological trait that pushes troublesome but talented young people towards acting as a way out.15 In a drama school context, their previously perceived disruptive behaviour, once channelled, is seen as creative energy. But of course, wildness always needs to be offset by discipline if you are to succeed as an actor.

Having a pushy parent Finally, to get the breaks your talent deserves, it may be helpful in your very early years to have a pushy parent. Many teenage stars appear to arrive suddenly out of the blue, achieving overnight success, but take a closer look and you notice that they were already seasoned professionals with careers as child actors: Elizabeth Taylor and Judy Garland, for instance. Think back to those Guildhall musicians who started at six. Leonardo DiCaprio’s first TV role was at the age of five (Romper Room). He puts his early success down to living in LA and having ambitious parents: ‘It was force of mere location that I got to go and audition as much as I did, to go after school to multiple auditions. You know, my parents supported me, driving me every day after school, for years.’16 Kirsten Dunst started her TV career, in commercials, at the age of three, and at seven she had a feature role in Woody Allen’s New York Stories. Scarlett Johansson’s mother began taking her to auditions at an early age and she appeared in her first film, North, at the age of ten achieving international recognition in The Horse Whisperer at fourteen. In Britain, the Harry Potter films provided a springboard for a whole tribe of child-actors. With a few films under his belt Daniel Radcliffe could have just about anything he wanted, so at the age of seventeen he chose a West End

xxiv

GETTING TO OUTSTANDING

stage debut in Equus and was soon playing on Broadway. There is also Keira Knightley, whose TV debut, in Royal Collection, was at the age of seven, and who in 2002 got her international break, at seventeen, in Bend It Like Beckham. * The conditions I’ve described are mostly outside your control and you may be thinking, well I didn’t have a troubled childhood, or pushy mother, and I didn’t go to Eton, so all the cards are stacked against me: What’s the point? But those factors are not exclusive. They just show how some people seized the opportunity of an early advantage and went on, through effort, to prosper. The focus of this book is about what you can do – now – to make a difference. And in the spirit of the growth mindset, there is a lot you can do. This book is about how you make the best of what you have – your talent, your physicality and your personality, because in the acting profession there is always hope. And there is always room for one more outstanding actor. So let’s get started.

PART ONE

OUTSTANDING IN YOUR WORK

2

1 WARMTH Like many children of my generation, when I was four or five, I didn’t have a lot of toys and gadgets, so I improvised. A lump of tree trunk could happily be a fire engine or a tractor. My tricycle could easily become an ambulance or a plane. You may remember doing something like this yourself. The point about young children playing is that they are doing it for the pleasure of it. And the sheer fun makes it charming for anyone watching. The source of that charm is the openness and warmth of children using their imagination. In this sense, we all have an early talent for acting. It’s what happens to that talent later on that makes the difference between a professional actor and the rest of the population. As Picasso once put it, ‘All children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist once we grow up.’

What is warmth? Warmth is the quality of heart in a performance. It’s about the way you connect with other people. When you act with warmth, you project affection, goodwill and kindliness – all powerful qualities for an audience to receive. To engage an audience fully, you need to work from a warm heart, and you do that by being open to everyone around you. Consider the opposite: a cold, cynical heart. Cynicism is death to acting. Through warmth it’s possible to find the openness and childlike quality that will touch your audience emotionally and draw them in. Warmth in performance allows your audience to identify with you. There is no occasion when warmth in the actor is not useful. Even when playing a villain, such as Richard III or Lady Macbeth, your warmth as an actor will enable the character to become more rounded. As Judi Dench pointed out, warmth is about having the right attitude towards your audience: ‘Your job is telling a story. That number of people have come on that specific night, bought their ticket, and you’re going to tell them this story. It’s going to be for them. It is not to do with you. It’s to do with this group of people on this particular night, telling that story to them, rather than you showing off.’

4

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

How do you find warmth? Warmth, of the kind an actor needs, is rare in adults because it comes from a cluster of qualities that add up to a carefree confidence. When I asked Rufus Norris, the National Theatre’s artistic director, what he thought makes an actor stand out, he said, ‘When you’re out of work, when you’re auditioning, when you haven’t had a job for a while – all of those things have an effect on people and you can take yourself down very quickly. So I think it’s somehow finding a positivity and an openness. Roll with it. If you’re on stage with somebody who likes to play, play with them. If you’re on stage with somebody who goes “Can you not put your foot there, you didn’t do that last night” – and those people exist – then don’t put your foot there. But work within that. And have the confidence, despite everything, to be vulnerable. Bring yourself to the party.’ This is not always easy, of course. As Emily Berrington put it, ‘If your fellow actor wants you to be the same every night, but you thrive on playing, can you challenge yourself to be the secure scene partner they need and also sprinkle in some playfulness in a way that still supports them?’ There is often a delicate and subtle negotiation between actors, which depends on having empathy. But you need to accept that every production and every cast will create different conditions. One solution is not to let your ego get the upper hand and that’s a choice you can make. Like the other key qualities, warmth is something you need to start cultivating offstage, in everyday life. If it becomes a natural habit in your life, it will be easier to express it in a performance. Warmth comes out of love – the love you feel for the work, the play, the character you’re portraying and the audience. But balance is important. There should always be a balance of intellect and emotion. Intellect alone will make your acting cold; emotion alone will make you come across as fluffy and sentimental. The balance engages both the hearts and the minds of your audience. Equally, the tension between childlike innocence and adult maturity can make you fascinating to an audience. Warmth is revealed by your behaviour to those around you and this is especially important when you are the leading actor. As Jude Law commented, you need to be a positive influence on the set or in the rehearsal room, ‘Good spirit I think goes an awfully long way. It creates an environment of security and safety.’

Warmth and your authentic self Most young children project a natural warmth to start with. Later, in adolescence a culture of cool sets in and often the charm is smothered by self-consciousness. Consequently, in your teen years, you usually develop a set of defences that

WARMTH

5

will help you survive on the school playground, avoid being bullied and, if you’re lucky, be popular. But this gives you a lot of clutter (attitudes, affectations and mannerisms) as you move away from your authentic self (the essence of your character that drives you through your life) towards a self that is more manufactured. And that is not good for an actor. Here’s a conversation I had with a student actor recently. I’ll call him Chris. We were discussing his performance the previous day. Me: What surprised me was that you started off well in each scene and then the energy dropped. You were on the back foot again. Chris: Yeah, why am I always doing that? It really gets me. Everyone tells me that. I don’t mean to. I just seem to bottle out. Me: What were you like when you were seven? Chris: Crazy. I was always tearing around. Me: Full of energy? Chris: Yeah, wild. Me: What was your imagination like? Chris: Wild, I was always coming up with mad things. Me: What were you like at secondary school? Chris: At sixteen I started to get this chilled out thing, because that’s what you did. Me: That made you popular? Chris: Yeah. People tell me now I’m always laid back. I don’t feel laid back. Me: Well you don’t have to stay that way. The point is: which one is the real you? Chris: I don’t know. Me: You could see this as three layers. First there was the crazy sevenyear-old, then the chilled out sixteen-year-old and now you’re starting to discover the third layer, which should take you back to the real you – your authentic self, free of clutter. That will be the source of your power. So how do you find that authentic self? The key word here is playfulness. Remember, the Elizabethan word for actor was player. But under the pressure of needing to be impressive, or getting it right, and the fear of being judged, playfulness is the first element to get sacrificed. Playfulness sets the tone for the performance and creates rapport, provided you are sending out a warm energy to your audience. But as Felicity Kendal once told me: It’s very difficult unless you are utterly at ease. Because the audience are there to be pleased, they’re on your side, initially. But in the first two or three minutes, it’s like an arrow going from a bow. You can’t change course very easily once you’ve set off. And if you’ve set off slightly askew it’s very difficult

6

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

to gain ground again. The awful thing is that if you’ve got it wrong, they tell you. Fear is picked up immediately. On a good opening night you are nervous, but you are not afraid. If you’re ‘nervous afraid’, it is almost impossible to convince anybody. When I recall my former students who have become highly successful, they all had an abundance of warmth. But genuine warmth is a quality that many actors find difficult to convey and they end up leaving us feeling cold. However, from forty years of training actors I’ve seen that, with willingness, everyone can indeed cultivate it. It’s about projecting openness towards others and, as Ian McKellen observed, embracing playfulness like a child. ‘You see kids – they’re always acting, always discovering, exploring. How they discover life is by playing. We are so lucky, those of us who are actors. We are going to be allowed to play for the rest of our lives.’ Just as young children get playfulness drummed out of them to some extent once they start learning, it is crucial that you rediscover that innocent state you were in as a child, and project a similar openness alongside all the skills you are acquiring as an adult actor. Lily James told me of an audition she had just done for the film director Danny Boyle: ‘He did the scenes with me and we were pretending to be in a car,’ she said. ‘And there’s Danny Boyle, running around the room and doing it, and that playfulness is the best feeling in the world, I think. And that’s heightened by the fact that you know you’re lucky and you know it’s fleeting and you know you have to make the most of it.’ The tension between childlike innocence and adult maturity can make you fascinating to an audience. It shows in the warmth in your eyes. As Audrey Hepburn, one of the warmest actresses ever, has said, ‘For beautiful eyes, look for the good in others.’ So how exactly does warmth fit into your performance? Warmth is not just about enjoying playing together; it’s also about welcoming your audience into your theatre and looking after them. When he was playing King Lear for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Robert Stephens told me: Many actors will come off and say: ‘It’s a bloody awful audience.’ A bloody awful audience has never existed. You can’t have 1,500 people all being bloody-minded. It’s possibly a very bad performance, because you’re not getting the reaction you got last night. And why aren’t you getting it? You’re not really concentrating. You’ve got to be aware of them. You’ve got to have an ear on them all the time. The great thrill of being an actor is the sense of responsibility. Suddenly the lights go down in the auditorium, you look out and there are 1,500 people sitting out there. You don’t know any of them. You don’t know where they’ve come from or why they’ve come. But you

WARMTH

7

have to make them quite assured that for the next three hours they’re going to be in very safe hands and they’re going to enjoy themselves. So I think it is a sense of command, of control that you have, and being able to project your enjoyment. If it’s a part like Lear, you’ve got to have the ability to share your own sense of the tragedy – what it means to you. And you’ve got to be prepared to be totally honest with an audience, because they can tell if you’re telling lies, or cheating.

Standing out This helps us understand warmth in the light of our central question: What makes an actor outstanding in a role? Putting aside your skill in speaking and moving, which the audience should be able to take for granted, there are three levels that make up an outstanding performance.

Intellect First, the intellectual level: you analyse the text meticulously and understand the structure of each scene and your character’s function in that scene. You have total specificity of thought so that every word you utter counts. Nothing is generalized.

Imagination Secondly, there is your creative imagination. Without this, even the most intellectually rigorous work will not engage the audience. Your imagination fuels your ability to come up with fresh, original choices that lesser actors might not have dared to make. It’s by being clear about your choices and why you’ve made them that you bring detail to your work. And by exploring choices outside your comfort zone, you can find more creative individuality. These two elements – the intellect and the imagination – counterbalance each other and help give you more virtuosity in what you do.

Heart But even then, you can still appear cold and the audience is not transported. This brings us to the third level: heart. The quality of heart in a performance animates your work, warms it and gives it humanity. It allows you to be more comfortable with being vulnerable. When there is heart in your performance, we can empathize with your character.

8

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

At the point where these three levels intersect, you have an outstanding actor.

* Here are some of the exercises and games I use to help actors awaken their childlike imagination, strengthen their concentration and bring warmth to what they’re doing. They all require great openness. I’ve grouped them into the ones you can do by yourself and those that are best done in a group, during classes or rehearsals. Think of the imagination as a muscle. It needs to be exercised regularly if it’s to lead you to fresher and more inventive choices than those of other actors. But the key thing is to do it. Reading an exercise will give you almost nothing; doing it will help transform you.

WORKING BY YOURSELF Transforming the object ●●

Take an object – say a length of rope, a sheet, a bamboo stick or a hula hoop.

WARMTH

●●

●●

●●

Without thinking, play with it and transform it into as many different objects as you can. For example, the rope can become a snake, a wig, a baby, a tight rope, spaghetti, vomit or a stand-up microphone. The skill is to come up with a succession of different objects, instantly. You are training your imagination to find creative spontaneity and this will work best if you keep yourself in a playful frame of mind, with warmth. The game can also be done in a group with everyone taking turns to transform the object.

The three squiggles

●● ●●

●●

●● ●● ●●

Here’s a brilliant way of training your visual imagination. Take a sheet of paper and without thinking, draw three random squiggles. Now, as quickly as possible, complete the picture. Try to avoid faces or maps, as those are a bit too easy. The skill is to do it very quickly, using a minimum number of lines. Next, do three more squiggles and complete that picture. Do ten of these a day and you’ll find yourself thinking much more creatively and spontaneously.

9

10

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

The double character This is a great way of bringing out your sense of humour and virtuosity. It’s also one of the earliest techniques in theatre, where one actor tells the story by playing all the parts. It goes right back to ancient Rome. The great mime artist Marcel Marceau perfected this in his performance of Bip as David and Goliath, in which he played both characters by disappearing and reappearing from behind a screen, each time with the physicality of the tall giant or the diminutive David. You’ve probably also seen this technique used by stand-up comics where they appear to have a conversation with someone else.

The exercise ●●

●● ●●

●●

Basically, by isolating various parts of your body, you assume the shape of one character, then you flip to the physicality of a contrasting character. A conversation ensues – either silently or with words. Situations can be: a child stealing from a fruit seller and getting caught, a bully intimidating someone, someone trying to seduce someone, Frankenstein dealing with his creature, an argument in the pub. This is also a chance to sharpen your technical virtuosity. You’ve got to be accurate in the space, with crisp timing, but to pull it off you need a warm sense of humour.

The detail ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

Walk around isolating first the head: you can hold it forward, back, up, down or tilted to one side. Next, add to that a position of the shoulders: they can be forward, back, pushed up or down, or one up and one down. Then the same with the chest, the hands, the abdomen, the pelvis, the knees and the ankles. Make a complete composition using a position of all of those together. Test how this person walks, stands, stops and starts. Don’t be afraid to make it physically bold but keep it truthful and believable. Now, in the same way, create a contrasting character and test how that person moves. Move between the two characters, either with a little jump, or a spin, or merely a shift of weight.

WARMTH

●●

●●

●●

●●

11

But when you arrive at the character, there must be a clear moment of punctuation: what Marceau called a fixed point (point fixe). It needs practice to get the accuracy. Then start to have them interact as they move in the space. Here you’re using cinematic editing techniques as you ‘cut’ from one character doing something to the other. Once you have the technique set up, you can start to create a little scene for the two characters. You can do these in silence (Marceau always worked silently with music) or you can have dialogue. Avoid using English as it inhibits you a bit and the improvised dialogue can sound awkward. You can usually get the two characters to communicate perfectly clearly in gibberish, but be sure to give it an image – Italian, German or Russian is good – otherwise it may sound generalized.

I love you, I hate you Warmth stems from your attitude to the other actors. Here’s a simple but highly effective technique you can use in rehearsal to give yourself more intensity in a scene, especially when you need to find a strong chemistry with your fellow actor. I’ve adapted it from an exercise I learnt from the improvisation expert, Keith Johnstone.1 ●●

●●

●●

●●

Before you begin the scene, choose either ‘I love you’ or ‘I hate you’. Repeat this mantra over and over in your head. This is not an objective; it’s just an attitude, which creates a mood. Now play the scene and keep the mantra going all the time while you are speaking the lines. Even though it’s difficult to keep those two unrelated elements going, make the mantra loud in your head while focusing on the other actor. This alters the energy and expression in your eyes. The tension between the lines and the mantra gives you a certain intensity that in turn minimally changes the way you say the words.

Obviously, ‘I love you’ projects warmth while ‘I hate you’ projects more coldness – and these will really change the way you feel – but remember to separate character from actor: your character may hate the other character but as actors you should both enjoy playing together. You can also take this to another level by playing the mantra in opposition to the objective. For example, try playing ‘I love you’ while keeping aloof or physically

12

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

uninvolved in the scene, which will project more vulnerability. Try playing ‘I hate you’ while seducing the other person, which will give you more sense of power and danger.

WORKING TOGETHER The interrupted journey While being warm and projecting fun, you also need a balance of imagination and focus to give you a clear line through your scene. This game will help you keep on track while flexing your imagination at the same time. You can play it with another actor. ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

You tell a story to your partner about a fictitious journey you went on, being very specific about the starting point and the precise destination. For example, you might start from the base of Big Ben, setting out for the top of the Empire State building. You tell the story in the past tense: ‘I turned and waved goodbye to Big Ben, then picked up my bags and headed off for the tube station … ’ As you speak, your partner throws in unrelated words from time to time, for example: spanner, bowler hat, sausage, eye patch. Without hesitating or interrupting the flow, you must incorporate the word into your story, while still moving it forward. So, you might have: ‘ … and headed off for the tube station where I bumped into a mysterious man wearing an eye patch.’ The fun and warmth of the game is that you’re balancing the story line with outrageous ways of justifying the latest word they hit you with. And as long as you keep the pressure off (not trying to be brilliant), you’ll find that your imagination works faster and faster. The skill is to tell the story without hesitation while seamlessly using the words that are thrown at you. This in turn helps you to stay in the present moment because it’s impossible to plan everything ahead.

Tag for actors This is an excellent warm-up game you can use if there is a group of you working together. You can take it through many levels to discover important points about the actor’s energy. But the bottom line is that it’s a game and it should be

WARMTH

13

performed with warmth that you share with each other. Provided there’s sufficient space, it’s best played with groups of up to twelve people.

The game 1. The basic game Everyone runs. One person, who is ‘it’, reaches out and tags (touches) someone. That person tags another and so on. The rule is that you can’t tag the person who has just tagged you for at least five seconds. At first this unleashes an explosion of enjoyment and laughter, but it can also be dangerous because the energy is almost always wrong. People crash into each other, carry a lot of physical tension, move too heavily, and so on. On this first level, I never let it go on for more than a minute because someone could get hurt.

The detail 2. Tension and relaxation The crucial thing is to find an effective energy on stage. In the game of tag, notice when you’re using excessive tension. If you work from tension, you’ll burn up your energy and are more likely to hurt yourself. Focus on letting go of the tension, even if it slows you down. This introduces a level of skill to the game.

3. Space awareness Constantly be aware of where you are in relation to the rest of the group. Keep close to someone, so that if you are tagged, you can more easily find someone else to tag. This transforms the space because now there is a connection between everyone. Also remember that it’s a 360-degree space: you can suddenly turn and tag someone behind you.

4. Giving energy to each other When you tag someone, it shouldn’t be brutal or clumsy. No bruises, please. Think of sending energy through your relaxed hand to the other person. It’s not important to play the whole game without ever getting tagged. The important thing is that the pulse passes rapidly from one person to another, just as the story in a play should be carried forward between the characters’ dialogue and action.

14

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

Once they get very good at playing tag in a released way, you start to notice that people are offering themselves up like sacrificial lambs and the game becomes too easy. At that point I’ll say, ‘Try not to get caught!’ Then the pace changes and there’s a higher level of skill.

5. Tag with sound The person who is ‘it’ makes a sound – a sustained vowel – until they tag the next person, who then makes their own sound. Check that the sound is open and centred, not coming from the throat in a constricted or falsetto tone.

6. Tag with song Everyone thinks of a song, then when you are tagged, you sing your song until you tag the next person. As a variation you can sing the song in a foreign accent. This is useful when you want to heighten the warmth and the comedy.

7. Tag with text I’ll give the actors a line of text – a phrase from a Greek or Elizabethan tragedy works well – and when you’re tagged, you speak that text. For example, ‘Gallop apace, you fiery footed steeds’, or ‘Thou, Nature art my goddess’. If you don’t get through the whole sentence, the person you tag picks it up from that point. If you do get through it and you still haven’t tagged anyone, you keep repeating the sentence. Two things tend to happen here. At first this will lead to a garbled, frantic speaking of the text, as people try to catch someone. At that point I’ll stop and say, ‘Why are we doing this?’ ‘For fun and enjoyment,’ they’ll say. ‘Yes, but why did I choose this particular text?’ ‘Because we have to move and speak at the same time?’ ‘Yes, but why these words?’ ‘Don’t know.’ ‘Aren’t they wonderful sounds?’ ‘Aaahh!’ Play with the sounds of the words. Enjoy them. You can stretch them out, say them high or low, loud or soft, sing them or speak them, and so on. Now there’s a more sensual connection with the text, the choices are much more flamboyant and there’s twice as much enjoyment.

WARMTH

15

The other thing that happens is that while you may have become physically released and accurate, once you add text – which means the intellect is working – the physical accuracy goes to pieces. We tend to favour one or the other. Aim to keep both going: the movement and the words, the intellect and the instinct.

8. Zen tag A further level of the game is to think like a martial artist. The wonderful thing about the physicality of the martial artist is that the energy is supremely effective: everything is pared down to the essence and nothing is wasted. With animal efficiency, the reflexes are lightning fast. That’s very useful for actors. So try to play the game like a martial artist, with super effective energy that is centred in the lower abdomen. This can be played in silence or with sound. At this level you should also maintain an equal level of energy, concentration and commitment. If one person lets that drop, the whole game drops. It’s the same on stage. Compare, for example, the last act of Macbeth, when messengers enter bringing bad news – they need to match the commitment of the actor playing Macbeth, otherwise the balance tips. When there are equal forces on stage, it’s very exciting.

16

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

9. Zen tag with gibberish Instead of sounds, you can take it further and use words, but in a made-up language – gibberish – so that the intellect is less involved. When you are tagged, speak to the rest of the group in gibberish and keep speaking until you tag the next person. Occasionally you might stop and speak to the whole group, then suddenly lunge forward and tag some unsuspecting individual who wasn’t alert enough. To avoid feeling generalized while speaking in gibberish, you can all decide on a subject: the joys of spring; the pleasures of ice cream; how much in love you are. Play with the sounds and be specific in what you’re saying. Be passionate and warm towards everyone.

10. Tag with centres You each move from a different centre (e.g. the nose or the fingers) and if you like, with a different quality of centre (e.g. springy or sodden). Although the game is fast, this will give everyone strikingly different rhythms and dynamics. It’s very good if you want to explore the comedy aspects of a play that needs a bold physical level. I also use it as a warm-up for commedia dell’arte work. It’s best to start the game in silence to build up accuracy, then add gibberish.

11. Cosmic tag This final level of the game is excellent for exploring the universal aspects of the characters where you want to stress their humanity. You could use it as a warm-up for tragedy, or again in something like the commedia dell’arte, where every character represents a slice of society and speaks for all the poor people, the hungry people, the masters, and so on. You remind the actors about the vertical axis (see pages 115–16) where everything is heard by both God and the devils. Then they play the game, each being connected on the vertical axis. It should be used with language, either gibberish or fragments of the text you’re working on. It’s like having an extra gear in your engine and it gives enormous power. ●●

See https://vimeo.com/channels/1486142/376359409

As you can see, tag can be a hugely versatile warm-up. It’s the combination of accuracy, alertness and fun that makes this game so exciting to watch. It offers a supreme chance to practise your virtuosity within the ensemble. But above all it helps you to strengthen the habit of projecting warmth in everything you do.

WARMTH

17

Sound and movement The game ●● ●●

●●

●●

Everyone stands in a large circle. You really need a big space for this one. One actor moves into the centre, making a pattern of sound and movement. The movements should be simple, using full extensions of the body. The sound should be free and comfortable. When the rhythm and pattern of the sound and movement are clear, the actor performs this in front of someone else. That person mirrors the movements and sound exactly, entering into the spirit of what’s given and matching the energy. Facing each other, they gradually reverse positions and the new person takes the sound and movement into the centre of the circle. This person then changes it into a new pattern of sound and movement, and when that is clear, passes it on to someone else.

The detail This exercise can also be done with a theme to explore character or the dominant themes in a play. For example: hunger, greed, courage, vanity. These will give you some powerful archetypal patterns. And the curious thing here is that these patterns are universal: when I’ve done this game in China, Canada, Indonesia, Italy, India or New Zealand, people have tended to come up with the very same patterns. Although this game is about two people giving and receiving energy, it also demands a high level of courage and individuality. The more extravagant you are, the more it comes to life. And this is once more the mark of an outstanding actor. Years ago, when working with the young Antony Sher (now Sir Antony) at the Royal Shakespeare Company, I was struck by the way that he entered into games and improvisations like this with more flair and risk than anyone else in that remarkable company. Because of the way he grabbed the opportunity in every exercise and took it to the extreme, he showed all the qualities of a star in the making.

Dealing with the difficulties Why should this be so difficult? When asked to get up and do something physical, most of us will initially fall back on a narrow range of patterns that we feel comfortable with. The game immediately exposes these. Its strength is that it forces you to take on new patterns and shapes. It’s not easy to do, though. You must keep the movements simple and elemental. They pass through the gut and use every part of the body.

18

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

There are three points where the energy can drop. The first is when the person doing the sound and movement starts coming towards you and you have to take it over. At that moment you may instinctively want to shy away, which will make the other person lose confidence. The skill is to be able to pick up the challenge immediately and joyously, without flinching. The second moment is when your partner leaves you to do it on your own. Suddenly, instead of two bodies in space and two voices making the sound, there’s just you. The skill is to take that over and build on it, revelling in the exposure and vulnerability. The third moment is when you realize it’s time to make up a new pattern of your own. Things can go suddenly intellectual on you and you start casting around for impressive things to do. Occasionally, people just stop and panic at that point. Forget about being impressive or sensible. Just play with the movement you’ve got and allow something to develop from it. Take your time to clarify it, making it simpler and more precise. Then, when it’s focused, pass it on to the next person.

Risk, transformation and warmth When it’s really working well, you’ll notice that everyone else in the circle seems to be internalizing the same movement – all the bodies are moving, as is if they are all in there doing it together. People often fall about laughing when watching this game. And that’s usually when we see one of our group utterly transformed, way out of their comfort zone, doing something we’ve never seen them do before. It’s impossible to succeed in this game without throwing yourself in with total warmth. Both in this game and on stage, the audience is engaged when the actor does something really brave and takes a risk. In that moment there is transformation. Also, when the movement is given to the other person and mirrored by them, sometimes that person reveals something new as they take on the patterns of the other person. And if the energy that comes back is magnified, there is a great power in the chemistry between the two actors. This engages us with its sheer exuberance. And if, while all this is going on, the actors appear to be enjoying it, then that adds to our own fun. It’s important therefore that there should be an equal balance of forces between the two actors, just as there should be an equal balance of forces on stage. If one actor is energized and the other is not, the balance tips and it’s not satisfying to the audience. It was said of the great classical actor Sir Donald Wolfit that he surrounded himself with mediocre actors on stage so that he would shine all the more in his personal spotlight, even to the extent of telling them, ‘When I say stay at arm’s length, I mean my arm as well as yours. Keep out of me circle!’.2 How much better he might have been had he the challenge of an equal force to play against. Although in this game only two people at once are up and playing, however briefly, the group should watch the action with warmth, generosity and focus, which gives the actors the courage to take the risks they need to. If you watch it in a detached, bored way, it makes the actors lose courage because they’re

WARMTH

19

aware that they’re not engaging you. The same goes for watching each other in rehearsal. If there’s an atmosphere of focused warmth and generosity in the rehearsal room, wonderful things can happen because you give courage to each other. The opposite is poisonous. This game is also very good for helping us understand our relationship with the audience. Why is it that sometimes everyone watching the game is totally engaged, smiling and laughing, and at other times they are all watching with mere politeness? This is to do with the energy that the actors in the space are giving each other. When they are truly playing together, that full energy fizzes out to us and we can’t help but be drawn in. Everyone is smiling. When the actors are coming from a position of weakness, anxiety or nervousness, that also communicates to us and we feel uncomfortable for them, or worse, just disinterested. The same thing happens on stage. Actors who are totally alive to each other will engage and transport the audience. The moment an actor starts going through the motions, the audience will switch off.

The magic substance The game ●●

●●

●●

You can sit or stand in a circle. You imagine you have a magic substance, which can be transformed into anything. The first person starts by moulding it into something – say a necklace – uses it as a necklace and then passes it to the next person, who also uses it as a necklace and then transforms it into something else. For example, you could stretch out the necklace and transform it into a sword. That person uses the sword and passes it to the next person, and so on.

The detail ●●

●●

The skill is to transform the object clearly, but with a minimum number of moves. You should also create something that relates to the shape you’ve just been given. For example, if you were given a sword, you might transform it into barbells or a fishing rod, or even bend it into a hoop, but you shouldn’t squash it into a golf ball or an apple.

The very best actors have learnt to free up their imagination so that under the pressure of games such as this, they can come up with inventive ideas. But to do this, you also need to find ways of taking the pressure off yourself. This game will flex your imagination while creating warm and supportive energy in the circle.

20

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

The foreign movie game The game This can be played as a solo scene, though it’s better if you have a partner to play with because that allows more interaction. ●●

●● ●● ●●

You create a very emotionally charged scene, even going into the territory of melodrama. It should have a light touch in that it’s not too thunderous, and yet you shouldn’t bottle out by sending it up in any way. Things ‘foreign’ are good for liberating your imagination because they distance you from your normal self and help you extend your emotional range. The aim is to see how much heart there can be in this mini-piece of theatre. It can be silent or with speech, but again in gibberish. After all, it’s foreign. For the sake of fluidity, all props should be mimed.

Here are some of the stories I’ve used: ●●

A detective thriller A young woman accuses her lover of cheating on him. He protests. He offers her a whisky. She kills him. As he dies, she tenderly kisses him.

A gothic story A vampire rises from his coffin and wanders through the night. He sees a young woman. She notices him – she stands transfixed. He approaches her and sucks the blood from her. She falls lifeless. He carries her in his arms back to his lair.

●●

A story of jealousy A woman and her lover are embracing. Her husband (or a rival lover) enters and sees them. The husband hits her. The lover pushes him away. The husband goes to another room and pours himself a drink, while the lovers embrace again. The husband returns and stabs the lover, then goes. The woman is left cradling the body in her arms.

●●

The heroic farewell Two brothers or sisters come to the border (one will try to leave the country). They are careful to avoid the border guards. They embrace – a farewell. The younger brother leaves, across the border. He turns and waves to his brother, then goes. The older brother waves, then turns back, but faces the guards. The guards shoot him.

●●

WARMTH

21

The detail The point is to be comfortable with the sheer melodrama of it. That’s something the silent movie actors did brilliantly. There was no way you would call their performances cold. And not a hint of cynicism. This came across very clearly in the 2011 Academy Award-winning silent film, The Artist. Its sheer warmth accounted for a lot of its success. What is important here is that you’re also comfortable with the innocence and romance of the story. Think of the extravagant mime scenes performed by JeanLouis Barrault in Les Enfants du Paradis (1945), one of the most lushly romantic films ever made, which has inspired generations of outstanding actors. You’ve got to confront the big emotions head on with loads of heart. Enter fully the world of the story, and pull us into it with you. While you’re working on this scene, you need to remember that cinema is a visual medium. The scriptwriter of a film will cut the dialogue to a minimum and let the actors articulate meaning through their eyes and bodies. Also, economy is important. When you take away the dialogue, it magnifies the physical dimension and audiences notice more. So all your movements should have an aesthetic grace and elegance, but without being stylized. This is different from real-life reality. It has to be natural and believable in its truth, but you pare away all the clutter. Here are some questions to consider while you’re working on the scene: ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●●

Where is it, and when (night, day; inside, outside; warm, cold)? What happened immediately before this scene? Is the opening charge of the scene positive or negative?3 What is the key moment in the scene? What is your objective? What do you want? Which character do you want us to identify with? Whose point of view? How can mime help tell the story without drawing attention to itself?

After you’ve presented these scenes, it’s a good idea, as a further level, to play them to music – either heightening the silent action or underscoring the foreign dialogue. It’s exciting to see how instantly this will push you into much more courageous choices and give you more scale. The music can be delicate and sentimental, or lush and powerful. Romantic film music is very good for this.

Learning from your audience You learn a lot through playing this to an audience, even if it’s a small group, as in a class, because it brings out so many points of craft. And remember, we learn most through the failures. For instance, people might laugh in what you took to be the wrong place. That’s not a disaster but a learning point. In a group situation,

22

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

it’s good to ask afterwards, ‘Why did you laugh just then?’ Usually it’s about the rhythm and timing. Something too fast or too sudden can unintentionally tip the moment into comedy. Or it might be that the mime is drawing attention to itself. In this kind of theatre, there also needs to be an aesthetic beauty in everything you do. If your body falls heavily, the action appears ugly, so you need to find ways of keeping everything light. And the tone needs to be clear. Consider the Indian concept of rasa or flavour in a scene. What is the overall mood you are trying to evoke in your audience? Is your scene heroic, erotic, romantic, fearful?4 Finally – and this is a crucial point – you need to allow the audience space to collaborate with you. You don’t need to do all the work for them. It’s like baking a cake. You supply the ingredients but the audience is the oven in which the cake is baked. So your job is to find the physical form that will move the audience most effectively. This is why music is so useful in these scenes. It shows you how little you have to do. The music helps you to fill out the form and let the audience do some of the work for you. However, the outstanding actor will bring to this exercise an intensity of concentration and a freshness of imagination that will make the scene both believable and compelling. And of course the whole thing must be performed with a warm heart, which is what makes it powerfully moving for the audience.

Warmth in a nutshell All these games are to help you strengthen your imagination, rediscover a sense of playfulness and radiate warmth in your performance. You do that by constantly being open to the story, the other actors and the audience. To find warmth, make it about them, not you, which brings us to the next key quality: generosity.

2 GENEROSITY Why do you want to be an actor? This is a question actors in an audition are often asked. The answers can be very revealing. Some actors talk about the positive effect on themselves. ‘It makes me feel more complete, more fulfilled,’ they’ll say. Others talk about the effect on the audience: ‘I want to change people’s lives. I want to cheer people up.’ Yes, acting can make you feel more complete and fulfilled, but that’s a bonus, not the goal. Acting is not therapy. The reason you’re putting yourself through all the agony of opening up and showing yourself is simple: to give people a good night out, which means, at the highest level, to move them profoundly. Hold on to that and it’ll stop you from going crazy along the way.

What is generosity? Generosity of spirit is one of the most powerful qualities an actor can have, because it creates an exhilarating camaraderie on stage and palpably reaches out to the hearts of the audience. There is a saying that what you send out into the world comes back to you. This was reflected by Ashley Zhangazha, who told me, ‘It’s so important to be generous and open and warm to everybody that you come across in this industry, not in a fake way, but if you’re positive about the way you conduct yourself in this world, I think you can help yourself to benefit from luck. When you open yourself up and you look to the world with positivity I think good things do happen to you.’ Generosity in acting is about freely giving everything away, but you can do that only if you are confident and strong enough to reveal yourself. It’s not about concealing. It also embraces other values, such as humility, openness, love and humanity. It makes vulnerability possible. Yet the number of actors who truly display generosity is disappointingly small. As Judi Dench put it, ‘I think it is to do entirely with sharing and slotting into the jigsaw. You can see an actor being absolutely brilliant, but not sharing and not passing the baton. I don’t think that’s very attractive in my book. And I know somebody very well indeed, who was playing an enormous part, and just before, on the first night, said, “Right, every man for himself!” That’s what it’s not about.’

24

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

Who do you act for? So a vital question is: When you’re on stage, who do you act for? The generous actor does it for the public. You give it everything you’ve got in order to excite the audience. And you do that by focusing fully on the other actors. That helps keep your ego in check and gives you the right level of humility with dignity. It’s not about you; it’s about the others. That, incidentally, is one of the most powerful ways I know of to deal with nerves: being generous to each other. Ewan McGregor talked about those nightmarish moments when, for whatever reason, you lose concentration on stage and you try to get it back. It happened to him once in the middle of a song during the West End run of Guys and Dolls. I usually find, the best way to do it is to go into the eyes of the other actors on stage. If you just go, ‘Okay, feeling a bit shit, I’m really aware.’ Just go straight in your other actor’s eyes. Go right into them. Start playing it right into them, whatever it is. And it’ll go away. You’ll start being sucked back into it with them. And that’s what we do on stage. We sort of rely on each other in every way. In certain parts of the world, actors take the spirit of generosity to an even higher level. I once asked a Balinese actor, ‘When you’re on stage, who do you dance for?’ He looked at me as if I was mad and said, ‘For the gods, of course.’ To the Balinese actor, theatre is an act of devotion. Therefore, there’s no question of giving a second-rate performance. The moment you step onto the stage, which in Bali is in the confines of a temple, you have to please the gods.

How do you become generous? If generosity is about giving and sharing, how do you achieve that on stage or screen? You do it by being available to each other – letting others in rather than pushing them away. This requires empathy: try to see where the other person is coming from. They may appear aggressive because there’s a crisis in their personal life at the moment. Or they may seem aloof because they’re feeling insecure. Give consideration to them, whether it’s the other actor, the director, the stage crew or the film crew. For many actors, this is part of the learning path and true generosity of spirit might come later in life, after you’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way. As Al Pacino recalled: When I was very young, I didn’t like to be told anything. And then I got a little older, and I still didn’t want to be told anything. But you learn a sort

GENEROSITY

25

of diplomacy – certainly trying to be helpful and understand if they want to ask you something. You learn a certain etiquette about it all. That’s part of learning. I guess that’s part of maturity too. I think that you might say I was a bit immature and a bit gruff in the way I handled things. And it got me a reputation. It didn’t do me any good. I was pronounced difficult. Not a good thing, especially in Hollywood. And the temper tantrums – very, very mild, minimal. You don’t get anything from that. All you do is aggravate the set, aggravate everybody. And you put a tone in the room that doesn’t work. That’s why if you rehearse with directors and you stay with it, it’s fine. You just keep your mouth shut. But in your mind you’re saying, ‘You’re a fuckin’ idiot!’ That’s okay. It’s going to be all right. Let him talk. He’s got freedom. He’s got a life too. Because guess what – maybe, just maybe, he may say something that works for you. That’s what I found out. One of the greatest strengths of generosity in a cast is that it enables the actors to do their best work, supporting each other to take the risks they need to take if they are to create great theatre or cinema. Hayley Atwell told me how, early in her career she was struck by the generosity and consideration of the older actors. ‘It was a revelation when I met those successful people to realise, oh no, you don’t have to be an arse, or a dick, just because you’re playing one. In fact, actually the opposite. When I was doing The Long Song and playing this heinous plantation owner who is abusive and a bully, I felt more of a responsibility after those takes, to engage with the other actors that I was working with to build up trust with them. I was like, “Was that okay for you? Was that too much?” So, checking in with them about the levels that I felt I could push it to in a scene because when you create that sense of trust you can go much further. I could be truly, truly awful and worse because on “Cut” we’d be able to have a giggle and go like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe I did that!” and then there was just this sense of play.’

The ensemble and the individual The acting ensemble is of course like a team. Think of the great Manchester United teams, or the All Blacks. They can play superbly well together but at a certain moment, it’s one person who gets the ball over the line or into the goal. As an actor within the ensemble, you need to be ready for that moment. It may be that you have the line that gets the laugh or the line that makes us cry. It’s like taking a goal. But you can’t take a goal by yourself – you need the other actor with you to set up that line. It’s the team that wins, not the individual. Equally, an acting ensemble should not be a comforting fog you disappear inside. It’s an electrical field, fizzing with energy. And within that electrical field, any one of

26

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

you should be able to stand out and take the space when needed. It’s an ensemble of virtuosos, where each actor displays technical and emotional brilliance. As the casting director, Anne McNulty told me, ‘The ideal is not to have a series of individuals who all have their own particular talent, but rather a group of individuals who all share their talent, so that each gains from the experience.’ There needs to be a balance of these two: the ensemble and the individual. Jude Law expressed the need to get the balance right when he first walked into rehearsals for Henry V: I don’t want anyone to think, ‘It’s Jude Law, he’s playing Henry V.’ I want everyone to immediately know that this is a company. And I think that takes a certain amount of effort. It’s not about demeaning yourself, or suddenly going, ‘Oh I’m humble and I’m just a …’ That’s false, and that’s not helpful either. It’s about meeting everyone on an equal playing field. The greatest theatre companies of Europe have been famed for their ensemble spirit, yet they featured actors of striking virtuosity. Consider Arianne Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil, Peter Brook’s Centre for Theatre Research, Grotowski’s Laboratory Theatre, The Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1960s and 1970s, Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble, The Moscow Arts Theatre, Shakespeare’s own company at the Globe, or the great commedia dell’arte troupes of the sixteenth century. Through complete commitment and the mutual trust that comes from working together with a common vision over a long period of time, the highest level of theatre is created. Nowadays very few theatres can afford a long-term ensemble, so it falls back on your values as an actor to nurture this from day one. Usually those values are set by the director. Arianne Mnouchkine, Peter Brook and Trevor Nunn have, at their best, created a strikingly powerful ensemble spirit in their productions. But many directors you work with will not know how to build an ensemble, or may have other priorities in their production. So a lot of the time, it’s up to you. The best you can do to create a powerful ensemble, even within the space of a single production, is to go in with a spirit of unflinching generosity – to your fellow actors and the audience, even when you are playing a minor role.

The actor as confident host Generosity applies not only on stage but also in film making. This was something Jude Law had learnt from the director Anthony Minghella very early on: He always said ‘This is your party, Jude. You’re the lead in this film’, and he would encourage me to go out with the extras and say thank you at the end

GENEROSITY

27

of a hard day. We were embroiled in this big war scene and we had a lot of local army recruits, and we went round and gave out soap, because they were all filthy from the mud, and cigarettes and chocolate. It’s kind of keeping that morale and the spirit up, and being a host. And you’ve been filming for maybe two months, and someone arrives to do a week’s work. You want to make sure they’re welcome. On stage, that same attitude of inclusion needs to go out to your audience. It is your party: you are the hosts and the audience are your guests. Make them feel welcome. As an actor, you’re often grateful for a house half-full. But if you’re lucky enough to be in a sell-out production, then you need to remember that your audience – at least some of them – are prepared to make sacrifices to see you. Like many London theatregoers, I didn’t book my tickets early enough to see Derek Jacobi’s legendary King Lear at the Donmar Theatre. It was sold out within days. So I turned up one winter’s day at 2.30 pm, hoping to get a return. As I took my place on the stone floor outside the theatre, the two elderly ladies in front of me smiled broadly, ‘Thank goodness you’ve turned up,’ one of them said. ‘We were beginning to feel a bit silly. We’ve been here since 12 o’clock.’ The next person came half an hour later: a frail, elderly man with a walking stick. The lady after him had tried queuing before, only to be turned away. So she’d come back, this time a couple of hours earlier than before. We had all made a determined commitment to see that production. When you step onto the stage, you are one of the lucky minority that has an acting job that night, and you need to remember your responsibility to your audience, who are paying your wages. I’ve met a few actors whose default is a disdain for the audience, and they act with an almost visible sneer. They may get work up to a point, but it doesn’t make their audience adore them, and it probably doesn’t make them very happy to act. Such performances lack humility and tip into arrogance. I’ve also met actors whose default is fear of the audience, dreading their collective judgement. This is a delusion. Do you really think audience members plonk themselves down in their seats thinking, ‘I’m going to make sure I really hate this’? Their starting point is that they want you to be outstanding. So you’ve got all this goodwill on your side before you even enter the space. Your part of the deal is to give them a good night out. This means working with your audience and listening to them to give them the best possible experience. The actor Yoshi Oida once explained it to me as a journey you take them on. ‘The actor is like a car bringing the audience to a time and space which it does not experience in daily life,’ he said. ‘A car can take all sorts of people. Sometimes they are noisy, sometimes very quiet. But the

28

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

function of the car is the same. So when you act, you think, how can I best bring them to another space? If I feel they are too serious then I must try to make them relax. When they are agitated I must calm them.’ Sometimes, nerves may tighten you so much that you can’t afford the luxury of feeling generous towards your audience. Such actors become what Robert Stephens called ‘audience-shy’. ‘If you watch them you see that they don’t ever look up,’ he told me. ‘They tend to play to the stalls, which means that the people in the gallery are looking at the top of their heads. It’s a technical thing. Olivier told me that when you walk onstage you should be aware always of the exit sign at the back of the circle. If you look up, the audience will open out.’ Generosity, like warmth, is based on love. You put yourself through it all, not for ego boosting, but for the love of your audience. A turning point for Hayley Atwell was learning to take the work seriously but not herself seriously, realizing that while many other people could have been given the job, she had the opportunity. ‘So this is a gift that I’ve been given,’ she told me. ‘And that means that my job is to be of service. So it’s not about me, it’s about my service that I can provide for an audience, whether that be to entertain them, to excite them, provoke them, whatever it is that your part in the story is there for. But it takes the tension off myself and into what it is that I need to do. And that’s all it is really, it’s demystifying the role of the actor and not thinking of oneself too much but going, I want to be good at this job so that I can provide a service that makes me feel like I can contribute.’ Going back to that day at the Donmar, in the end, after waiting for five hours I was lucky. And as I settled into my seat, I glanced across the auditorium and spotted the two elderly ladies, the man with the walking stick and the lady who had tried a second time. And when the lights went down, Derek Jacobi and his fellow actors gave performances of such energy and generosity, that we all sat on the edges of our seats, hardly daring to breathe. * Here are some of the exercises and games I use to cultivate generosity. They’re about listening, supporting, connecting and following each other with imagination.

WORKING BY YOURSELF Do it for the fans This is a powerful technique I developed to help my students find more vulnerability and generosity of spirit. You can use it while you’re preparing for a

GENEROSITY

29

scene, or in rehearsal or even in performance. It works best in those moments when your character is undergoing some inner turmoil: for example, when two lovers are parting, or you have to conceal a secret, or make a sacrifice. ●●

●●

●●

Imagine yourself as a great movie star. To give yourself more distance, you can take the image of a screen idol in the 1930s or 1940s. While playing the scene, give full concentration to the other actor but at the same time think of your fans watching this scene in the finished movie. Think of the effect this scene has on them. Is there a lump in their throat as they identify with your suffering? Are they weeping as they watch you? And you play the scene for the fans, courageously. Give it all away. Put yourself through it for them. It’s a total act of generosity.

One of my former students uses this as part of his thought process on stage: ‘Ahh, the fan club is in tonight. They’ve come to see me give my great performance as … ’ The tension of opposites is powerful here. It doesn’t lead to vanity, because you are doing it for the fans. At the same time, it gives your generosity of spirit a touch more charisma by freeing you up to make bolder choices and be comfortable with risk-taking.

Status The struggle for power between the master and servant has been at the heart of comedy right back to the plays of Aristophanes. It’s particularly striking in the commedia dell’arte plays of the sixteenth century where for example Pantalone, the miserly master, is constantly tricked by his hyperactive servant Arlecchino. The interesting question for actors is: What is the master doing that gives him authority and what is the servant doing that makes him look like a servant? The answers lie partly in their body language. In the context of improvisation this has been well explored by Keith Johnstone1, who developed the very useful concept of status: whether on or off stage our behaviour can be seen as predominantly high status, low status or somewhere in between. Status shouldn’t be confused with your role or social level: it’s about the way you do things. By adjusting your status you can influence the other person. Using status is a powerful way of applying the principle of generosity in your acting because it puts all the focus on the other person, making you feel less self-conscious. It’s particularly effective as part of your rehearsal preparation. Status helps you to see your behaviour in relation to the other character’s and adjust it accordingly. You can give status to others: ‘You’re so clever and thoughtful. I feel so clumsy alongside you.’ Or you can take it away:

30

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

‘Did no one tell you that we don’t wear suits on Fridays? I’m afraid you’re going to look very awkward like that.’ In fact, once you know how to use status, your life is never quite the same again because you can use status as both an acting technique and a way of influencing people in real life by adjusting your behaviour. For instance, it’s something you can apply effectively when speaking to a potential employer in an interview or audition.

High status The qualities of high status are that the body is open and relaxed, you keep the head fairly still and make strong eye contact with the people you’re speaking to. When you’re standing, your feet are planted firmly on the floor, not too close together. If you’re making gestures, these are economical rather than cluttered. Just moving in this way will also change the way you speak: the voice will tend to be stronger and you are likely to speak in more articulate sentences, usually short and to the point. But this is not just a technical thing: moving like that will also change the way you feel. Move in high status and you’ll actually feel more confident.

Low status The qualities of low status are the reverse: the body is more closed (you might have your legs crossed or your arms folded); you move your head a lot (especially small, fast movements when speaking); you lose eye contact, with your eyes glancing down to the floor or the table all the time; you blink a lot; and your gestures are fast and fidgety. If you’re standing, your feet are shuffling. Just moving in this way will mean that your sentences are naturally broken up with lots of ‘ums’ and ‘ers’ and other hesitations, and you’ll tend to ramble on. In fact, it’s almost impossible to think clearly in low status. And of course, it’ll change the way you feel: you’ll be less confident.

Using status There are two crucial things you need to know about status. First, it’s a flexible tool, both in acting and in real life. We all have a basic default position (you might be broadly either high or low status in your day-to-day behaviour with most people) but we shouldn’t stay stuck in that. There’s little point in going around in high status all the time: that would just make you seem pompous and remote. Similarly, there’s not much point in being constantly in low status so you can seem like one of the guys, because no one will take you seriously.

GENEROSITY

31

We need to consciously adjust our status according to who we are with. For instance, if you are speaking to an important person – say a famous director you’ve always wanted to meet – you can prepare yourself by raising your usual status a little in order to overcome your nerves and project more confidence. On the other hand, if you’re speaking to someone who is very nervous, you may get on better if you deliberately lower your status a little to put them at ease, which conveys generosity. The point is that you are in control because you know what you are doing; most people project their status level without being aware of it, and they end up wondering why they can never get served by the barman. Applying this to your acting, you can project different status levels when interacting with different characters in a play. What the audience will read is that your own character may be quite at ease with some people, intimidated by others, or in conflict with yet others, for instance when there’s a face-off, with both characters fighting to out-status each other. Additionally, your character may have a low status default position throughout the play, then a crucial event takes place and the character starts to adopt a high status, which sends out the broad message: you don’t push me around anymore. Playing the game of status in rehearsal allows you to be open and generous towards the other actor, even when the scene demands conflict. Whatever the circumstances, it helps you maintain that vital twinkle in the eye. This leads to the second thing you need to know: when we meet and engage with other people, there is a status continuum, which is often forced upon us. Status is relative. However high status you (or your character) feel in everyday life, you’ll eventually come up against someone who has higher status behaviour than you. However low status you feel, you’ll come across lower status people. So you’re often provoked to adjust your behaviour. Once at a reception hosted by the global company Shell, I was talking confidently to a group of executives when a voice said to me, ‘And do you work for Shell?’ I turned round and it was the Duke of Edinburgh. In moments like this you may find your status level doing a sudden dive – mine did. But by being aware of status as a tool, you can recover almost instantly and have a useful conversation.

Status in action The secret of high status – in both acting and real life – is that it’s about economy and relaxation. You can’t do high status from physical tension because the tension will produce tiny movements of the head, feet or hands that will give you lots of clutter and lower your status. Gestures need to be economical and relaxed. Even the hunchbacked Richard III, who enjoys playing low status to put people off their guard, needs plenty of moments where he is chillingly high status

32

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

and free of twitches. It’s his ability to span both those extremes that gives him his depth of character. You can of course use clutter and simulated tension as a source of comedy, as when you show a character trying to be high status, but failing because the tension gives him away. Going back to the commedia dell’arte, this is often the turning point in the play, when the master is tricked and suddenly flies into a low status rage.

Status in rehearsal Rarely do directors have time to play games and do lots of improvisations in rehearsal, so here are some ideas that you can bring into rehearsal or try with your scene partner outside the rehearsal. Using status as part of your personal rehearsal process can help you sharpen the definition between characters in a play or film. It’s also very useful for exploring the nuances in a scene, for example if you repeat a scene with different status levels. Consider the scene in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire2 when Blanche and Stanley first size each other up. Depending on who plays high status and who plays low, the scene can take on a completely different meaning. You can apply the status model usefully to almost any scene in any play where there is a competitive tension between two characters, however small. When you have a wide gap between high and low status, you’ll find it relatively easy to unlock the comic potential of a scene because this pushes you into bolder choices. You must, of course, always keep it truthful and believable. This is a useful approach in Shakespearean comedy (think of Antipholus and Dromio in The Comedy of Errors), or most of Alan Ayckbourn’s comedies, or a broader farce such as the West End hit One Man, Two Guv’nors. Because you’re concentrating on fighting for your status level, and therefore focusing on the other actors, you’ll be less inhibited about widening your range of expression, because you’re not so focused on yourself. And that of course helps you to be more generous as an actor.

Narrowing the status gap But you can also use status very effectively in more serious scenes, and to do this you simply narrow the gap. This will give the relationship between two characters a sharp sense of detail. Sometimes, as in many of Pinter’s plays, playing the status accurately can intensify the chilling atmosphere of menace. Think of The Dumb Waiter or The Birthday Party. Most of the time, however it’ll make the playing slightly warmer, without sacrificing the seriousness, for example, Vladimir

GENEROSITY

33

and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, where the actors need a strong spirit of generosity. Or take the opening scene of The Seagull, where Medvedenko the schoolmaster is trying to win the love of an increasingly irritable Masha. He’s probably low status and she is probably high, but there’s not a great deal between them if you want us to feel the tension in their relationship. It could work equally well – though tell a slightly different story – if you reversed the obvious status positions. Similarly, in the same play, when the would-be young actress Nina is starstruck when talking to the famous writer, Trigorin (end of Act Two), the status transaction is pretty obvious. But what if Trigorin played low status and Nina was high? It might not necessarily be right for the play, or the director’s interpretation, but it could equally lead you to some exciting choices that you might not otherwise have thought of. You can also use this idea of narrowing the gap to meet the demands of different genres, for example, in film or television where the character choices need to be even more subtle. A good way to get a feeling for narrow status gaps is initially through improvisation, with more serious situations. And this is something you can do with scene partners outside rehearsals. For example, three sisters come back home after a family funeral. Or three friends meet in the pub after work to celebrate the birthday of one of them, but he tells them he’s just lost his job.

Same status Playing status differences is a great way to unlock your imagination, but what if you want to show a strong rapport between two characters: for example, Romeo and Juliet, or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? When people are getting on very well, they relax in each other’s company and forget about making an impression. Consequently, the status gap almost disappears. The secret of rapport is ‘same status’. Again, credit goes to Keith Johnstone for coming up with this indispensable model. For example, have another look at that scene between Trigorin and Nina. How does it change when you both play it same status? The characters are drawn to each other in their own cocoon and the world around them stops. We instinctively know they will become lovers. To get even more texture into the scene, you could start with a status gap – Nina is intimidated and shy in the presence of the worldly Trigorin – and gradually close that gap as they find a rapport: we’ve actually witnessed the precise moment of them falling in love. Where ‘same status’ works so well is that it’s a very direct way of taking the pressure off you. Because you’re busy dealing with another task – matching the

34

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

other person’s status – it takes your mind off the usual question: How can I come out of this scene looking good? And by focusing on your partner, with generosity, you can relax and your creative imagination becomes fertile. Here’s how it works in an improvised scene. Two strangers meet in the coffee break at a boring business conference. Neither of you thinks of playing high or low status. You just concentrate on matching the status of the other person. If you think she’s higher than you, raise your status a little; if you think she’s lower, lower it. In the course of the scene, you may both go up in status or down, but you concentrate on matching each other. Or another situation: two friends at a party come outside to get a breath of fresh air. Same status is very good for scenes where there’s strong empathy: two strangers whom we feel are going to fall in love, or are going to become close friends. It also tends to make the playing warmer. A good way to start exploring same status is to improvise a scene where nothing much happens, because this will open the actors up.

Status and rapport in life You can start to see now how powerful this tool can be in everyday life as a way of influencing other people. This gives you considerable power, so I’m assuming you’ll use it as a force for good. First, let’s look more closely at rapport. As neuro-linguistic programming (NLP)3 has shown, when two people are in rapport, they will tend unconsciously to match or mirror each other. This might be in their speech patterns – both talking fast and loudly, or both talking calmly and quietly. Or it might be in their body language – both with legs crossed or open; arms folded or open; leaning back or forward; using lots of gestures or few gestures; fast movements or slow movements, and so on. When people in rapport mirror each other, their legs, for instance, will be crossed the same way; when they match each other, their legs will be crossed, but in the opposite direction. You can test this for yourself by just observing people who are talking together in restaurants, pubs, wine bars, trains, or at parties, conferences, meetings, receptions – pretty well anywhere. It’s a well-researched phenomenon. However, the danger of blatantly using NLP as a quick fix trick to create rapport is that if it’s clunky, you’ll almost certainly be found out. And that will have the opposite effect of breaking rapport and creating fury: ‘Why is this maniac mirroring everything I do?’ That’s why I have found, through working with business leaders, that when you want to influence someone in everyday situations, the ‘same status’ model is a more useful tool. You can observe the other person’s status and match that, without worrying about mirroring the body language. If mirroring happens

GENEROSITY

35

naturally, let it happen, but be aware of what’s going on. Keep eye contact and observe their body language with your peripheral vision; if your eyes were constantly darting to check their feet or their hands, they might get very anxious. But the main things you’re looking for are the amount of relaxation or tension and the amount of economy or clutter. Working in this way, you might technically be raising your status to match a very confident director who has a strong sense of authority, or lowering it generously to match someone who projects less confidence. The important thing is that, knowing about this, you are able to come towards them (hoping they haven’t read this book). If at a certain point in the meeting or interview you feel you want to gain more authority, you can gently raise your status by having more stillness and a stronger eye contact. But it must be kept relaxed – not laid back, but an energized relaxation. And of course you must concentrate fully on what you’re saying. Be aware of the status level in the other person’s speech patterns as well. If they use lots of ‘ums’ and ‘ers’, it’s not useful to speak in formal, articulate sentences. If, on the other hand, they use short sentences in a clipped, machine gun delivery, you can usefully slip into a similar pattern rather than stay in a laconic drawl. But remember, these are just tools and techniques. As in any acting exercise, they must be backed up by truth, and you find the truth by making sure that your behaviour (the outer) and your values (the inner) are aligned.

WORKING TOGETHER Status in groups If you’re working together in a group, here are a few status exercises (some of them adapted from Keith Johnstone) that I often use. Remember, the key thing is to explore your generosity as actors playing together. Generosity here involves listening and being aware of the other person’s offers in a scene. It’s good to start with extremes of status so you can get the feel of it, and then move on to more subtle differences.

Status and eye contact With a partner, have a conversation – it could be about food, the economic situation or your enthusiasms. One of you plays high status, making steady eye contact and keeping your head fairly still, while the other tries to look at you but breaks eye contact, looking at the floor and moving the head a lot. Then you

36

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

reverse. Notice how this changes your choice of words and the way you feel, even your breathing.

Status in a scene Two people arrange an outing together. The one doing the asking out is in high status; the one being asked out is in low status. Then replay the scene, reversing your status. When you play these extremes of status in this scene the rest of the group tends to fall about laughing, because the high-status person looks like an arrogant bully and the low-status person is such a walkover. Then we’re amazed what a difference you can make when the status positions are reversed. Suddenly the bully is floundering. But remember, in high status the key is to keep relaxed. A curious thing often happens in this exercise: if you try to ‘do’ high status, because of the effort you’ll often end up appearing lower status than your partner, who is intentionally doing low. Then, when you’re allowed to do low status, mysteriously the opposite happens and your status goes up. The reason is simply that when being high status you’re trying too hard. You’re working from tension or increasing the tension, and this betrays you through lots of small fidgety movements and twitches, which lower your status. Once you’re asked to do low status, you can suddenly relax, and with relaxation comes economy, and your status unintentionally goes up.

The status hierarchy Status transactions start to become more interesting when there’s a pecking order. You can start by playing a scene for three people: for example, three flatmates clearing up after a wild party the night before. Or a motorist refusing to accept a speeding ticket from two policemen. Or three party planners setting up their stand at a trade fair. You each have a number: 1 is high status, so you dominate the other two; 3 is low status so you’re subservient to the other two; and 2 is in the middle, which means you play low status up to the one you feel is high and high status down to the one you feel is low. It’s best if you don’t know what each other’s number is because this makes you very alert to their behaviour. You must fight for your number, either giving status to everyone if you’re low, or taking status from everyone if you’re high. Even with experienced improvisers I need to keep reminding the actors about relaxation and economy. ‘Stop!’, I’ll call out: ‘Was she really in high status?’

GENEROSITY

37

‘No,’ the group will say. ‘Why not?’ ‘She was moving her head,’ or ‘She was blinking too much,’ or ‘Her hands were twitching.’ It’s the little unconscious movements that give you away. That’s why your physical training aims to give you a released state so that you have complete control over your body and you’re aware of the signals you’re sending out, right down to the smallest detail. Mastery of detail is incidentally another quality of outstanding actors. Following from this, high status doesn’t need to be aggressive. You can also be charming and contented with the world. For example, a high-status burglar is caught red-handed and charms the house owners into letting him keep the loot, or deciding to work for him as apprentice burglars. Once you can play the status hierarchy accurately, you could go on to scenes for four people: for example, a landscape gardening team arrive to lay out the garden, or a local celebrity is coming to the anniversary celebrations of a stamp collectors club, or a model car club. Again you each maintain your position in the hierarchy. An obvious solution might be that the celeb – a model or a minor movie star – is number 1, the secretary is number 2, and so on. But it might be much more interesting to have the celeb being very low status in number 4. Often I’ll say, ‘Play the scene again, keeping more or less to the same script, but all shuffle down one. If you were 1, you become 2, if you were 2, you become 3, 3 you become 4 and if you were 4 you shuffle up to number 1.’ The actors have got the shape of the scene now, so they’ll be more relaxed about the characters. And because they’ve already done it once, they’re inclined to take more risks and enjoy themselves more in the new status levels.

Same status in twos In improvised scenes, ‘same status’ helps you focus very accurately on each other. Here’s an example from one of my classes. Two flatmates: one is on the couch, the other comes home from work. The girl is on the couch reading. She looks up as the boy comes through the door and says, ‘How are you?’ ‘God, I’ve had a terrible day!’ he says. ‘I’m absolutely knackered. I need a drink.’ I stop them and ask the class, ‘Are they same status?’ ‘No,’ they all say. ‘Nick is high status.’ ‘What was he doing that made him high status?’ I ask. ‘He didn’t even look at her and he immediately took control of the scene.’

38

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

I get them to do it again. ‘Remember, you mustn’t control each other and you must match the status of the other person,’ I say. Suddenly the two actors relax and open up, and they both become much warmer. The scene is now more tender and sensitive. The invention flows effortlessly and if I’d let it run for another five minutes the actors would easily be able to sustain it. Why? Because they’re focusing on each other, not themselves. And because of that, they’re not feeling the pressure to impress us.

Same status in threes Once you’ve got the hang of same status for two actors, you can apply this principle to three or four actors in a scene. A vivid way of showing the difference is to replay a scene that you previously did as a status hierarchy. For example, go back to the three sisters who’ve just been to the family funeral. This time you must match each other’s status with no one leading or controlling the others. As a result the scene becomes warmer, there’s better listening and the characters become much more open and generous to each other.

Mirror exercises An excellent way of strengthening generosity is through mirror exercises because they’re all about the other person and you have to be absolutely open to each other. It sounds elementary, but it can be testing even for very experienced actors.

Mirror in pairs ●●

●●

●●

●●

In pairs you stand facing each other. One makes a continuous sequence of movements as the other simultaneously mirrors these. You choose who the leader is to start with. The session leader or director calls out ‘Change’ every so often and the leader changes. Aim to find the right pace, where your partner is challenged to find strong concentration. If you move too slowly, your partner will get bored. If you move too fast, your partner won’t be able to keep up and will lose concentration. Keep eye contact so that you don’t lose your partner. Look after your partner, because this is after all about generosity. An actor who just doesn’t get it may be tempted to make his partner stick their finger up their nose – I’ve seen it happen – whereas a generous actor will create a serene feeling of rapport that helps the person feel completely open in a powerful way.

GENEROSITY

39

Mirror without a leader ●●

●●

●●

●●

After changing back and forth, the session leader increases the pace, with the changes getting faster and faster until he calls out ‘No leader’ and both of you follow each other, neither of you leading. Keep the flow going without coming to a grinding halt and without either of you leading. Focus on the eyes rather than the hands; see everything else in the peripheral vision. You will want to make things happen and force the pace at times, but try to resist that. Just follow your partner (who is following you) and build on what you see your partner doing.

The chorus on the disc Leading on from the mirror work you can apply this on a larger scale with work on the Greek tragic chorus. But to take it through its different levels, you need a group of at least six people. The chorus was a Jacques Lecoq exercise4 I first learnt nearly fifty years ago and have since adapted to use in various ways. It started in a circular format, based on the stage of the classical Greek theatre, then later Lecoq used it on a rectangular format. I’ll describe here the earlier version. This is one of the best exercises around for developing ensemble work. You can get results with it immediately, but it takes a lot of practice and patience to build real accuracy in the ensemble.

The basic exercise You all stand around the outside of the room to form a large circle. You can if you wish define this with long lengths of rope or mark a circle with chalk. The premise is that you are all standing just on the outside of a giant disc, which is perfectly pivoted in the centre. Underneath is an imaginary pit that you don’t want to fall down into. ●●

●●

The first person runs into the centre and maintains the balance of the disc before it tips up. At a certain moment, this person decides to throw it deliberately off balance, by moving to one side. At that precise moment the nearest person opposite must run onto the disc. The roles now change. That second person becomes the ‘leader’ and can move anywhere on the

40

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

●●

●●

●●

disc they choose: it’s the job of the first person, who now becomes the ‘chorus’ to keep the disc balanced. After a while and without warning, the ‘chorus’ suddenly stands still, thereby unbalancing the disc. As soon as she sees this, the leader must run and join him. Meanwhile the nearest person opposite jumps in as the new leader. A chorus of two must now preserve the balance. You are balancing the disc visually, not in terms of literal weight. And at this stage it’s simply about the space being balanced, not the style with which you move. The ‘chorus’ must have dual focus: focus on the leader and on each other. They are making eye contact with the leader while sensing where their partner is through their peripheral vision. At a certain moment, they decide that they want to stop (without looking at each other or touching each other). Once they stop together, the leader joins them and a new leader steps in to lead a chorus of three. See https://vimeo.com/channels/1486142/376354319

The detail Depending on the size of the room, you can build this up to a chorus of about seven. Each combination has its own qualities. Odd numbers in general are easier to work with than even numbers and anything over seven becomes very difficult to hold together without a formal leader within the chorus. And of course, as the chorus gets bigger, so it becomes more difficult for everyone to sense the perfect moment when they all want to stop, but then that’s the point of the exercise. To maintain accuracy in the chorus, keep an equal space between you. Breathe together and let the body do the thinking: if you go into it with the intellect, the conscious mind will slow you down and there’ll be lots of awkward clutter. This first level is about getting accuracy in the space. It’s not so much about the style as the positions and balance.

Chorus with emotional provocation ●●

●●

●●

At this level, the leader uses sound, which expresses specific emotional attitudes towards the chorus. For instance, you might go from aggressive, to fearful, to flirtatious. The movements of the leader will change along with the sound, but each shift should be truthful. The chorus, now working on two levels at once, must mirror that emotional provocation and the movements that go with it, while also balancing the space.

GENEROSITY

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

41

As the leader, be courageous with your choices. However exposed you feel, you know it’s going to come back to you three-fold, four-fold, fivefold, and so on. That’s a lot of energy coming back at you. So you’ve got nothing to lose. At the same time, look after the chorus members and help them strengthen their accuracy, while making it fun for them to be led by you. That’s where the generosity comes in. In the chorus, aim for a sense of economy: you execute each movement or provocation from the leader with accuracy and precision, paring away any unnecessary clutter. Collectively that builds a very powerful sense of presence in the space. With sound, more specificity in the chorus is possible because you’re playing with an unfolding sequence of dramatic impulses (like an objective), which takes it away from being merely mechanical. Consequently, a strong connection builds up between the leader and the chorus and it becomes riveting to watch, especially when the leader takes a risk and becomes courageous, because this is then multiplied by the chorus, which in turn gives the leader even more courage. The transfer of energy is infectious. But you need to balance accuracy and playfulness. See https://vimeo.com/channels/1486142/376354823

Chorus with rapport ●●

●●

●●

This level heightens the connection between leader and chorus even further. The moment the chorus members feel bored or awkward with what the leader is doing, they stop, and the leader joins them to make way for a new leader from outside the circle. As leader you must try to keep the chorus constantly engaged and delighted to play with you. The game then becomes about which leader can stay in the longest. As chorus, aim to delight your leader, giving them even more courage. Keep it warm and generous. If it’s all coming from fear and caution, nothing interesting will happen.

Like ‘sound and movement’, the point is to add to your spatial awareness a widening of your emotional range. So don’t be afraid to look silly – when you take that risk, something comes alive. This balance of accuracy and playfulness makes it engaging for the audience. The focus on making sure the other side enjoys playing with you raises the stakes and heightens the energy between chorus and leader.

42

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

Chorus in rehearsal As part of the rehearsal process, you can use the chorus game to explore tragic situations, especially when you have a large number of people on stage and you want a strong feeling of ensemble: for example, an army going into battle, villagers surrendering to a warlord, townspeople rebelling against their leaders. But both sides need to remember the sense of play so that everyone feels the exhilaration of the game, giving energy to each other. It’s very good for helping prepare the crowd scenes in plays such as Julius Caesar, Coriolanus or Henry V, And the great value of chorus work like this is that if you have a group of actors who can instinctively sense where they need to be on stage, moment by moment, it needs less formal choreography from the director.

Chorus with text Here’s how you can use the chorus with your scene partner to give life to a scene, especially if you haven’t been able to find much freedom in it. This works best for duologues, but you could also adapt it for larger numbers. ●●

●●

●●

●●

The two actors stand facing each other, balancing the disc. One of them will be the leader and the other, the chorus, must keep the disc balanced. They can use sound and emotional provocation, aiming for a strong sense of play. Once you’ve got the sense of game going, one of you calls out, ‘Text!’ and the rule is now that the one with the lines is the leader, so the other must keep the space balanced. Sometimes the dialogue will be very fast – one line each – so the leader will change rapidly back and forth. When you’re the leader, you aim to keep your partner on their toes, challenging them to be alert but making sure that they enjoy playing the game with you. See https://vimeo.com/channels/1486142/376355406

The game is very freeing because you’re concentrating on keeping the disc balanced, rather than the usual anxiety: How do we make this scene look interesting? It starts at an exaggerated level, which gives you bold choices. You can then internalize all of that to find transformation and detail with naturalism.

GENEROSITY

43

Frogs and stones This is a game I invented with my company, the Living Theatre Troupe in New Zealand back in the 1970s. I wanted to help the actors find a connection in space where one movement affected everyone else, like ripples in a pond. Since then it’s evolved through many levels and it’s great fun to do. It’s an excellent energizer in rehearsals because as well as warming you up, it helps you to work very closely and generously together. It works well with a group of five, but if you’re very concentrated you can take it up to seven people. If it’s done in a larger group, you can have everyone else watching and taking turns to play. In order to keep the continuity going, I’ll usually call out, ‘One drop out. One join.’ It’s a fun way of bringing the space to life and at the higher levels of the game it gives you opportunities to be as flamboyant as you dare. You set it up with three preliminary exercises:

1. The magnet ●● ●●

All move around as if you are the same end of a bar magnet (north to north). Feel that force that pushes you away from each other as you come near. You suddenly see that there’s a connection between each of you in the room.

2. The seesaw ●●

●●

●●

In pairs, facing each other, you jump alternately, as if you were on a seesaw. As one person lands, the other takes off and as that person lands, the other takes off. Again, the idea is to sharpen your reflexes so the landing instantly causes the jumping. Be sure to warm up your ankles first and keep the jumps light and springy. It also helps to focus on each other’s eyes rather than the feet, which you see in your peripheral vision. If you get out of synch, simply stop and start again. Use your knees to keep the movement deliberately slow because it will tend to speed up.

3. The frogs and the stone ●●

In groups of three, stand in a triangle. Two of you are facing each other: you are the ‘frogs’ on a lily pad, though standing up (it’s not about animal shapes).

44

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

If a stone is thrown into the pond, what will the frogs do? Jump away, of course. The third person is the ‘stone’. You jump into the pond – the space between the other two – and they jump back in surprise. Then the actors come back to where they were and the ‘stone’ goes into the pond again and once more the ‘frogs’ jump. The idea is that the jump of the frogs matches the size of the stone. If the actor who is the ‘stone’ makes a big jump, the ‘frogs’ get a big shock. A medium jump and they jump back more moderately. A small jump and they give a little jump. This game is about sharpening your reflexes: the ‘frogs’ should jump the moment the ‘stone’ hits the water, just like you were doing with the seesaw game. After a few jumps, you change around and have a new person as the ‘stone’.

The game 1. Basic level Now you have the ingredients for the game. You play the frogs and stone game, this time with four people in the space. Once you’ve got that working, add a fifth person. Later, you can build it up to six or seven. It’s best to have one person dropping out as a new one joins. The game is great for helping you to be open and aware of each other in the spirit of generosity. Here’s how it goes. ●●

●●

●●

●● ●●

●●

The floor is the pond and you are all, by turns, both frogs and stones. Anyone can be a stone at any moment; the others will react as frogs, instantly. And each time they must react according to the size of the stone (the weight of the jump). There is no attraction in this game; only movements away from the stone. If you all tend to get splattered near the walls, be a stone to fill the hole in the middle. If it speeds up and gets unclear, with a constantly reverberating water bed effect, then find a point of stillness so that it becomes clear again. Keep everyone in view so that you’re aware of who’s behind you. If the stone lands near you, you’ll react with a bigger jump than someone who was further away. As a stone, it’s better to aim for the space rather than the person (frog), otherwise you’ll get two people chasing each other around the room.

GENEROSITY

●●

●●

45

If, by coincidence, two people are simultaneous stones, they should rebound off each other simultaneously. That’s a nice moment. The skill is to respond the instant any stone hits the ground. It needs to be absolutely accurate. I’ll often call out, ‘Sharper reflexes!’ When everyone is razor sharp accurate in the space, the game is incredibly watchable. Now you can take it to the next levels.

2. With sound ●● ●●

●●

Each person being the stone can make a sound on landing. The type of sound reflects the size of the stone and the way you hit the pond. Keep the sounds open and free. In this game the frogs don’t make any sound, just the stones.

3. With a wider dynamic range ●●

●●

●● ●●

●●

As well as jumping you can go on to explore a whole range of movements. How would the frogs react if you just started walking across the space? They might float away from you. What if you flung your arms out towards them? They might fly backwards. What if you went berserk and zigzagged all over the place like a balloon with the air let out of it? There might be momentary chaos in the space. And when you add sound to this (remember it’s still only the stone making the sound) it all becomes great fun.

It’s now on a much more demanding level of skill because it’s harder to be accurate when there’s such a wide range of movements: the split second the stone moves, you react. But that’s where it’s such a useful game because the whole point is that you should all be like that on stage in a play. Not jumping all over the place as soon as a new character enters, of course, but affected by each movement anyone makes. Once you’ve got that, there’s a thrilling connection between you. ●●

See https://vimeo.com/channels/1486142/376351545

4. With extensions ●●

Rather than land each time in a neutral posture, you need to find dynamic positions. You can take this further, as the frogs, by extending your limbs fully.

46

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

●●

●●

In reacting to the stone, you might even end up sprawled out across the floor with your arms outstretched. But avoid letting the whole game get dragged onto the floor, which will make it static. Keep yourselves in the air.

5. With language ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

A further level is where the person being the stone can use, not just sounds, but language. It’s most liberating if this is in gibberish with strong consonants. Working in English can deaden things a bit because it takes you back to your intellect. In gibberish you can enjoy communicating through the sound of the language. It’s at this point that the game starts to become theatrical and stories emerge. There’ll often be some kind of fight scene: gangsters, martial artists, sci-fi aliens and humans. That brings us back to the idea of generosity: we love watching people enjoying the sheer anarchy of the game while working so closely and accurately together. If it gets into a routine of sensational but ultimately meaningless moves, I might call out ‘Have a clear objective towards the others when you’re a stone.’ Suddenly this transforms the game because they’re now sending specific emotional energy towards each other. To give the game more structure, I might call out, ‘Find the crisis!’ so they build the intensity, which often heightens the comedy if it’s done with warmth. It’s the combination of skills and fun, in a spirit of generosity that makes the audience engaged. The game can also be played in a confined space, which takes it closer to realism, highlighting the kinetic dance on stage, where one actor’s movement or gesture affects the others. See https://vimeo.com/channels/1486142/376351104

Once the actors know the game well, I’ll run it for a while and then ask the rest of the class, ‘Were you engaged? Was it holding your attention?’ They’re admiring the skill and accuracy, but they’re likely to admit that their minds were wandering because they’ve seen the game before. This shows what a knife edge you work on if you’re to keep your audience fully engaged all the time. ‘Start the game again,’ I’ll say, ‘But this time concentrate on giving the other actors a good time. Make sure they really want to stay there playing

GENEROSITY

47

with you.’ Suddenly the game bursts into life and the audience are laughing away, totally in it. ‘Why did you laugh?’ I’ll ask them. ‘Because there’s a story.’ Yes, the audience are constantly looking for relationships and once they see them, they’ll start to put a story together. They’re working with you to complete the picture.

Negative space Some actors don’t see themselves as great movers, so here’s one way of overcoming that. The negative space is the shape of the space around you. It works on the principle of giving yourself a different task to concentrate on, while not worrying about how you can move well. It’s another early Lecoq exercise that I’ve adapted over the years as a way of building spatial awareness and helping the actors find more sensitivity to each other. Negative space helps you forget the body altogether and concentrate on the space that’s around you. To use an analogy, in the famous gestalt picture below, if we look at it one way we see a candlestick (the form), and if we look

48

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

at it another way we see two heads talking to each other (the background or negative space).

The exercise 1. Individually ●●

●●

●●

In the negative space exercise, we concentrate only on the background. For instance, if you stand up straight with your feet together and your hands by your sides, you create a symmetrical and not very interesting space around you. Now, extend one arm while lifting a leg and you create a more dynamic negative space. Think of it as a three-dimensional sculpture of space: it’s all around you, above you and down to the floor, and it’s constantly moving. Start to explore a more complex sculpture of space: be aware of the shapes between your fingers when your hand touches the floor, or the triangular space if you have your hand on your hip.

2. In pairs ●● ●●

●●

●● ●● ●●

●●

●●

With a partner, explore the negative space around you and between you. Think of it as a constantly changing sculpture of three-dimensional space: if you lean forward and extend your arms, you create a space in front of you which your partner can fill. And by moving down to fill that space, your partner leaves a new space for you to fill. Keep the rhythm fluid and slow so that you can each cope easily with balancing the space, moment by moment. And remember to breathe. The three rules are: no eye contact, no physical contact and no words. By not looking directly at each other, you concentrate on the negative space and feel less self-conscious. By not talking, you find a deeper, non-verbal level of communication where the intellect has a rest. You’re training the body to know where to move instinctively, which is a faster pace than intellectual thought.

GENEROSITY

49

3. In threes ●●

●●

●●

Now add a third person to your group so the negative space becomes more complex. The easiest way to do this is to split up one group and send them to the other groups. You can vary the rhythm more this time; for example, one actor might be momentarily still while the others are moving. Or you might all find a more staccato rhythm.

4. With sound ●●

●●

●●

●●

At this point you can add sound. When you move to balance the space, you make a sound that expresses the quality of that movement. All the sounds should fit together as a whole, so that you have both a spatial and an aural composition. You don’t have to make sound all the time: that would drench it. Think of yourselves as working with movement and stillness, and sound and silence. Your main focus, though, is to create an interesting sculpture of space that is constantly shifting, while always being balanced.

5. In larger groups ●●

●●

●●

●●

Depending on how many people you have in the room, you can now work in groups of four, and then five and six. Each of these group sizes has its own quality. As the group gets bigger, it’s very easy for everyone to get bunched up and lose accuracy. The session leader can fix this by saying, ‘Stretch the space out between you.’ The point is to be able to feel the connection between you in the space so that it’s alive.

6. The larger ensemble ●●

You might end up with two large groups doing negative space. You can gradually merge these together until you have one group, though anything much over fourteen is very difficult to hold together.

50

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

At this point the session leader needs to remind everyone to balance the space between them and also be aware of the collective sounds the group is making. I might say at this point, ‘Give energy to the space. Listen to each other. Be in the same song together. Keep it light.’ You will be less self-conscious if you keep constantly focusing on the negative space and the task in hand: to keep that balanced. It then becomes about the space and not you. The key thing is to get lightness into it. Rather than push out a big sound, you should concentrate on the vibration. Feel this in your torso, your arms, head, even your legs. In a large group of twelve, when you find yourself crowding each other, keep pulling the space out while keeping a connection between you. And it helps to think of using your spine to balance the space which takes you away from just using your arms

Afterwards the actors will often talk about having found a spiritual quality. This is because they have unlocked the power that comes from openness, simplicity and generosity, which in turn gives them a very strong presence that can touch an audience. The actors are themselves touched deeply by this because they have had to strip away all clutter. Rather than be driven by the intellect, they have found how to let the body do the thinking. And this is a key quality of outstanding actors: they generate a strong presence on stage through gracefulness, openness and simplicity when such moments are needed. With constant coaching by the session leader, you can achieve an almost trancelike serenity that has a very sensitive give and take, and a powerful sense of the ensemble. And if you’re working on a production together, this may give you all sorts of possibilities for creating different qualities of energy, or different pictures on stage. ●●

See https://vimeo.com/channels/1486142/376353407

Negative space with text ●●

●●

●●

●●

To apply this to a specific piece of theatre, you can have a group of four or five actors doing negative space while sharing lines or phrases of a short text. In this case, the musicality of the text should dictate the rhythm of the movement. For instance, a nursery rhyme such as Hickory Dickory Dock would give you a light-hearted staccato rhythm, while an iambic line such as ‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows … ’ would produce a more fluid rhythm. You can also add the conditions that the actors can make eye contact and even physical contact.

GENEROSITY

51

Negative space with story ●●

●●

●●

●●

●● ●●

●●

In this variation, you work in groups of four, taking the dynamic from a piece of music: something avant-garde and percussive is good. Gradually you can make eye contact and then add language, but in gibberish while moving on the dynamic of the music, which might range from staccato (angular) to legato (fluid). Although you’ve started at an abstract level, simply balancing the negative space, you can find the story in this, which comes naturally out of the sounds you’re making and the way you’re communicating. The need to keep the space balanced takes your mind off the intellectual level and because you’re using gibberish, it liberates you to find more creativity. You should also keep a generous twinkle in the eye. To take it further, I might call out, ‘Find the crisis!’ which provokes you to shape the improvisation towards a climax. But it should always have a light touch and openness. See https://vimeo.com/channels/1486142/376363148

When actors are totally focused in the space, we the audience are engaged and we enjoy watching those accidental, miraculous moments of connection. There’s a direct relevance to Shakespeare and Chekhov here because the stage picture should always be clear, moment by moment. There should also be an aesthetic beauty on stage, but without it being merely decorative. And as an audience we are also fascinated by the virtuosity of the actors revealed through their bold choices, while at the same time working closely together in the space. Once you’ve established the various levels of negative space, you can use it in rehearsals as an approach to highly physical scenes where the actors need to be almost like dancers together in the space.

Word at a time story One of the basic fears in improvisation is not knowing what you are going to say, or even worse, not knowing what your partner is going to say. Instinctively, we like to keep control of things, but that usually inhibits spontaneity. The word at a time story game is excellent for keeping in the present rather than planning ahead. Provided you have a big enough space, this can work for groups of up to sixteen people. Here’s how I use it:

52

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

Word at a time in circles ●●

●●

●● ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

You all stand in a circle and tell a story, with each person adding just one word. The first word of the story should provoke action rather than just description, so words like ‘Suddenly … ’, ‘Yesterday … ’, ‘Just … ’ are good for getting off to a lively start. When you feel you get to the end of a sentence, start a new one. There should be a line through the story, but you don’t have to worry about the story being too sensible. It just needs to make grammatical sense. The scary thing about this game is that you can’t pre-plan because you don’t know where the story is going until the person next to you has spoken their word. So it keeps you in the moment. The first time through, people will tend to be a bit apprehensive and they’ll be looking ahead or at the floor, which makes their voices sound a bit flat. Also, some voices will be very quiet, with the danger that the others in the circle may miss the word and the thread of the story falls apart. Part of this comes out of the fear of saying something silly, or stupid, or obscene. Embrace the unexpectedness of your imagination; only then can it fly. Once you commit to your word, making eye contact and sending your energy to the next person, the game immediately comes alive. When the story has been round the circle a couple of times and everybody has got the idea, you can all divide into smaller groups, say of six people. This time, make the first word an exotic sounding name. If I’m working with English actors I might use: Franceschina, Sebastiano, Vladimir, etc. In these smaller groups, there will be a stronger rapport and the story will have more chance of developing. When a group is working well, there’ll be a lot of laughter. After a while, you break this down to smaller groups until you eventually get to groups of three. At this point, you can introduce a new rule: if anyone hesitates, or feels stuck, awkward or uncomfortable, they can shout out, ‘New story!’ and you instantly start again, using any starting word. This takes the pressure off and means you never feel imprisoned in an improvisation that’s not working.

Acting it out ●● ●●

The final level of the game is where you work in pairs. As you tell the story, one word at a time, you act it out: running, jumping,

GENEROSITY

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

53

rolling over or whatever the story requires. Although there are only two of you, it becomes easier now because the words are coming out of the action. This time the first word should be ‘We’. You work as a unit: ‘We ran along the edge of the cliff … ’ rather than splitting up: ‘I threw the porcupine at you … ’ To keep together, it’s a good idea to hold your partner’s hand. You can also set the genre by suggesting the location, for example a magic island or a primeval forest, rather than the local supermarket. The aim of the game is now to look after your partner and make sure they enjoy playing with you. You don’t control each other, though you may find that when a good rapport develops you are almost thinking each other’s thoughts and the words of each sentence tumble out in a natural order. When you come to obstacles in your story – a dragon for example – it’s more interesting to stand and fight rather than run away, even if you get swallowed by the dragon and come out the other end.

During rehearsals, you can play this game with a scene partner as a way of strengthening your rapport and imagination. When you all play it together in a group, it creates an anarchic explosion of energy. Everyone’s faces are open, like children playing. Remember, your imagination works best when you are most relaxed and playful. That’s why it is so important to find ways of taking the pressure off yourself, for instance by being generous to others.

Generosity in a nutshell These exercises and games are a chance to develop the spirit of generosity in your work. I’ve chosen them because they challenge you to be open and sensitive to each other, within the ensemble. Generosity means listening, supporting and connecting with each other. It’s an energy that moves from you, not towards you. Give everything to your fellow actors and your audience. But at the same time you should maintain your sense of virtuosity, which will come from being comfortable about taking risks and making bold choices. That’s the mark of an outstanding actor, which leads us to the next quality: enthusiasm.

3 ENTHUSIASM For five weeks I had been working with a group of twenty-four young actors to devise a production about climate change. After the first performance, one of them came up to me and said with a joyful smile, ‘That was such fun!’ What struck me was that he sounded genuinely surprised. How do you have fun as an actor? Are you even supposed to have fun? It’s a serious issue because for so much of the time you’re under pressure: you’re being judged and you’re anxious about pleasing everyone, which can crush the enthusiasm and joy out of you.

What is enthusiasm? Enthusiasm provides the energy to keep you going and overcome the obstacles that stand in your way. It creates joy in the work. It gives you the stamina to override those troughs we all have when we lose sight of our vision, or feel tired or lost. It is the quality that makes the growth mindset possible. When you’re enthusiastic about an activity, the time flies by and you seem to have limitless energy. Ideally, rehearsals should be like that: joyful and infused with enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a quality that almost all the high-flying actors I’ve taught radiated when they were still at drama school. Nearly all outstanding actors at the top of their game have it, whatever their age. Enthusiasm is also a trait that effective leaders have, whether in business, sports, science, education or the arts. The reason they’ve got to where they are is that they are driven by an infectious passion and enthusiasm. ‘Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,’ said the poet Emerson. The greatest power of enthusiasm is that it is hugely contagious. It makes the people around you enthusiastic. It gives energy. And in turn that gives expression to your passion. So, enthusiasm is a shared quality. If you can’t find constant enthusiasm for acting, you shouldn’t be an actor. Consider this: the enjoyment which that smiling actor in my production felt was not because of himself in isolation. It was caused by the reaction of the audience. The measure of your enjoyment on stage is the degree to which your audience enjoys your performance. After all, they are the ones who are supposed

ENTHUSIASM

55

to be having a good time. So, your enjoyment in performance depends on your attitude and state of mind. This brings us to the ancient principle that like attracts like. There are several phrases for this: what you sow, you reap; what goes around comes around, karma, etc. Accordingly, if you send out enjoyment and enthusiasm to the other actors and the audience, they are more likely to reflect enjoyment and enthusiasm back to you. Of course, it also works the other way: send out cold disdain to your audience and a collective chill is likely to come back. I recently heard an actor actually say, ‘I hate audiences.’ What’s the point then? It all comes down to your attitude, which is informed by your values. These are subtle shifts of your mind, but they alter the signals your fellow actors and the audience pick up. And they in turn alter the signals that come back to you. This idea is backed up by the neuro-scientific discovery of mirror neurons – that class of brain cells which fire when you perform an action, or when you watch someone else making a movement you are familiar with. For example, if we see someone laugh, part of us wants to laugh or smile as well. If we watch someone fall and skin their knee, we feel a visceral reaction. If we watch an actor who is palpably nervous on stage, we feel uncomfortable.

Enthusiasm in practice Talking to me just before a performance of Henry V in the West End, Jude Law showed typical growth mindset when he reflected: Enthusiasm is passion for work. It also opens up the right not to be scared to make a fool of yourself and get it wrong. I’m still very hungry to learn. I have no sense whatsoever at 41 – or indeed having now just played Henry, and having played Hamlet – a feeling that I’m anywhere close to the capacity I would like to one day feel. I’m so aware that there’s so much more to absorb and to improve and learn. And that’s a lovely sense of positive future. It excites me greatly, actually. Because we know that it’s not easy and you get knock backs, and even when it is easy we’ve got to keep going at it. It’s not about a sprint. It’s about a long run.

Enthusiasm and curiosity Enthusiasm is fed by curiosity – the eagerness to learn – which the experts I spoke to valued very highly. Judi Dench, recalling the start of her career, said, ‘I would be suspicious of anybody who wasn’t curious. Curiosity is essential. I

56

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

remember when I was at the Old Vic, not going back to the dressing room, and standing and watching other actors.’ Al Pacino was the same. ‘I worked with the greatest actors of the day,’ he said, ‘and watched them, and watched how they dealt with things. It’s interesting.’ The director Nicholas Hytner’s advice was, ‘Every time you get a good job, watch the people who are demonstrably more experienced, who know what they’re doing. The ones who know what they’re doing are always wondering how to do other stuff. Hang around, watch. Being curious about how other people do it – all the good ones I know do that. They’re watching all the time, picking stuff up.’ The critic Michael Billington, a passionate advocate of training, reflected on his experience of once directing a production in a drama school. ‘I do think there’s some almost innate quality that you either have or you haven’t,’ he said. ‘And it all transcends technique. It’s about whether the actor has curiosity. I noticed that those drama students who asked questions – the ones who probed, the ones who nagged away – were always the more interesting ones and ultimately the better actors, than the ones who took whatever was offered to them. That seems to me to be an absolutely crucial quality in an actor.’ Enthusiasm and curiosity can help you achieve a level of detail where you stand out, in the right way, even in a small role. Ashley Zhangazha confirmed the old adage: there are no small parts, only small actors when he won a commendation for the prestigious Ian Charleson Award (best classical stage actor under thirty) and then two years later, the award itself, both for minor roles – The King of France in King Lear and Ross in Macbeth. I asked him how he did this. I tried to take that on to the next level and go, ‘Okay, so this isn’t the protagonist of the play, but in this scene, without being selfish, France is the important person in this scene, and why is that? What’s at stake for this character in this scene? Ross is the most important character in each of these scenes. What is at stake for Ross?’ And that was how I started my preparation. It’s to make sure that every time you come on you need to make an impact. You’re not on stage for nothing. It’s such an easy thing to think ‘Well I’m just a small part in this’ but you have to do the same amount of work that you would do if you were playing Lear. You want to come on there with presence and commitment. In both those experiences it felt like Ross was as important as Macbeth and the King of France in that scene was as important as Lear. That enthusiasm made top directors want to work with him again, in lead roles, and led him to play Ike Turner on the West End in the musical Tina. The positive effect you leave on a director can make a huge difference in your career, as the National Theatre’s artistic director Rufus Norris told me:

ENTHUSIASM

57

How do you get in the door? Be good when you’re at the door. Everything you do is witnessed, even if it’s by three people in a fringe venue, and word of mouth is how it works. Directors call each other all the time for references, and are always honest with each other. On top of that, if I’m casting a play, there will often end up being three or four people in the cast of 20 who I won’t audition. I’ll just go ‘Do you want to do it?’ Even to the point now where there are handful of people – actors that I have grown to trust implicitly – who might phone me up and say, ‘I’m really skint’ and I’ll go, ‘Okay, well what I’ve got coming up is this and I don’t have anything great, but I’ve got this and that, do you want it?’ ‘Yeah’. ‘Okay, you’re in.’ It’s not about nepotism, it’s about a trust that has been earned. Many of the companies that I work with might end up being 40/60: 40 per cent actors that I know and have worked with, even if it’s only in a workshop and 60 per cent people I haven’t worked with before. I really enjoy that mix and there are actors that I’ve worked with again and again. It’s like any job in the world: you want people around you that you trust, and who trust you.

The actor and the character Of course, curiosity and enthusiasm overdone can tip into aggression. Once I was doing an improvisation class on concentration, and one of the aspects we were looking at was ‘corpsing’: that involuntary giggling that sometimes occurs when you’re supposed to be serious. I asked two actors to play a scene while the rest of the class could do anything they liked to make these two corpse. ‘Accuse her of taking your iPod without asking,’ I said. They started the scene, while everyone else did their best to put the couple off. Much mirth all round. The boy threw everything he had at the girl with awesome passion, while she defended herself, trying not to laugh. And then something extraordinary happened. As the boy’s passion intensified, the girl became frightened and a chill suddenly swept through the room. The laughter had stopped because everyone felt anxious for her and by this time she was in tears – the girl, not the character. They were no longer playing together. That mini-disaster illustrated a powerful learning point: you should always remember the separation between actor and character. Two characters may be out to kill each other, but we should always feel that the actors enjoy playing together. They’re friendly. They should play the aggression with relish and enjoyment, which in electrical terms ‘earths’ the scene, without diluting the passion, and makes it safe for us to watch. Thus we, the audience, can enjoy the aesthetic quality of the hostility. Otherwise, we’ll feel anxious for the safety of the actors and we snap out of the theatrical spell.

58

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

Another example. An Italian director wanted his production of Romeo and Juliet to have a palpable sense of rivalry between the Montagues and Capulets. So, he cast it from two rival gangs. The production was a failure because the actors playing the Montagues and Capulets really did hate each other. There were fights offstage as well as onstage, and the genuine aggression turned the audience off. Enthusiasm gave way to hatred.

Finding your enthusiasm So how do you cultivate enthusiasm, particularly if you’re not normally a highly enthusiastic person in life? Enthusiasm is the energy that comes from the motivation to do something. Therefore, you need something to be enthusiastic about, for instance: making the production you’re in as good as it can possibly be. So first, you need to find your complete commitment to the project – every bit of it. If you’ve accepted a part in a profit-share fringe production, be clear about your vision. Remind yourself why you’re doing it. Decide what you’re trying to achieve and why you’re trying to achieve it. Focus on the rewards of that goal, then engage with the production on that level. There’s a big difference between ‘I want to look good in this show so I can get an agent’ and ‘I want to use the challenge of this production, in this role, for this kind of audience, to move my skills forward, one step closer to fulfilling my potential.’ And that’s the difference between fixed mindset and growth mindset.

Vintage years The contagious power of enthusiasm can often have striking results in a group. Looking back over the photo sheets of each year group at Guildhall, I’ve been struck by a curious phenomenon. If you examine the year groups of the actors who became most famous, you’ll find that usually these actors were not alone in their fame. Several actors in that class also did exceptionally well. These classes are what I call ‘vintage years’. Just as an excellent wine may get better with years, so a vintage year of actors may not be proved until ten or fifteen years after they’ve left drama school. However, like a wine grower anticipating the crop on the vine, I can often sense a vintage year while they’re still in training. So, what kind of chemistry is operating in a vintage group? And of course this doesn’t just apply to drama school groups: the same process happens when the cast of a play assembles to rehearse. There is something about the chemistry of groups that is fascinating yet elusive. Sometimes a group clicks and it’s magic in there, while, despite everyone’s willingness, other groups just don’t gel. This has been studied extensively in the business world: How do you get

ENTHUSIASM

59

teams performing at their best? It’s relevant because actors in a play should be the classic example of effective team building.

Enthusiasm and the chemistry of groups One such researcher was Meredith Belbin,1 who discovered that to be effective, a team needs people of different qualities: for example, creative people, timekeepers, co-ordinators, supporters, critics, experts, and so on. When everyone is much the same, Belbin found, the team becomes dysfunctional. So, what qualities do you bring to the team in a production? One principle of success is the ability to recognize your strengths and play to them. This helps give you the confidence to project your enthusiasm for the task in hand. One of the first things I tell my students is: respect the differences and celebrate the diversity. Some may have average education, others may be Oxbridge graduates; some may have lots of life experience, others may be fresh out of school; some are from London, others are from the other side of the world. By embracing and respecting those differences, you can get the best out of each other and together you can raise the bar. You can also unlock the power of interdependence by pooling your collective enthusiasm to overcome challenges. Imagine I give you a bamboo cane and ask you to break it. You can do this easily. But if I give you a bundle of twelve canes – one for each member of your cast or group – you’ll probably find this almost impossible to break. Alone and independently we can achieve a certain result, but when we work together to combine our strengths – interdependence – we can achieve an outcome that is greater and richer than what any individual might have come up with by themselves.

Team stages Another researcher, Bruce Tuckman,2 found that teams go through four different stages in their development. ●●

●● ●●

●●

Forming: when the team is getting together and everyone is playing it safe because they don’t know each other that well Storming: when conflicts and power games arise within the team Norming: when everyone finds a way of working together and the team starts to cohere Performing: when there is openness, mutual support and the team achieves its potential through a level of excellence.

60

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

That cycle is pretty much the pattern of the average rehearsal period for a play. When you find yourself in the storming phase, which every actor must be familiar with, what you can do is recognize that and focus on the norms: What are our values, what’s our aim, what are the ground rules, how can we work together better? To go back to those vintage year groups, what characterized them was an unrelenting, collective enthusiasm that set the highest standard of achievement. These actors challenged each other, admired each other’s creativity, created their own environment in which they could take risks to embrace failure, and they built a culture in which mediocrity was definitely not cool. Years after he left Guildhall, I asked Damian Lewis, who had Joseph Fiennes in his class, about this. I think there can be no question that if there is a bed of talent in a year, if there’s competition there and people are driving each other on, then you must get the best results. And I know that as I sat in second year classes – probably because the second year for me was the most inspiring of the three years – I remember being inspired by other people, hugely inspired by people’s talents. It made a difference to me because I’m naturally competitive, and I was ambitious to do well. A few years later another vintage year produced, among others, Orlando Bloom, the Italian movie star Maya Sansa, the War Horse puppet expert Finn Caldwell, and the writer of Nine Night, Natasha Gordon, who told me, ‘We were hugely competitive, but in a positive way. We egged each other on to achieve our best work. We worked hard, like when you set us a group exercise to do, people like Finn would interrogate the hell out of it to the extent I’d be like, “Oh my God, surely we’ve done enough, surely we could move on”. He’d go “No, no, no, guys we have to look at this moment”. And then there was Maya’s line of meticulous investigation. Always you have fall outs of course, but we really got on.’ Maya Sansa suggested that a lot of their success was down to a particular energy and attitude that they brought to the work. ‘I think there were many people in that year for whom just getting into the school was already making a dream come true and we didn’t want to miss any of that,’ she recalled. ‘It was just so special for us and I don’t remember ever feeling “Oh just school”. We felt we were the elected ones. And that made us feel proud and happy and committed and we liked each other. There was a good number of very warmhearted people.’ Going back further, Judi Dench and Vanessa Redgrave were in the same class at Central Drama School in the late 1950s. And at about the same time, another notable vintage year occurred at RADA when Peter O’Toole, Albert Finney, Richard Harris and Alan Bates found themselves all in the same class.

ENTHUSIASM

61

Be an entrepreneur The other striking feature of ‘vintage years’ is that the student actors in them often show outstanding leadership qualities, such as inspiring others and challenging the status quo, while they are still at drama school. Because of their enthusiasm, these people tend to seize opportunities to make things happen. They’re entrepreneurs. And this is a common trait of almost all high-flyers. In the corporate world, for instance, Richard Branson, Alan Sugar and Mark Zuckerberg had all set up entrepreneurial ventures when they were still at school or university. Evidence of an entrepreneurial spirit will usually show itself at an early age. I staged my first production – My Fair Lady – at the age of twelve in my grandparents’ living room with my cousins making up the cast. However, if you haven’t stuck your neck out in some way by the age of twelve, this doesn’t mean you are condemned to mediocrity. Following the principles of the growth mindset (see pages xviii– xix), you can choose to change your behaviour and adopt a completely different approach to life and work at any time. But you need to take action. Time and again I’ve watched students creating their own performances, setting up theatre companies and generally exploiting the facilities that the drama school offered them. Whatever stage you are at in your career, you need to make the best of your opportunities – to become proactive, creative artists rather than reactive actors waiting at home for the phone to ring. And you find the courage to do that by focusing on your enthusiasm, sharpening your motivation and being comfortable with risk-taking. When he was still at Guildhall, Paapa Essiedu and some classmates set up their own production company, Invertigo. This helped him overcome the common feeling that from an actor’s point of view, the industry is set up for you to be reactive: It was really crucial for reframing the idea of what it means to work as an artist in this industry. Even by virtue of being in a room when you’re auditioning someone else, or you’re talking to a director on the creative level, or you’re dealing with the minutiae of budgets and all that kind of stuff, it gives you a more well-rounded understanding of what this industry is. And I’m sure it did give me more confidence, but it definitely stopped me from having as much negativity attached to that initial meeting, because so much of it can be caught up in anxiety, fear, self-doubt, or whatever, or just being mystified by how does it work? How do you get a job? What is a good audition? What are people looking for? What do people expect from me?

62

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

Creating your own work should be an important part of any drama school curriculum. At Jacques Lecoq’s mime school in Paris he called this auto cours and time was given each day, every week, for the students to create new work. If it wasn’t up to standard, you could be stopped after less than a minute, so you needed determination to survive. As a result Lecoq sent generations of young actors out with the confidence, flair and enthusiasm to start up their own innovative theatre companies around the world. Complicité, one of Europe’s most acclaimed physical theatre companies, was one of them. Here are some of the exercises and games I use for cultivating curiosity and building enthusiasm by encouraging passion and joy.

WORKING BY YOURSELF The sense diary This is to arouse the habit of curiosity by making you more enthusiastically aware of everything around you. Do it properly and you’ll definitely be in a different place by the end of it, and its profound effect lasts for a long time. ●●

●●

●●

For seven days, keep a sense diary in which you write down each day five sights, five sounds, five touches, five smells and five tastes. That means twenty-five sense experiences a day. Each entry need be only a short sentence, but be specific. For example, not just ‘a tree’ but maybe, ‘late afternoon sunlight highlighting the olive leaves’. Not ‘a peach’ but maybe, ‘the velvety, furry skin of a ripe peach against my lips’. Keep this up for seven days without stopping and you’ll find that your senses are much more heightened, and that you are more vividly interested in everything around you.

Storytelling Your craft as an actor can be traced back to the ancient art of the storyteller and it’s useful to remember that connection as a way of keeping your feet on the ground and your values as an actor clear. Imagine the way the great epics of Homer might have been recited nearly 3,000 years ago, or folk cycles such as The Mahabharata, or tribal myths.

ENTHUSIASM

63

It had to be a virtuoso performance. The storyteller had to play with the spectators, enticing them, teasing them, amusing them, shocking them, holding them in suspense, making them want more. The actor’s oldest relationship was therefore with the audience. Later, when Greek drama emerged, it was also with the other actors on stage. But right from the beginning, rapport with the audience was a crucial ingredient if the audience was to be engaged. Without enthusiasm – a joy in telling the story to the audience – that rapport is impossible. The persona of the storyteller is different from that of the actor as character. Playing the character, you’re inside the story, therefore totally engaged in the emotion of each moment, and your character doesn’t know what the future holds. As the storyteller, you’re outside that and you have all the power. You control the characters: you can bring them on when you want to, you can make them fall in love, confront each other, or you can kill them off. You can dive into their skin – becoming them – and out of it again. So you have a different complicity with the audience and there should always be a twinkle in the eye, because you know what the future holds. Enjoy the power.

The climactic sentence If storytelling is at the heart of theatre, telling stories directly to the audience will help you learn quickly about rapport and enthusiasm. And it’s a marvellously exposing way of strengthening your virtuosity, because you’ve got to go for it and be outstanding. You simply can’t duck out of the task and give it only half your courage and enthusiasm: the audience will immediately switch off. That’s why I do a project at Guildhall where the actors dramatize myths and legends. One of the most effective exercises I use to help prepare them for this is ‘the climactic sentence’. You can practise this by yourself, recording it on your phone, though if you are part of a group, you can also use it to explore how you engage an audience and create rapport. I developed it to help push actors well out of their comfort zone.

The basic exercise ●●

Together and on the spot we create the premise for a fantasy story, deciding who or what the hero is, who is the hero’s arch enemy and what special powers they have. You can do this with a series of quickfire questions: Male or female? Animal, human, monster or demon?

64

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

●●

●●

●●

Name? What special fighting powers? Where does it take place? When? You have two minutes to compose a sentence describing the climatic final confrontation between these two characters, and to practise speaking it with big physical gestures. The sentence should describe the action and the more epically outrageous it is, the better it will be. I’ll make one up now:  Just then, Kolouratti swooped down from the cliff, raised her fifty arms and threw fifty fiery spears towards Jedro, the sea god, who shot venom from his furious single eye. You can prepare for this with some releasing exercises, such as arm swings, to ensure that when you make a big gesture, the energy travels right out through your fingers in a released way.

The group version ●●

●●

●● ●●

When you’ve composed your sentence, one at a time you run into the space and speak it to the rest of the group. There’s usually a lot of hilarity in this, but it’s an incredibly exposing exercise because it shows just what it is that engages an audience. It instantly separates the outstanding actor from the average one. It’s important to set up an atmosphere where it’s okay to fail. Very few people get it right first time, by which I mean it’s not often that they can completely command the attention of the rest of the group.

The detail What goes wrong then? An actor might use far too much movement, so it looks fidgety. They might have the energy all wrong, so it looks like hard work. A lot of the time they might just speak too fast, without breathing, so all the words have no value and everything comes out the same. Or they’ll forget to make eye contact with the audience, or in their nervousness they might get tunnel vision and address the whole thing to only one or two people in the middle of the group. Sometimes they might throw it away in a droll, understated manner, without any energy or charisma. ●●

●●

The aim is to develop a strong presence and rapport with the audience – in this case, the rest of the group – and at the same time to make it look effortless by being physically released. To do this, you need to pare away the clutter in order to find more

ENTHUSIASM

●●

●●

65

physical economy. Release physical tension, make eye contact with each individual, breathe before each thought (under pressure, young actors usually stop breathing), relish the sounds of the words. Use full extensions through the body and above all, project warmth and enthusiasm. When someone gets all this across, the rest of the group often cheer because it’s so damned exciting – a bit like cheering for football players or athletes.

When the actors run out and do their sentences, one after another, I’ll often call out instructions for them to do it again: ‘Terrify us twice as much!’ ‘Do it with blazing eyes!’ ‘Hands up those she didn’t make eye contact with!’ ‘Twice as slowly, enjoying the sounds of the words!’ ‘Excite us twice as much!’ ‘Twice as friendly!’ The point is that you often think you’ve done enough, but when provoked you can always go further than you realized. Sometimes we see a sudden breakthrough when someone finally comes fully alive. I’ll usually ask everyone afterwards: ‘What were the moments we were most engaged by?’ The answers will be: ‘When they were released, when they weren’t trying too hard, when they got rid of the clutter, when they slowed down, when they made it simpler, when they really looked at us.’

Keeping a calm centre At the same time, you must avoid the trap of getting into a frantic energy. That’s when you start pushing and going into all sorts of physical tension. The advanced stage of this exercise is to find a stillness and inner calm when you deliver the story. You need a relaxed, but energized focus that makes your audience concentrate on what you’re saying. If people get stuck when they’re speaking their sentence, or go blank, I’ll say: ‘Try to visualize in exact detail everything you are describing. What is she wearing? What is her hair like? What’s her armour like? What does the land look like? Is it in the desert, on a mountainside or in a forest? Is the sun or the moon shining on them? What sounds do you hear? What are the colours? See it all in your mind’s eye and just tell us what you’re seeing.’ It’s interesting that this makes you more open and you let us in. Why should that be? Because it becomes about the story, not you. You must never get in the way of the story. Remember that you are the vehicle for the story: it passes through you to be recreated inside our heads and hearts. The energy should be outward, not inward. It’s not about your problems in the space; it’s about what the audience receives. That’s also a great way of settling your nerves and taking the pressure off yourself.

66

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

To prove this point, you could also try conveying the sentence both ways: first being as intense and impressive as you can, then visualizing the action and willing us to see it. There’s less pressure because all you have to do is describe what you are seeing.

Specificity But the storytelling must be clear. The same principle applies on stage in any genre: your thinking should be as accurate and specific as possible. If you have a woolly image of what you’re talking about, we’ll get a woolly impression and we won’t be able to collaborate with you fully to complete the picture. Outstanding actors have great specificity of thought. Sometimes I’ll get actors to do the story sentence first in gibberish. That forces you back into using the body and the sound of the language to make your meaning clear. And because it’s in an unknown language, it liberates you by taking the pressure off the intellect. The important thing here is to have specific thoughts, but to relish the sounds of the words. Or if I’m working with a very international group, I’ll often ask an actor to do this in their own language. I’ll usually have to remind them to breathe and slow down, but it can lead to an exciting breakthrough in projecting enthusiasm and joy.

ENTHUSIASM

67

WORKING TOGETHER Transformation sets Here’s a wonderful improvisation game you can use to practise your virtuosity with a scene partner and strengthen your enthusiasm together. It’s also a good way of widening your range when you’re improvising.

The basic game ●●

●●

●●

From opposite sides of the room, two people run into the centre and play a scene. One of you has been chosen to lead the scene, which in this case means just establishing the opening line or situation. When the session leader claps sharply, or beats a drum, you both transform the physical situation you were in at that moment to begin a new scene as different characters, this time with the other actor leading. When the session leader next claps, you transform the situation and relationship again, with the first actor once more leading. And so on.

The detail ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

When improvising it’s very easy to get into the habit of playing the same sort of characters every time, so this is designed to push you further. With each scene, there should be a different relationship: two brothers, two spies, two business partners, two lovers, a master and servant. And the genre should be different each time: fantasy, serious drama, wild action, comedy. You shouldn’t feel under pressure to play everything for laughs; if the scene turns out to be serious, then compel the audience to take it seriously. Think of each scene as a balance of words and action, so you don’t need to keep a constant stream of dialogue going. In fact it’s better, and easier, if you let the dialogue come out of the action. Therefore, it’s important that the scene starts as an action idea. In choosing the moment to clap, I’m looking for the most interesting physical pairing of the actors, when they are in physical contact. Use that position to determine the next situation rather than breaking apart and starting a conversation, which will set up a dialogue-led scene.

68

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

●●

●●

As soon as you run into the space you’re looking to find out: who are we, where are we, when is it and what do we want? Once the ‘leader’ has set up the opening moment, you both work on equal terms. The game is great for thinking fast and releasing your creative imagination together. And it makes you listen to each other very well.

If I feel the actors are getting a bit intellectual and are getting bogged down with dialogue, I’ll release the scene by getting them to play it in gibberish, which immediately throws them back to communicating through the action. To make the language more specific, I’ll suggest an image: ‘Play it in Italian!’ ‘Play it in Russian!’ Then I can call out, ‘Back into English!’ for a few lines, so they both know exactly where they are, then, ‘Italian!’ to move them forward physically. What we, the audience are looking for is: ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●●

Did they have a good time playing together, with generosity? Did they enjoy themselves? Was there a good rapport between them? Were their choices bold? Did they take risks? Did they find truth in each scene? Did they have enthusiasm?

Once it’s under way, each scene should be equal. If one actor tries to dominate or control the other (as actor, not character), then the balance tips and it’s less satisfying to watch. When the actors are free enough to work together with complete generosity and a sense that they are really enjoying playing together, then it becomes incredibly engaging to watch.

Enthusiasm in a nutshell Working with enthusiasm is a choice you make. You can find enthusiasm by focusing on the positive outcome of what you are doing: ‘I’m going to enjoy taking a real risk in this scene, so we all have more fun.’ Every exercise and every rehearsal is therefore a chance to show your enthusiasm and spread it to those around you, with courage and daring, which leads us to the next quality: danger.

4 DANGER ‘There was a long pause while the whole house held its breath. He stood perfectly still, threw his head back, and emitted from a distended throat two of the most blood-curdling screams that can ever have been heard in any theatre. They had the brightness of a high trumpet, and pierced every one of us like the sharpest of swords.’1 That was Laurence Olivier in 1945 playing Oedipus – the moment he realizes that he has killed his father and slept with his mother. One of the highest levels you can attain as an actor is danger. And that leads us to the heart of this book. I’m not talking about smashing up the scenery, or risking injury on stage, though a performance can often have the excitement of an acrobat on the high wire. What I mean is the unexpected.

What is danger? Danger is your capacity to surprise us. It’s the tension you set up between yourself and your audience, when the audience is thinking: What’s he going to do now? What’s going to happen next? It’s about being unpredictable. A few examples from over the years stay in my mind: Ian McKellen and Judi Dench in Macbeth at the RSC, Matthew McConaughey in the TV series True Detective or Joaquin Phoenix in the film Joker. Nearly all the greatest actors have had a riveting sense of danger about them. Danger is a vital quality to aspire to. Of all the ideas I pass on through my training, this is the one that seems most to have caught actors’ imaginations. When I’ve visited former students backstage in the West End, such as Ewan McGregor, Dominic West, Freddie Fox, Hayley Attwell, Ashley Zhangazha, Lily James, Damian Lewis or Orlando Bloom, the first thing they’ve said was, ‘Ken, was I dangerous?’ So why does that stick? Danger for its own sake, however, is indulgent. You must avoid what Nicholas Hytner described as being ‘trapped in an idea of how to be dangerous, which is self-destructive’. As he said:

70

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

I think danger is about unpredictability. It is about being in the moment. And it’s about acknowledging that if you are in the moment, the next moment cannot and must not be predictable. I think if you find yourself stuck and are predictable in front of a camera, the camera turns off you very, very quickly. The great film actors are exactly the ones who by doing least surprise you most. A stage problem is that an Electra, a King Lear, a Juliet, gets stuck in the one thing and it seems like it’s coming from a truthful, generous, warm place, but it bores the shit out of me.

How do you find danger? The actors with the greatest danger are usually those with the boldest, freshest choices. How do they achieve those? By taking risks in their preparation and rehearsal. And how are they able to take those risks? By being comfortable with failure. To do that, they have to be prepared to tread the knife edge between what will work and what won’t. Once, I gave some fairly adventurous drama students a selection of Shakespeare one-liners and said: ‘Choose one of these and be exciting with it.’ It’s a trap, of course that usually leads to a lot of flaying about of arms and misplaced energy, because the point I’m making is that true excitement needs economy and control. One student picked up a chair in the course of his line and hurled it against the wall, smashing the chair and making a hole in the plaster. Although this went far too far, it did illustrate a crucial point: the bottom line of your performance is that we should be able to have confidence in your ability to be physically safe – with the scenery, the other person and yourself. But how can you be dangerous and safe at the same time? A year or so later, a student doing this same exercise picked up a heavy piano stool, ran towards the group and in fury raised it above his head, to hurl it at us. Afterwards I asked the students, ‘Who thought there was a chance he might really throw the stool?’ Over half of them put up their hands. The point, which this actor made so brilliantly, was that he might have thrown it, but he chose not to. He was convincing in that he didn’t bottle out of the very bold choice he had set himself, but his values made it safe for us to watch. For a split second, we could enjoy the thrill of the possibility. That was danger. It’s like circus performers. As the trapeze artist is flying through the air to catch the trapeze, of course we don’t want him to fall splat on the ground, but it’s the possibility of failure that creates the thrill. And because we know he is most likely to catch that trapeze, we can enjoy the show. Similarly, although

DANGER

71

you are normally working with the illusion of danger, we need to have complete confidence in your skills as an actor. If danger is the tension between you and the audience, where you’re unpredictable and the audience doesn’t know what you’re going to do next, then you need to hold something in reserve, making us feel that you could go much further. This is about using economy – paring away the clutter. To come back to the chair-breaking student, we should always feel that he probably won’t break it, but he just might. It’s the exquisite doubt that creates the tension. And that puts the audience in your power, rather than them sitting there thinking, oh I can see where this is all going. As Damian Lewis put it, ‘There’s always a conflict, a tension there between what you reveal and what you don’t reveal.’

Actors who have danger Discussing danger, the critic Michael Billington told me, ‘All great actors have had that. Olivier – that’s why he was a great actor. It was because you never knew where he was going or what might be next. And sometimes embracing physical danger, which he famously did all the time. Leaping off rostra or whatever, doing something that’s physically extraordinary.’ As Judi Dench put it, ‘That’s very attractive. Watching Tony Hopkins in Pravda – I thought he might have leapt off the stage and threatened us all ! He was so dangerous, you didn’t know where he was going to jump.’ Danger is also about extravagant choices. These might lead to an outrageous physicality, like Olivier, or a smouldering intensity, like the volcano that can blow at any moment: think of James Dean or the early performances of Marlon Brando, or Daniel Day Lewis, or Daniel Craig. Some roles have this element of danger built into them, as a requirement: Richard III, Prince Hal, Hamlet, Mercutio, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Juliet, or Blanche and Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire. It’s also about being totally comfortable with the vulnerability of the role, where you can take your character along that knife edge between being sane and unhinged. Think of Vivien Leigh, Judy Garland, Vanessa Redgrave or Lupita Nyong’o. The quality of danger, both on stage and screen, is often conveyed by the intensity with which you listen to the other actor and the specificity of your thoughts. Outwardly you might appear to be doing nothing, but underneath there must be the energy of a coiled spring. Damian Lewis’s advice was: ‘Watch Robert De Niro when he’s not speaking. When a camera goes on him he’s just looking at a guy. But most of the time you think, Christ, he’s going to kill him. But he’s not always playing that role. And when he’s listening you can see him looking and thinking.’

72

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

Danger and risk So, how can you be dangerous without being predictable or destroying the furniture? This brings us to the element of risk. In both drama schools and professional productions, directors are constantly saying to you: Take risks! What they mean is: Embrace the freedom to fail (which is what rehearsals are for) and work through trial and error towards solutions that will bring the play or the role to life in the most exciting way possible. Not of course by hijacking the role to show off your talents, but telling the story truthfully and with integrity. In this spirit, Hayley Atwell’s best advice for novice actors was: ‘It really is okay to fail.’ As she told me, ‘It’s okay also to be bad at times. That is actually allowed. It’s kind of necessary to build up a healthy amount of self-doubt about who you are and what you have to contribute as an actor. Because it keeps you grounded in reality and also knowing that you’re involved in something that is so unbelievably subjective. Someone might think you’re brilliant and some people think you’re absolutely horrendous, or right for the role or wrong for the role. All that is allowed and once I gave myself permission not to be very good or not to be as good as such and such, then I was able to get on with the job and find enjoyment in it. Anything that’s fear based is only going to make life and the profession intolerable really.’ In a similar vein, Al Pacino recalled his own training: I was a young guy at the Actors’ Studio. And we could do anything. I’d say, ‘Okay, I want to do Shakespeare. I want to do the first act of something.’ And you’d do it. And it had some of the most of interesting people. I have seen at the Actors’ Studio the worst acting ever known to man, and I’ve seen the best. And I was privileged at a very young age, to have that access, to be in a space that allowed me to do whatever I did. It helps to think of rehearsals as a series of controlled failures, which is similar to the scientific principle of experiment through trial and error. You try something; it doesn’t work. So next time you try something else; it still doesn’t work. You try yet another idea and that doesn’t work either. But all the time, you’re moving closer towards something that will work. The riskier and more off beam your choices are, the greater the likelihood that you’ll reach something really fresh and exciting. A series of safe choices will lead to safe acting, which is unlikely to thrill the audience. This of course is the essence of the growth mindset that I described in the Introduction: pick yourself up and try again. Or as Samuel Beckett famously put it, ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’2 In this vein, Meryl Streep recalled her experience at Yale School of Drama when a bold and risky choice led to a lucky break: ‘Bob De Niro saw me in The Cherry Orchard where I played Dunyasha, the maid. And I had taken as

DANGER

73

my “endeavour” [that] I was going to fall down every time I came on stage, for some reason or another – just to make myself and the other members of the cast laugh. That was my thing. And that he saw that performance – a shameless performance – and cast me in The Deer Hunter, was sort of amazing.’3

Dealing with fear Achieving danger means not being afraid of failure. Technically, the job of acting is so complex – whether you’re getting your breath and phrasing of the lines right in a classical play, or landing on the right mark at the right moment on a film set – that fear often kills the enjoyment that would allow your personality to shine. But this is something you must learn to live with. As Jude Law expressed it: Fear is going to be a bedfellow and you’re going to have to learn to look it in the eye, take it on, sometimes swallow on and conquer it and sometimes embrace it and go, ‘Come on then, let’s go, I’ll ride you!’ And I also believe that way lies the greatest sense of reward and thrill and physical stimulation. Showing total growth mindset Judi Dench had a similarly robust attitude to fear: I think having a real insecurity and fear is very good. Fear can fuel a performance. And it’s not our business to let the audience see it as fear. That then is a thing that catches fire. But it can be used in energy. It can be used towards a goal, which is at the end of the evening thinking, well I’ve done as much as I can tonight with that. Tomorrow I’ll try again and make it better. Sports coaches often talk of ‘being comfortable with being uncomfortable’4 and if you are to exude danger then you must be genuinely comfortable with risktaking. This means widening the range of your personality and favouring bolder choices that reflect more creative individuality. But how? Whether in training or rehearsal, you need to claim the freedom to play with the uninhibited joy of children. This requires a highly positive, relaxed atmosphere where there will be few judgements but many discoveries. There should be a balance between order and chaos, between discipline and spontaneity. Above all there should be trust. Rather than wait for a director to set that tone, you can personally adopt those habits in the way you work, thereby giving courage to others in the cast. Taking risks is about revealing yourself and your imagination, and being at ease with the possibility of failure. You can only do this in rehearsal if you’re confident about the other people. That’s why qualities, such as warmth and

74

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

generosity, need to be in place so you build a mutual sense of trust. If you get up to try out something risky and you feel that people might sneer at you, you’ll never be able to do exciting work. But in a climate of mutual support, you can freely embrace the fear to fail and great things can happen. It’s an incredibly fragile balance, though. The director Peter Hall once told me: In my early twenties I worked with some of the greatest people in the British theatre – Ashcroft, Olivier, Charles Laughton – and I was aware very early on that, inexpert as I was, if I said the wrong thing at the wrong time, even to Olivier, I could paralyse him from proper work for days. It’s a position of enormous power and you have to really be responsible about that … You can destroy the greatest talent for a considerable period of time.5 This highlights the fact that when we make theatre, whether as directors or actors, we need to place ourselves courageously in each other’s hands, trusting that our creative process will be safe.

Showing courage Having danger therefore is also about showing courage: the courage to be bold or out of the ordinary. Such choices take courage because it’s much easier to do it the obvious, safe way. Therefore, a major part of your development as an actor is about widening your range of expression. It’s about accessing the opposites: masculine and feminine, love and hate, good and evil, and so on. You’re unlikely to have killed anyone, yet it is quite possible that you will one day get to play a killer on stage or screen. Theatre and film are not about the middle ground: they are about extremes. Your job is to portray a much more extreme life than your average audience member will ever experience. So you need to be completely at ease with those extremes. Some of Shakespeare’s most memorable characters are the villains, such as Richard III, Lady Macbeth and Iago, and they need to be portrayed as fully rounded, fascinating human beings.

Danger and vulnerability Danger of course doesn’t always have to be about aggression or conflict. It’s also about the way you create empathy. When your character goes through exquisite suffering on stage, we need to recognize that and identify with you. The roles of both Romeo and Juliet are good examples. If we, the audience

DANGER

75

don’t passionately want them to live happily ever after, there’s no point. In some roles you need to fascinate us and embody our dreams. You need to take us there. Portraying a dream man or a dream woman is therefore part of your job as an actor. When we watch a wonderful pairing of Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, or Rosalind and Orlando, part of us should feel, ‘I wish I had a lover like that. I want to be up there with them.’ Sometimes, your audience must adore you. But to achieve adoration, you must offer your vulnerability (with great warmth and generosity) and tap into your capacity for danger. Occasionally you may be required to transport us to a dream world – heightened and beautiful. That combination of vulnerability and danger will help give you the mystique to do it. As for finding danger, the following exercises will show you how you can make your choices bold enough to be able to hold something in reserve, and heighten the tension between you and your audience.

WORKING BY YOURSELF Peaks and troughs To make an analogy with scientific experiment, let’s go into more detail now on the question of risk. Once a former student, who’d been working in the profession for about ten years, came to me and said, ‘I’m stuck. I’m getting good small parts in big Hollywood films, but I don’t know how to break through to the next level of the lead roles. What can I do?’ This is something almost every actor must ponder at some point: what are the stars doing that you are not? Part of the answer is about boldness of choices in a role, and this is a key aspect to achieving a sense of danger. Here’s a model that can help you. You can make safe choices in rehearsal, which will usually be acceptable, but are never exciting. Or you can go for high-risk extremes, trying out something bold and maybe getting it completely wrong. However, this is a bumpy road, demanding lots of courage: your first bold choice may be wonderful but the next one may lead you into ‘awful’ territory, then the one after that may be brilliant, but the next one is totally wrong. When you line up all those choices – the awful, the brilliant and the ones in between – you get a graph something like this:

76

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

You’ve ended up with a series of a few exciting peaks, and some troughs, but you will probably feel under pressure to base your final performance on a range of choices somewhere in the middle, avoiding anything too risky. This is understandable because these are the most reliable and logical choices. And there’s your answer: the competent actor takes the middle road, while the outstanding actor has the courage to choose the high-risk peaks, having risked the troughs along the way. Use your discretion, though. A lot of roles don’t benefit from hugely inventive bold choices or displays of personal virtuosity. As Alfred Hitchcock once said to one of his actors, ‘Just come through the door and say the line.’ But I suggest that in most plays and films you still have more freedom than you think. Imagine, for example, you’ve been given the role of an eighteenth-century pirate in a Disney film that’s going to be set in the Caribbean. You could research pirates and make an in-depth study of life in the eighteenth century, which might lead you to what you feel is an authentic portrayal of the pirate’s world, full of integrity and sound preparation. Or you could throw that all away and base your portrayal on an ageing rock star, such as Keith Richards. The first approach would sustain your reputation as a sensible, reliable actor, which is what makes most directors comfortable. The second might make the director think you were mad. It might even alienate some of your potential audience, but if you could pull it off, you might be able to create an unforgettably original character and enhance your reputation as an outstanding, though eccentric actor. The risks are high but the rewards are even higher. The trap is, however, that in numerous sequels you could settle for mere repetition and descend into cliché, at which point the danger disappears. At the same time, the desire to constantly surprise your audience can put you at odds with the suffocation you feel when your casting pigeon-holes you into a very narrow range of characters, which you’re known to be good at. Even the best actors find it very hard to break out of this.

DANGER

77

Lily James made her name in Downton Abbey and then Cinderella, and as she told me, ‘Repetition is the death of creativity and when you feel like you’re not exploring new ideas, different parts of yourself, or different stories and characters, you can start feeling really awful and like you can’t act. I’ve had moments where you feel like you’re repeating yourself because people around you only think of you as one thing and it can be really hard to push outside of people’s expectations and ideas of you.’

Pressure and performance If you really want to aspire to danger, what are the solutions, then? At this point let’s turn for inspiration to the field of sport, where the key driver to stepping up is targeted improvement: if you are focused on getting better, what does ‘better’ look like? In sport, this is relatively easy to measure: you’re either running faster or you’re not. In acting, where judgement of a performance is more subjective, improvement is often linked to risk-taking. This can be indicated by a change of direction, say in an unexpected role, or a more challenging performance displaying detail, truth and memorability that surpasses what went before and becomes a career milestone: for example, Marlon Brando in The Godfather, Claire Foy in The Crown or Joaquin Phoenix in Joker. Improvement should not be confused with experience, though because we don’t necessarily get better with age. Experience without a serious drive to improve can be just more of the same, which leads to a plateau or even getting worse. But experience with the passion to improve takes you forward to the next level. What drives improvement and indeed risk is our attitude to pressure, which takes us back to the idea of learning to be comfortable being uncomfortable. For the sports psychologist Ceri Evans, the key is to see an uncomfortable situation, not as a threat, which will create tension and make us want to run away, but as a challenge, which will energize us and drive us forward to engage with it. In other words, instead of ducking out of that overambitious audition, you face it adventurously and enjoy giving it your best shot. As Evans observes of sports stars, ‘Rather than avoiding the most uncomfortable parts, champions identify their greatest vulnerabilities – where they feel least comfortable – and place intense focus on those aspects.’6 For example, if you’re scared of improvisation, you grab lots of opportunities to improvise and try to get better at it. If you’re terrified by the lack of rehearsal in television drama, you develop methods of mastering that. Our attitude to pressure also affects our motivation because it’s to do with whether we are driven from within (e.g. your personal goals), or whether the pressure comes from outside (e.g. needing to pay this month’s rent). Eventually

78

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

you realize that discomfort is essential for progress and you can choose to adopt a default mindset of reversing the usual phrase by being uncomfortable with being comfortable. This helps alert you to those moments when you are aware of sitting back and not challenging yourself. For Evans, the key is not to reduce the level of discomfort, but to learn to face it. As he says, ‘When we appreciate the power of being more comfortable being uncomfortable than others, we actually become energised by the challenge of the discomfort.’ If you’re committed to becoming successful, this is a hugely powerful idea to grasp. It was also proposed by the psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl.7 Controversially, he pointed out that when we pursue a life of comfort, we will lack drive. Therefore, the tension that comes from being dissatisfied with where we are can paradoxically be mentally healthier than being totally free of tension. It’s this tension that helps us step up to the next level of effectiveness. But rather than being preoccupied with our own discomfort or mental pain, we need to focus on the task ahead. The discomfort extends us into new territory. This might mean auditioning for a challenging role that’s way outside your usual casting range, or taking on a famous role – Hamlet, Juliet, Henry V – that carries a whole history of great performances, where you’re bound to be compared with those who went before. But we must have a clear picture of what the next level looks like for us, otherwise it’s going to be harder to get there. How do you do this? One way is to focus on what Evans calls the performance gap – the contrast between the way you want to perform under pressure with the way you are performing now. You can identify this by asking yourself three questions: Do you want to be a better actor? Have you reached your full potential? Do you have a clear picture about what your next level of performance looks like and feels like? Your full potential is seldom achieved because we always have one more step to go, but it might involve scoring a success as Hamlet or Juliet, or carrying a lead in a TV drama, or successfully managing your own theatre company. Having a clear sense of your full potential, you can define the performance gap between where you want to be and where you are now. You can then identify what is missing. Then you can set out your strategy to get there (for more on the strategy, see page 155). That enables you to see the present obstacles that hold you back as in fact energizing. How do you measure whether you’re improving? Getting and using feedback is one of the best indicators. This might be noticing a changing pattern in press reviews or audience reactions, though more useful feedback might come from people close to you whom you trust. Highly experienced actors will often ask me to come and give them feedback on a stage performance. This must be done with discretion of course, so as not to subvert what the director is doing, but when you know an actor well, you might be able to give them evidence of how

DANGER

79

they’ve moved forward or challenged themselves relative to what they’ve done before. Let’s now look at some specific ways that you can step up to the next level by bridging the performance gap and embracing risk to achieve danger.

The funnel model The reason so many actors fail to stand out is that they don’t fully exploit their freedom of choice in rehearsals. In the theatre, at least, when you’re working on a character, try thinking of your choices as based on a funnel model.

At the top of the funnel, the circumference is wide and the water pressure is low. In the early rehearsals, you try out lots of possibilities, keeping an open mind, and drawing on your imagination and instinct to explore the wide range of choices you have. As you come down towards the spout of the funnel, the water pressure becomes a little higher. In rehearsal you start to narrow your choices, discarding the ideas that were not right for the character or the play, and refining the ones that might fit. You’re now starting to apply more judgement to get order into your choices. By the time the water comes out of the spout – your performance – the pressure is high and the sheer force of the water is strong because the circumference of the spout is much narrower than at the top. The performance has focused power, supported by all the choices you made at the start.

80

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

The opposite of this is the cylinder model, which unfortunately is often forced on you in television drama and film because there is usually very little time for rehearsal. In the cylinder model your choices are as narrow at the top as they are at the bottom. The water can therefore come out with less focus. There’s not much exploration at the start and there’s not much difference at the end. In this case you need to do all your work beforehand, coming fully prepared. As Al Pacino wryly commented, ‘You don’t have rehearsal in movies. They don’t have time to rehearse. I’ll tell you something else – they don’t have time to shoot the movie either.’ The point is to explore freely a wide range of choices in early rehearsals, when you have them, and then start to narrow your choices so you have a reliable form, or physical score, for the role. It sounds obvious, but how many actors really do that?

Raising the bar A lot of the time we hold ourselves back unnecessarily through our mindset. Here’s another way of looking at boldness in your choices. Imagine there is a line, or bar, that you think is the right level of boldness and individuality you want to achieve in your performance. If everything you are doing in rehearsal is below the bar, then all your work becomes about trying to pull it up to that level. And that’s tough going.

If you can give yourself the freedom in rehearsals to jump above that bar sometimes – unafraid to be over-the-top, caricatured, stereotypical or plain crazy – then your work becomes about eventually internalizing the choices to an appropriate level of truth: bringing it down to the bar. However, some of those choices that felt over-the-top turn out to be actually brilliant.

DANGER

81

The surprising thing is that when you work in that territory above the bar, you often discover in the process that the bar actually belongs a little higher than you originally thought it was. It just takes courage to put it there.

Dynamics There are two broad approaches to dealing with emotion in acting: you can work from the inside out, or the outside in. In the first, influenced by Stanislavski’s earlier work, you get your objectives, given circumstances and emotional memory sorted out, and according to how you feel, you might move in a particular way. In the second, influenced by the French mime schools, especially Jacques Lecoq’s, you find a physical form and that will in turn determine how you feel. Neither is right nor wrong: they are simply different ways of working and indeed many actors employ both at the same time. But I want to talk about the second approach for a moment.

82

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

A powerful way of finding bolder choices, without losing accuracy or truth, is to examine the whole question of the dynamics of each movement – the physical texture of every movement and gesture you make. This can refer to volume, weight, strength and tempo. It’s basically all the choices you have in getting from point A to point B. In this section, I’ll describe some tools you can use to widen your range and at the same time find detail in everything you’re doing. This will enable you to bring more exciting choices to your director in rehearsals. Most of the time we don’t really open up these choices, so the result is often bland and the director has to work hard to find ways of livening up the scene. Say, for example, you have the following: SHE: (Getting up and walking over to him) It’s finished. I’m leaving you. Normally you will obediently follow the most obvious level of the stage direction: standing up and walking over to him while saying the line. But consider: between A, the chair you get out of and B, the other actor, you have a whole spectrum of physical possibilities, which will each change the way you say the words. For example, you could spring up, or rise slowly, or get up smoothly, jerkily, heavily, lightly, wearily, energetically, awkwardly, sensuously, and so on. And then how do you walk? Or run? And do you touch him or not touch him? Where do you touch him and how? Do you make eye contact or not? And do you speak while moving, before you move or when you get there? All of these give different shades of meaning to that action, thus helping you find a much sharper level of detail. ●●

 

See https://vimeo.com/channels/1486142/376353042 Here are some ways of opening up those choices:

Acceleration and deceleration Raising your arm ●●

●●

●●

●●

Start with your hand at your side and raise it, quite quickly, till it’s extended lightly at shoulder height. Do this a few times to perfect the movement: that is, taking out any wobbles or hesitations so the movement is smooth and economical. Once you have that, do the same movement, this time accelerating. You start very slowly, getting faster and faster and then suddenly stop. Try to avoid excessive tension or the hand bouncing at the end: it should just stop.

DANGER

●● ●● ●●

●● ●● ●●

●●

83

And avoid over-running: the hand stops at shoulder height. Do this a few times trying to perfect the movement. Now do the same movement, this time decelerating. From stillness your hand suddenly moves very fast, but it immediately gets slower and slower until it finally subsides into stillness. Again, avoid excess tension, or the hand over-running. Keep working at it until you’ve perfected the movement. Finally, raise the arm very, very slowly and stop clearly. This is much harder to do without micro-wobbles or changes of pace, so you need to practise it several times. Aim for economy and smoothness.

Running to a point Now you can apply the same dynamics of fast, accelerating, decelerating and slow, to a larger action.

Fast ●●

●●

●●

●●

First, run to a point and suddenly stop. Try to arrive in a dynamic, lively position rather than just neutral. Once you’ve got the mechanics of the movement – sudden start; sudden stop – find a reason for moving and a reason for stopping at that precise moment. That will keep the imagination alive, thus filling out the movement. To give even more detail, ask yourself: Are you moving forward to get away from something or to get towards something? And why do you stop at that particular point? Also, where does the impulse to move come from: the chest (emotions), the head (intellect) or the hands (kinaesthetic)?

All these variations will give totally different meanings to a fairly basic movement, but they are choices we don’t always think of making.

Accelerating ●● ●●

●●

Now move to a point, accelerating. From stillness you start slowly, getting faster and faster, then suddenly stop. This should be a steady progression, not a sudden gear change from slow to fast.

84

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

Try this over different distances, again finding reasons for starting and stopping. You can also consider the emotional flavour of that accelerating dynamic. It tends to be about urgency and it’s upbeat: assertive, active and strong. Next you can explore how words are affected by this dynamic. For example, if you’re calling out: ‘Stop! Come back!’ You’ll notice that the sudden stillness is important because it acts like a magnifying glass to focus our attention on whatever happens next, even if that is a small gesture or a quiet phrase. Now you can explore a line of text to see how the dynamic fills it out. Strong phrases from Shakespeare work well. Here are a few of my favourites: ºº ºº ºº ºº

Speak, I charge you! Avaunt and quit my sight! Speak, I’ll go no further. Turn, hellhound, turn!

At this point, a curious thing happens: you tend to lose physical accuracy. You’ll find yourself just running fast, without much variation. This is because words engage the intellect, which tends to dominate, and it’s initially difficult to get an equal balance of both language and physicality. That’s where the skill comes in; it needs practice, but if you can get a feeling for being physically accurate while speaking, your acting will be so much more expressive.

Decelerating ●●

●●

●●

●●

Now try moving to a point, but decelerating. From stillness you suddenly run and immediately start to slow down until you glide to a gentle stop. It’s as if you stopped inside before your body stopped. It should be a steady progression to stillness and you should find different reasons for starting and stopping like that. You can also try it over both long and short distances. Try it with an exclamation (‘Watch out!’) to test the effect of words and then try it with a line of text, taking care to maintain the balance of intellect and physicality so there’s an even progression towards stillness. What tends to happen is that you slow the words down (just as you might tend to speed the words up with the acceleration). That’s probably quite natural: body and mind slow down together.

DANGER

●●

●●

85

But watch that you don’t lose vocal energy. In fact you can get a very powerful effect by making the words steady and strong while the body slows down. Or you could even speed the words up while the body is slowing to a halt, intensifying the tension of the opposites.

This dynamic tends to have a more downbeat feeling of surrender, resignation, even defeat: it’s more passive.

Slowly ●● ●●

●● ●●

●●

●●

Finally, take just a few steps forward very slowly. This is not slow motion, nor is it stylized: you simply choose to move slowly towards the point at which you stop. Be clear: Why do you start moving then and why do you stop at the point? And what leads you forward: head, heart (chest) or hands? You might, for instance, try it with a slow gesture, such as reaching out towards someone. Your first concern, on a technical level, is to achieve the movement economically without wobbles or hesitations, so that every detail counts. Try this with the same lines of Shakespearean text you used before. You’ll be struck by how much this changes the meaning of the action. And when you can do that with total economy, the action is enormously powerful with a strong presence.

This dynamic has a more tragic feel to it and it needs very strong concentration if it’s not to look empty. It’s also excellent for conveying a feeling of danger by holding something in reserve. As you can see, the dynamic, combined with the text, alters the meaning of the action. And that’s the whole point of this work: to open up your choices, giving you more accuracy and detail. You’re training the body and mind to be able to achieve these variations technically and consciously, so that in rehearsal, when you’re stretching your imagination, you’ll be able to use dynamic changes instinctively while maintaining technical accuracy.

Applying the dynamics In rehearsal, you can apply these dynamics to particular actions. Try greeting someone, embracing someone, waving, picking something up, throwing something, reaching for something, leaning on a wall – each in a different dynamic. And try these with particular lines. When you have a group of people

86

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

each using different dynamics in their actions, there’s enormous variety in the space: together they look like real people. Using these dynamics as part of your rehearsal work, you might explore the default dynamic of your character. For instance you might be constantly accelerating in everything, while another character may be constantly decelerating. The contrast of the two can be used to heighten the comic effect. Additionally, you might find a point in the play where a crisis forces your character to move out of their default position; a decelerating person, for instance, might suddenly in one scene start accelerating in everything as they become more assertive.

Form and emotion The power of these four dynamics – fast, accelerating, decelerating and slow – is that even though you are exploring them technically, they change the way you feel. They do half the emotional work for you. In discussions about acting, this idea has been argued over for centuries. But it is true: we can work very effectively from the outside in, provided the outer form is truthful and appropriate for telling the story at that moment. This reminds you that part of your job as an actor is to find the form that will best convey the meaning and stimulate the appropriate emotion, not just in yourself, but in the audience. You can think of the form as the choreography of any action. When the form is right, it will help you fill out the emotion freely in a natural way, rather than squeeze raw emotion out of yourself without any context. To make a comparison with the Japanese classical actor for a moment, his job is about learning the codified form,8 which has been passed down, unchanged for centuries, and then discovering how to fill that out and make it his own. The Western actor on the other hand is given only the text, so a lot of your effort is about collaborating with your director to create the appropriate form.

Angular and fluid Two other dynamic directions are angular (where the movements are staccato, sharp and sudden) and fluid (where they are legato and smooth). Here’s how you can explore them:

Fluid ●●

Lie on the floor, on your back with your eyes closed and scan through the body, flexing and releasing, to let go all tension. Imagine the body has the quality of oil where everything flows.

DANGER

●● ●●

●●

●● ●●

●●

●● ●●

●●

●●

●●

87

Let the weight slop over to one side, then the other. Explore various movements from the spine, so that they flow out along the limbs and up through the head. In this dynamic, one movement flows into the next and that into the next: there is no beginning or end, just a continuous flow of energy without tension. Be aware of your breathing. Keep working on the floor like this and now start to sigh the breath out, letting the outward breath become voiced. The sounds should be light and free, reflecting this fluid dynamic. You can add consonants if you like, but it’s the vowels that are important. Gradually extend the rolling movements to crawling and sitting up. At the same time, extend the sounds into words and phrases in a gibberish language that expresses this fluid dynamic. Note the cadence of this language, its slowness and caressing sensuousness. Then gradually reduce the sounds and movements until you are once more on your back in stillness and silence. Reflect on the mood this dynamic evokes: it may be dreamy and sensuous. See https://vimeo.com/channels/1486142/376358955

Angular ●●

●●

●● ●●

●● ●●

●●

●●

●●

Now, still on your back, start to explore an angular dynamic, where the movements are sharp, sudden and staccato. Whereas the fluid dynamic seemed to grow out of the spine, these movements will come from isolations of a hand, a foot, the head, part of an arm. Everything suddenly starts from stillness and suddenly stops in stillness. This time the movements are more held: they are not overly tense, but there is less relaxation. Everything is fast, crisp, clear and precise. It’s more the dynamic of an insect. Because of the contrast, the stillness should have a strong intensity. It’s about extremes. Let the outward breath become voiced and note the range of sounds: sharp and crisp. Then extend these into words and phrases in gibberish. In this language, it’s the consonants that are important, at both the beginnings and ends of words. Sentences seem to attack. Note the moods this dynamic evokes: they may be both startled and frightened, but also aggressive and attacking.

88

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

Now extend the isolated movements to involve more of the body until you are sitting, kneeling, crawling, and eventually standing and walking. If you’re working in a group, encounter each other in this dynamic. Greet each other, argue with each other, tell each other something important. Gradually extend the made-up language into text: the play you are working on, or phrases of classical text. Although it’s sharply staccato, you still need to find a believable level in this dynamic, so it never becomes mechanical and robotic. See https://vimeo.com/channels/1486142/376358549

If you’re working in a group, as part of your rehearsal, you can mix these dynamics so some people are in fluid and some in angular. This lets you see the contrasting energy these dynamics produce, which is what it’s like in the street, or at a party: each person has their own distinct dynamic.

Internalizing the dynamics What you’ve ended up with may be quite exaggerated and over-the-top for certain plays. So you can use the scale of 1 to 10 to find the appropriate level. Imagine that if 1 is neutral and 10 is wildly exaggerated, you’re currently working at 9. Try internalizing the dynamic, without losing energy, so it takes you to level 7: it will become more grounded in reality. After a short while, take it down to 5: everyone in the room will start to look more naturalistic now. Reduce it even further to 3: at this level, the physical differences are less obvious, but there is still a strong sense of individuality. You can also use this technique in screen acting, where it might be internalized even further but can still help give you detail and individuality. ●●

See https://vimeo.com/channels/1486142/376350888

The qualities of angular and fluid Psychologically, there are broad qualities that these dynamics suggest. Fluid people will usually appear relatively relaxed, airy, tactile and sensuous, maybe slightly affected in their approach to other people. Angular people will be more rigid, precise, tidy, pedantic, urgent and clear-cut in their approach. This is not to say that everyone in the world is either fluid or angular, but it’s a useful frame through which to look at the behaviour of your character, because it may throw up some interesting choices. And of course, in a moment of crisis, your character may revert from one mode (the default) to the opposite.

DANGER

89

Also, because you’re concentrating on the accuracy of the dynamic and its level, this settles your concentration; you feel less self-conscious about the way you are speaking and behaving to others, and your imagination is freed up to become more inventive. And the more inventive you become, the more unexpected your choices are. The more unexpected your choices, the closer you get to an exciting sense of danger on stage.

Moving from different centres In your physical training as an actor you are taught to find a neutral position – anatomical perfection – and generally adopt that in all situations so that you can move like a dream and walk with exemplary grace. This means, among other things, standing with the knees released, the feet parallel, the spine aligned, the neck free and the arms at your sides. But of course real people are not like that at all. So part of your job is also to learn how to simulate the imperfections of human beings, though in a controlled way. Without realizing it, most people tend habitually to centre their weight or their energy in one part of the body, which is one of the things that gives them individuality or makes them recognizable. Taken to extremes, this becomes an eccentricity. The idea of moving from different centres is a very powerful and vivid approach to creating a character. It also helps you achieve transformation by breaking out of your personal habitual patterns. Here’s how I use it.

Primary centres ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

Look around the room with your energy centred on the tip of your nose. Now see something in the room and move towards it, with the tip of your nose leading you. If you’re working in a group, meet each other, shake hands and say hello from the tip of the nose. Note the attitude you tend to adopt, the way the words come out, how you feel and the signals you send out: probably inquisitive, intrusive, ‘nosey’. Now do the same thing from other centres: the chin, the forehead, shoulders, chest, abdomen, fingers, hips, knees, feet, eyes. These centres all have distinct qualities with a whole range of signals. The shoulders, for example, can be high and tense, as if you have been working at your computer all day and are very uptight, or they can be floppy and bouncy, which suggests a crazy, impulsive energy. The chest as a centre can be pompous and arrogant in a male, or sexually provocative or confident in a female. The hands leading can give a manic, over-tactile, unfocused energy.

90

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

●● ●●

●●

The hips leading can be laid back, casual and sensuous. The feet leading give you a mindless sense of not knowing where your body is going. Or with all the energy in the eyes as a centre, you start to adopt an alert, piercing look that can also appear weird and over-intense.

Emphasizing these centres is a powerful way of unlocking the comedy in a character, but you can also use the scale of 1 to 10 to internalize the centre where the genre – television, for example – demands something less exaggerated and less comic. The key thing is: don’t be afraid of exaggeration at the beginning, so long as you can fill that out truthfully. Then, by the time you internalize it, you’ve got a lot of detail that subtly changes your rhythm and dynamics. This also changes the energy in your eyes and strengthens your concentration. Each time, be aware of the signals these centres send out and the way they make you feel. If you’re working in a group, you can then each choose one centre you liked and move from that so that you feel the different energies altogether.

Primary and secondary centres To give more detail, you can also adopt a primary and secondary centre. For example, the main centre of your character might be the chin, but your secondary centre could be the hands. This might suggest someone who is aloof and arrogant, with very assertive gestures and a strong sense of authority. But if you were to reverse that, it would give you a quite different balance: perhaps someone who tries to get attention through strong gestures but lacks authority in an aloof sort of way. The important thing with this approach is that although it’s very technical, it should never be merely mechanical. In fact, that is very unlikely to happen because these dynamics instantly change the way you feel and thus stimulate your imagination. ●●

See https://vimeo.com/channels/1486142/376352160

The quality of the centre When you’re in a play with a large cast, for example a Chekhov, all of you can easily pick up each other’s rhythms and end up moving in the same way. A sure way of avoiding that and keeping your physical individuality is to give the centre you’re moving from a distinct quality by altering its dynamic. To explore these qualities, it’s easier if you first locate these through a more obvious centre, such as the chest. Then you can change them around later. I’ll give you some examples that I use.

DANGER

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

91

Starting with the chest centre, move around the room giving yourself lots of actions: sitting, standing, reaching, picking up something, putting it down, throwing, waving, greeting someone. Now think of that chest centre as being cold and soggy like a damp sponge. Note how this instantly changes the dynamic. The movements tend to become heavier, slower and more fluid. Your face adopts a more negative expression. Add some text as you encounter other characters and note how the dynamic changes the way the words come out. Now change the dynamic to fluffy and wispy, like a cloud: the movements and the voice become more airy. Then change to other qualities: molten lava churning and flowing; coiled springs being suddenly released; sharp, hard, shiny steel; boiling, bubbling water; dry, brittle driftwood, bendy rubber, heavy machine oil. Each of these will produce a strikingly different dynamic. See https://vimeo.com/channels/1486142/376361431

Putting centres and qualities together ●●

●● ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

Choose one of these qualities you liked and adopt that. Then take it into a different centre: you may be moving from the forehead as red hot lava. Or you may move from the hips as coiled springs going off. In a group, when you are each adopting different centres and qualities, the characters start to become more sharply defined. Now add language, first in gibberish so you get the feel of the energy and cadence of the language these dynamics produce. Then, if you are rehearsing a particular play, you can start to add fragments of the text, all the while trying out different actions. If you apply this quality to both primary and secondary centres, it will give you an even greater level of detail. See https://vimeo.com/channels/1486142/376360924

Also, the quality of the centre can change when the character reaches a crisis in the arc of their development. For example, someone whose default is steely could suddenly become cloud-like when falling in love. Or an energetic and optimistic character, who is like springs going off, might become soggy in the face of bad news. The audience picks up a major change in the character’s emotional state. And again, you can internalize the centre by using the scale of 1 to 10 according to the genre of the play. Remember though that these are essentially rehearsal tools for you to explore different physical possibilities for the

92

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

character you’re playing. You wouldn’t consciously be thinking of all these levels in an actual performance, but they will have stretched your imagination and opened up bolder choices than you might otherwise have found, again helping you find more potential for danger by being unpredictable.

Impetus Have you ever noticed that some people seem to glide along when they walk, while others make heavy work of it? Examining the impetus of the walk – the force that sets you in motion – can give you yet another frame for developing your character. In this approach, which I have adapted from a Jacques Lecoq exercise, there are four directions.

Pulled forward from in front ●●

●●

●●

●●

First, imagine there is a string attached to the sternum (the breast bone) pulling you along. When you walk, you are giving in to this force; when you stop, you are resisting it. Feel the difference of those energies: the freedom of almost floating along when giving in and the slight effort when resisting. That resistance, however slight, also heightens your presence in the space. This impetus is most noticeable in the way you start to walk from stillness.

Pulled back from behind ●● ●●

●●

Now imagine a string attached to the middle of your back. When you move forward, you are resisting this force, which wants to pull you back; when you stop, you are giving in to it. This gives quite a different impetus to the way you walk: for one thing there is more effort, especially when you start walking from stillness.

Pushed forward from behind ●●

●●

●●

Imagine now that someone has their hand on your back and is pushing you forward. When you walk, you give in to this force, almost as if you are being blown along by the wind. When you stop, you are resisting it.

DANGER

●●

93

This walk varies subtly from the ‘pulled forward’ impetus in that because you are being pushed, you seem to be less in control of why you are walking along.

Pushed back from in front ●●

●● ●● ●●

●●

Finally, imagine that someone has their hand on your chest and is pushing you back. As you walk, you have to resist this quite strong force. Once you stop, you have given in to it. This walk is slower, often suggesting the gravitas of someone who is pushing the world in front of them with effort. So the decision to start walking from stillness takes on more significance.

Once you’ve got physical accuracy in working on these efforts, you can add language. Do it first as gibberish, to explore the flavour and cadence of the language such a person would use. Then take it into a text you’re working on to explore how it changes the way the words come out. In a group you can each choose one you like and explore how each person’s different impetus produces an authentic individuality. Again, if you feel this produces too much exaggeration, you can internalize the physicality by using the scale of 1 to 10. It may all sound technical, but most people really do appear to move with these energies. You can test it for yourself by observing people moving through a crowded place, such as a railway station.

Sectors of gesture Have you ever thought about the sectors of the body at which our gestures occur and how these affect the thought, the words and the sound we make?

Hips ●●

●● ●●

When you’re not particularly passionate about what you’re saying, the arms hang down and the gestures tend to happen at the level of the hips and thighs. This also pulls the voice down. The vocal range narrows and the voice becomes monotonous. Everything is very ‘cool’.

94

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

Gut ●●

●●

When we’re more strongly committed, the gestures unconsciously happen a little higher, at the level of the gut. Because this is close to the solar plexus (around the stomach), there is a more emotional connection and the voice immediately becomes stronger and more centred.

Heart ●●

●●

When we’re even more passionate, the gestures tend to come from the level of the heart. The voice will be strong and more emotionally connected.

Head ●●

●●

But when we get stressed, the centre rises and the gestures tend to happen around the level of the head. At this sector, the voice is shrill and tense.

That’s the way people are and you can observe these sectors in action for yourself. Just watch anyone in hysterics, or speaking warmly about someone they love. The relevance for you as an actor is that you need to understand and articulate this. By consciously placing gestures at these sectors, you can show the state of mind of the character at any given moment. A character may also have a default sector: if they’re generally lethargic for instance, their gestures will usually happen down around the hips. But the action of the play may provoke them to a more passionate state and at a certain point the gestures may rise to the heart sector. The audience won’t be sitting there thinking: ‘Ah, he’s moved from the hips to the heart sector.’ But they will unconsciously sense that a change has taken place in the character and they will empathize.

The gods ●●

●● ●●

There is a fifth sector, which I call the gods. Only actors, jubilant football fans and people in extreme states of grief or joy tend to use this. It’s when you raise your hands to the skies, as if imploring the gods. As this is more cosmic than the rest, you obviously need to be very centred to bring it off. If it’s not filled out, you’ll look as empty as a coat hanger and you’ll probably hurt your voice.

DANGER

95

To put all this into practice, you can try it with a scene partner. Discuss something you feel strongly about – say your favourite food dishes – while consciously placing your gestures at these different sectors, starting from the hips and ending with the gods, then coming back down again to the hips. It’s fascinating that these sectors change not just your voice, but your thoughts as well. You think and speak more passionately at the heart sector. Your language is more laconic in the hips sector. Working with text you can use sectors of gesture to show the degree of empathy (two people both make gestures from the same sector) or discord (they gesture from different sectors). Say each character has a dominant sector: one character’s gestures are mainly around the hips, while the other’s are at the heart. It’s clear they don’t really understand each other. Chekhov is excellent for exploring all these subtleties. And this work is tremendously freeing for the actor. It can help you to find more unpredictability and therefore more sense of danger.

Characters from colours You may be in a play that demands a strong, flamboyant physicality and your director may be trying to push you to a point where you think, if you go any further, you’ll just about lose the truth of it altogether. One way to create a strikingly individual physicality is to start on an abstract level: for example, colours. This approach can release even the most stuck imagination. You can work on colours individually, as part of your pre-rehearsal work, or you can do it in a group. ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

Choose a colour, say bright yellow and move around the space using sound and movement to find its essence. It’s not psychological though: this is not a person feeling yellow. It’s your subjective interpretation of the very energy of the colour itself. Using all of the body, with full, free extensions of the limbs, radiate the energy of bright yellow so that it fills the whole space around you. Now find the sound of yellow, making sure it’s free and open, and let that come out of this physicality. The exercise is aimed to short-circuit your intellect so that your creative imagination can take over. Now work on a few contrasting colours: pale pink, dark blue, grass green, orange, purple, bright red. The main thing here is not to let the intellect get in the way. Just respond to what you feel is the energy of the colour and play with that, as if the body were an abstract instrument.

96

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

●●

If you’re in a group, each choose a colour you like and play the dynamic of that so you get the contrasting energies in the room.

Colours to humans ●●

●●

●●

●●

Now apply the scale of 1 to 10 to explore the psychology of the colour: 10 is pure abstract colour and 1 is neutral human. Take it down to 8, then to 7 and start to turn the sounds into gibberish as you communicate with each other. What you’re exploring now is how that colour informs character. Does bright red make you impulsive and explosive, or more negative than positive? Does bright green might make you radiant, energetic and cheerful? Working in gibberish delays the moment when the intellect comes into it and helps keep your choices very bold.

Colours with text ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

If you’re using this for a particular play, you can start to bring the text in at around level 5, then gradually internalize it to about level 2. If you find that you’re losing the boldness, then simply take it higher up the scale to the more abstract levels and bring it down again. This is not acting by numbers: it’s giving you ways of gauging the exact level of physical imagination that’s right for the type of play you’re working on. To get the best value out of the technique in rehearsal, just go with the impulse and see where it takes you. It’s informing your instinct, stretching your imagination and allowing you to be comfortable with risk. Later you can use more analytical thinking to decide which discoveries work best for the character and the play. See https://vimeo.com/channels/1486142/376353956

This is taking your mind off ‘getting it right’ to focus on an entirely different task. In doing so, it pushes you in directions you might not have thought of. And when you bring in the text, it’s with a freedom you might not otherwise have found.

DANGER

97

Characters from materials While you’re exploring colours as an approach to character, you can also mine the riches to be found in materials. This involves working in exactly the same way. ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

Start by taking a material – silk, for example – and explore the dynamic of its texture in sound and movement. Keep it abstract rather than psychological and use the body in the boldest, most extended way, provided it’s released and free. On the abstract level, choose a variety of materials to find something that might chime in with your character: thick leather; velvet; nylon; coarse wool; chiffon; cashmere. Keep on your feet in this exercise, rather than rolling around on the floor. That way, when you gradually take it down the scale to become more psychological, you’ll more easily find everyday actions and gestures. As in the work on colours, you can start to add a made-up language at about level 7 and take it into the text at around level 5. If you find yourself getting stuck, just go back, higher up the scale towards the abstract, then gradually bring it down again. Explore how you stop, or start, or stand. And what is the quality of the stillness?

When you have a number of people, each doing a different material, you’ll be amazed at the detailed individuality this produces in the room.

Animals Animals are a widely used approach to the physicality of character. Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire reputedly based his Stanley Kowalski on a gorilla; Robert DeNiro studied a crab for his role in Taxi Driver, then a snake in Cape Fear; Lee J. Cobb in Death of a Salesman based Willy Loman on an elephant. The value of animal studies is that they give you a specific image to work on. They stop you working from reason alone and make you start working instinctively, and you find a breathing rhythm that’s different from yours. If you can do some direct research, say in a zoo, then that will help give you more accuracy. Otherwise, nature videos can be helpful. Try to get a feeling for where the animal’s centre is, the rhythm with which it moves, how it carries its weight, its dynamic and impetus, and above all, the energy in its eyes. How do you know which animal is right for your character? Ask yourself whether the character tends to be the predator or the prey. Is it a loner or does it tend to go in groups? Is it strong or vulnerable? Also, is the character sensuous

98

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

or not? This might lead you to consider the spine. For example, cats, both wild and domestic, seem to be sensuous because their spine almost undulates when they walk or run. Dogs on the other hand have a more rigid spine and rarely appear very sensuous. As a result, actors often choose wild cats for seductive characters and dogs for comedy characters. Some animals, such as wild cats, snakes and birds of prey, also have an inherent sense of danger about them.

Animal to human Once you’ve made a detailed study of your animal, you can start to make the bridge towards human, and gradually transform the animal sounds through gibberish to text. Again, you can use the scale of 1 to 10 to experiment with the right level of animal quality in your character according to the genre and size of the stage.

Other physical approaches to character There are, of course, many other physical ways you can approach character. I’ve even used trees, with surprisingly good results: imagine an oak and a weeping willow encountering each other, somewhere on the scale of 1 to 10. The elements – air, fire, earth and water – are yet another approach. Rudolf Laban’s system of human efforts provides a whole language of movement that opens up more ways of looking at the dynamics of characters. It needs detailed study, and there are numerous courses and books available,9 but among other things he identified eight basic efforts, which we use in moving: pressing, flicking, wringing, dabbing, slashing, gliding, thrusting and floating. These in turn can be analysed in terms of space, time, weight and flow. A ‘pressing’ person, for example, would be direct, sustained and strong. Whereas a ‘dabbing’ person would be direct, sudden and light.

WORKING TOGETHER Making physical contact Direct contact There’s an enormous range of possibilities in the way you make contact with someone. Does your character touch other people and if so, how? While danger

DANGER

99

is often shown through physical violence, more often it can be about the threat of violence – what you don’t do. ●●

●●

●●

●●

First, consider how much of your arm you make contact with: the whole arm, the forearm, the hand, the fingers or just the fingertips. Then explore the different kinds of contact you can make: poke, stab, stroke, caress, press, punch, pinch, squeeze, push, grab, rub, hug. As part of your rehearsal work, or your preparation outside rehearsals, you can work in pairs applying different kinds of contact as you speak. And again your character may have a default way of making contact with most people, which you can break out of in a moment of crisis.

Self-contact There is also self-contact, where the characters often appear to betray themselves by allowing the audience to glimpse behind the mask. ●●

●● ●●

Do you caress yourself, as if you desperately long to be loved but are unable to touch anyone? Or do you play with your hair? Or do you unconsciously punch yourself or scratch, or kick, or dig your fingers into your skin?

No contact ●●

●●

There is also ‘no contact’, where the character’s body language is saying, ‘I don’t want to be touched’ or ‘I don’t want to touch you.’ You can create a powerful tension between two characters when you play with the extremes of a ‘no contact’ person dealing with a highly tactile person.

Taboos and touch Then there are the physical taboos. Given the world of the play, where must you not touch someone? This can be quite unexpected, especially when it comes to taboos in different cultures. For example, when I first visited Thailand in the 1970s I was told that it was strictly taboo to touch someone’s head because they believed that the soul resided there. In Indonesia, it is considered very rude to have the sole of your foot pointing at someone. And in New Zealand, giving

100

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

a workshop for Maori actors, I once unwittingly caused offence by sitting on the edge of the table we would later be eating from. Great tension can therefore be created in a play when you deliberately break a cultural taboo: for example in Chekhov, when a gauche young man suddenly steals a kiss from a girl. Also, if you’ve previously set up a convention, then breaking the taboo can create a moment of great intensity, which is often heightened by the sense of inevitability. In Three Sisters, Masha and Vershinin are falling hopelessly in love but should not touch each other erotically, yet we the audience want to see them kiss and we are waiting for this to happen.

Exploring contact in a scene By consciously exploring variations of contact in a scene, you can unlock the different layers of meaning and decide which interpretation is best. This works especially well in plays where the subtext is important. Take the scene from Act Two of The Cherry Orchard, where Dunyasha the parlour maid is trying to attract the servant, Yasha by playing up her vulnerability. There should also be a sense of danger in this scene. DUNYASHA: I’ve become sort of anxious, worried about everything. They took me to live with the Master and Mistress when I was still a little girl. So now I’m not used to the simple life, and my hands – look, they’re white. White as a young lady’s. I’ve grown sensitive, so delicate, so gentle, and afraid of everything. So afraid.10 Version one. She leads. The contact is playfully attacking – stab, punch, slap. The meaning: she’ll never get him because she is really so coarse. Version two. She leads. The contact is soft – caress, stroke, brush. The meaning: he’s in her clutches and she’s got him. Version three. He leads. The contact is soft – caress, stroke, brush. The meaning: he’s seducing her and has complete control of the situation. This suggests how much detail and accuracy there can be. You can of course also surprise your acting partner in rehearsal by not telling them what you’re up to, creating a spontaneous emotional reaction.

Using personal space Understanding and playing with someone’s personal space is another way of articulating the tensions between two characters. Research in psychology

DANGER

101

shows that there is a distance where we are comfortable: for northern European and white North American people, it’s a little over a metre. For Mediterranean cultures, it’s closer. Invade that space and you’ll make the other person uncomfortable, which will usually mean that they’ll back away. You take another step forward and they take yet another step back. How often do you see this bizarre dance around the room at a reception where one person wants to be closer and the other wants to be further away? These patterns are important for you to be aware of as an actor. There is also the discovery, made in psychology, that in non-intimate relationships males find a front-on encounter slightly confrontational, but an oblique or side-on encounter more relaxing. For females it is the reverse: they are happy with the front-on encounter (whether speaking to a man or another woman) but feel exposed by the oblique and side-on encounter, especially if it’s with a male. So all sorts of misunderstandings occur in real life, and on stage you can use these patterns to give authentic detail to the relationship between two characters. The audience is unlikely to know about this personal space stuff, but they will pick up an innate sense of the tension that might exist between the characters when personal space is invaded, yet another way of projecting danger. Within that, you often have to distort your personal space according to the acting space you are working in. On very large stages, such as the National Theatre’s Olivier stage, it has long been a problem for two actors to look natural while having a conversation, because they have to stretch the space between them, even in an intimate scene. On the other hand, for TV or cinema, especially in a close-up, you may have to come absurdly close together for what will look like a normal social space on the screen.

Attack/yield You can also explore the pattern of attack and yield, when A comes into B’s space. You can do this exercise either with text or in gibberish. ●●

●●

●●

●●

The obvious pattern is: A comes into B’s space. B yields. However, if A walks straight up to B, it’s too easy. But if A does it by degrees, while speaking, this increases the tension between them. At the same time, if B doesn’t yield, then A may have to bounce back, which can be as subtle as a shift of weight onto the back foot, or even a turn of the head to break eye contact. So you become aware of the mini-dance going on between the two of you.

102

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

You can also apply this to a fragment of dialogue by choosing from three objectives while stepping inside someone’s personal space: ●● ●● ●●

Threaten – aggressive, confrontational Help – caring, compassionate Seduce – sensual, erotic.

Using dynamics in rehearsal This work may seem very technical, but technique is at the heart of your craft as an actor. Edmund Kean, famed for his danger, would actually count out the number of steps he was going to use to get to a certain point on the stage. The aim is not to make your acting mechanical and cerebral, but to fire your imagination. These tools can help you when you’re stuck, or they can give you a simple checklist to use as part of your process. Furthermore, because the physical form affects the way you feel, the dynamics awaken the emotions. This approach also gives you flexibility. If your director tells you that you’re being too externalized or over-the-top, you can deliberately internalize it (without losing energy) by thinking, ‘Okay, I was on level eight, so I can take it down to four.’ Recently an actor came to me between rehearsals, saying, ‘I’m just feeling like my performance is below par and I’m not getting much help from the director, and it’s hard as there isn’t the time to go and do work on my own.’ I reminded him of the dynamics work I had done with him and he was able to apply these techniques and move forward. That’s an important point because this is your personal work that you bring to the rehearsal. The director doesn’t need to know that you’re decelerating in purple as a vulture. The director’s job is to help you shape what you’ve brought. What holds many actors back is that they have a fear of doing anything too far out of the ordinary because it might displease the director. On the contrary, directors usually want you to be bold and creative because it saves them doing all the inventing for you. The late Terry Hands, when co-artistic director of the RSC, told me, ‘Today you tend to get actors who stand there and say “Paint on me.” You get Ophelias who turn up saying, “Okay, you tell me why she goes mad.” Whereas they should turn up with 15 reasons why they think she goes mad and only accept a 16th if one of their 15 isn’t as good.’11 One of the best ways of putting this approach into practice is to work on the techniques with your scene partner outside the rehearsal, assuming of course your director is happy for you to do some exploration on your own. Here’s how you can do it.

DANGER

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

103

Run through a fragment of the scene, say about two minutes. You will need to know the text by heart. Check your objectives. Have you found the strongest possible verb? Play the scene again concentrating on the objectives. Have you used a clear POC (point of concentration – usually an event outside the scene, in the past or the future, unique to each of you, or common to both)? Play the scene with objectives, but with most of the focus on the POC. By now you may be losing the element of play, so you need to remind yourself of the game of it. Play the scene again this time using the game of the chorus on the disc (see pages 39–42). You keep the disc balanced and the one with the lines is the leader. Because you are now concentrating on the game, it frees up the text and you start to have more personality. Repeat the scene as animals. Make sure you have contrasting animals. It’s good to start on all fours, making the sounds of the animals and playing the broad objective of the scene to each other, as animal. Once that’s working, you can bring in the text and become more human. To free up the imagination further, you can do the same scene as colours or materials. Start on the abstract level, as sound and movement, then bring in the text at a fairly heightened level. To give more detail to the character, you can now choose a centre and quality of centre. And then play the text with that. According to the character and the play, it may be fruitful to try dynamics such as accelerating or decelerating, or fluid or angular. You can also run the scene choosing different modes of touch, or different sectors of gesture.

Each of these will help you make new, bold discoveries and it’s exciting to see how you find different meanings or nuances in the scene, and how the lines come out differently. If I’m taking actors through this, I’ll make sure they work very fast, so there’s no time for the intellect to process everything. You’re constantly firing things at your imagination. After you’ve used five or six of these ideas, you immediately run the scene putting everything together. You can’t of course consciously apply every single idea you’ve worked on, but the sum total of it will have sunk into your instinct and you’ll now find that you inhabit the character more vividly and fully. Because you’ve done all that physical work, your body is totally alive and present. Because your imagination has been working on so many levels, you are able to find an effortless spontaneity and agility. The result will be that you have much more ownership of the text.

104

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

Obviously you can’t go through the entire play like this, but once you’ve worked intensely on one scene, you can consciously take some of the ideas forward into the rest of your performance. The beauty of this approach is that you will most probably have arrived at choices that are bolder and more imaginative than anything you might have found solely through intellectual analysis. You still need the intellectual analysis of course, otherwise your interpretation could be shot down, but the dynamics approach gives you an additional imaginative dimension. And the bolder choices allow you to project a strong sense of danger when you need it.

Dynamics and performance Remember though that these are essentially rehearsal tools for you to explore different physical possibilities for the character you’re playing. You wouldn’t consciously be thinking of all these levels in a performance, but they will have stretched your imagination to find fresh solutions each night. As in the funnel model, your process is to start with lots of ideas and see what you can let go. It’s like a Japanese Zen garden – there may be only a few rocks in the midst of a sea of sand, but what is left has been pared down to the essence. It’s not cluttered with masses of flowers and shrubs and fruit trees. In that simplicity is a power that moves us. Einstein said, ‘Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.’

Spontaneity in performance Actors often ask me about the relation between their conscious choices made in rehearsal and the eventual performance. ‘I’ve done the work,’ they’ll say. ‘I’ve sorted out my given circumstances, my animal, my elements, my objectives. But how do I keep all that going in the performance?’ Their worry is that they’ll lose freshness and spontaneity. Your performance can and should still have spontaneity, but within the discipline of the framework you’ve worked out for yourself. That framework needs to be so ingrained into your muscular memory that you should no longer need to think about it. Then within that, you’re free to improvise. As Ewan McGregor commented: I quite like seeing how differently I can do things, either on stage on a nightly basis, or when I’m working on film. You know, when you’re working on a shot, you do seven or eight takes. I like to challenge myself to try and find variety in that without stepping outside the sense of what you’re doing. But it’s so

DANGER

105

much fun like that. And when you’re just playing it one way over and over it’s not so much fun. The process is like riding a bicycle. When you’re learning, you’re concentrating fully on the technique that will keep the thing upright. It’s hard work because there’s a lot of inefficient, clumsy effort involved and frequent falls, and with that the risk of getting hurt. Later, after months of cycling, you never give a thought to the technique, yet it’s invisibly there. The bicycle stays effortlessly upright and you’re able to concentrate on your destination. Now you’re moving forward more smoothly and efficiently, and you can even afford the spontaneity of improvising a flashy turn, or a slowing down, or speeding up. You can play a little. It’s still relative though, because you’re sometimes pedalling away only to be overtaken by another cyclist, with better technique, gliding effortlessly past you. So, it’s about momentum with economy, which in turn leads to grace. Rehearsals should be clumsy. Performances should be graceful. At the same time, your personal process should be flexible enough for you to be open to what is needed for each project. And here you must use your judgement in order to prioritize. When I asked him how he developed his character of the American detective Jimmy McNulty in the classic TV series The Wire, Dominic West admitted, ‘I’d like to say that I based it on an animal, but I didn’t. There wasn’t an element or a colour. I hate to say it, after all the work we did at Guildhall, but it was purely a question of trying to nail the accent and not look stupid.’

Danger in a nutshell Danger is what makes you unpredictable and audiences like to be surprised. To surprise us, your acting choices must be original, bold and creative, but you can only achieve that by taking risks in rehearsal. That allows you to find spontaneity, which is vital because to have a sense of danger you must be totally present, which brings us to the next quality.

5 PRESENCE It was just after 4 o’clock in the morning and the Kathakali actors had been performing episodes from the Hindu epic The Mahabharata for over six hours. The audience of 500 villagers was sprawled on the ground under the laser-sharp constellations of the Kerala sky. By now, most of the children had dozed off and the older people were following the action with variable concentration. Suddenly, the drums beat faster. Responding to this cue, there was a rustle through the audience as everyone shook themselves into alertness. The climactic scene, where the hero Bhima takes revenge on the demon Dushasana for dishonouring his sister, was beginning. The scene is called Raudra Bhima (Furious Bhima) and it was performed by Gopi, famed throughout India for this role. As the drums rose to a deafening crescendo, Gopi as Bhima fought Dushasana and eventually knocked him to the ground. Gopi’s eyes, which had been stained red, blazed with savage power as if he was possessed by the spirit of a lion. This was the moment the audience had been waiting for all night. Bhima slashed at Dushasana’s chest and ripped open his torso. With shocking swiftness he pulled out the entrails and in a thrilling gesture of triumph, grasped them between his teeth and held them up for the gods to see. Gopi’s presence in this moment was stupendous. He was Raudra Bhima and the audience was at once terrified and excited to have forgotten they were watching a play, transported directly into the midst of the 2,000-year-old story itself. Such was the power and presence of this actor.

What is presence? Presence is perhaps the most tantalizing of all the acting keys to success because it’s hard to quantify. We can get a sense of it, though we may not know why. For example, sitting in a theatre, have you ever noticed that there can be two people on stage and your eyes are inexplicably drawn to one actor, while you hardly notice the other? It’s not that one of them has all the lines, or the light, or is acting the other one off the stage – there’s just something magnetic about this person.

PRESENCE

107

Judi Dench described presence as, ‘Just standing there in that moment, and not being behind it, or in front of it. It’s acting in the moment. It’s that thing of not being able to take your eyes off somebody. I mean, Richard Burton – you used to just absolutely stare at Richard, because he had a presence about him. He walked onto the stage and you were riveted by him, and rarely looked at anyone else.’ Presence operates in two dimensions. It happens in time: Are you totally present now, in this moment as you are reading these words, not dragged back into past memories, or pulled forward into the future? And it happens in space: Are you filling the space you are sitting in, radiating energy throughout the room? On one level these are just tricks of the mind – a slight change of concentration – but without realizing it an audience watching you can often sense the difference.

How do you acquire presence? One of the key issues for an actor is: How can you increase your presence on stage? It is key because without presence you won’t hold the attention of your audience. And without presence, you’ll never be outstanding. It’s also something that you will find yourself puzzling over throughout your working life. People often ask me: Is presence something you are born with, or can you acquire it? While some people may have an innate presence, I’m convinced that everyone can strengthen their personal presence to some extent through certain exercises and the right mindset, which I’ll explain. First, you need to think of presence as going in two opposite directions simultaneously. It requires you to be receptive – completely open, available and able to listen actively to those around you: inward energy. At the same time, presence is an energy that travels through your body and outwards, connecting with those you are speaking to. In both cases that energy must come from a calm centre, which means eliminating physical tension. Acquiring this two-way energy is a discipline of mind and body but it’s a habit that you can learn to adopt. From my experience of studying actors around the world, I believe the most valuable secrets about presence can be learnt from actors in traditional Asian theatre and towards the end of this chapter I’ll show you two of the most powerful techniques I have ever come across: they are guaranteed to heighten your presence on stage or screen.

What blocks presence? To get a better understanding of how you strengthen your presence, it’s useful to begin by examining the factors that block you having presence.

108

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

Nerves Excessive nervousness, coming from a lack of confidence, blocks your presence because it stops you projecting your energy outwards. And in a state of nerves it’s also very hard to listen properly. There’s nothing wrong with nerves: the key thing is to be able to channel your nerves, or as they say in the business world, to get those butterflies flying in formation. To project confidence, not only do you need to be well prepared but you also need a positive attitude towards your audience and the work you’ve done. That’s a habit you can choose to adopt. If your usual habit is to see your audience as a block of people sitting in judgement, waiting for you to fall flat on your face, then you’re more likely to project your anxiety. I was once giving a drama workshop in a school in the East End of London and the pupils were excitedly telling me about a show they had just done. ‘Did you feel nervous?’ I asked them. One of the girls grinned: ‘We don’t get nervous, sir. We always go on proud.’ To be proud of your work is a great way to conquer your fear, and send your energy out to the other actors and the audience. In doing so, you become more present.

Tension Physical tension blocks your presence because it stops your energy radiating into the space, and this is often a direct result of nervousness. For your energy to project beyond your body, you need to be relaxed. Test this by tensing your hands as hard as you can, and then ask yourself how much presence is radiating outwards. Very little, because the tension makes the energy feel as if it’s actually turning inwards.

Clutter A third block to your presence is clutter – too much movement, too much effort – which is usually the result of physical tension. If you are twitching and using low-status – with tiny movements of say, the neck, the hands and the feet – this will immediately sap your presence. Similarly, if your mind is darting all over the place, your presence will be hugely weakened. Robert Stephens believed that you have to contain power. ‘If there’s this great barrage of words coming at the audience, you’re boring them to death,’ he told me. ‘If I’m shouting and bawling and jumping about and trying to make every comma meaningful, it makes it hard work for them. They stop travelling.’ Therefore you need to find economy in everything – mind and body – by eliminating the clutter, which leads to a natural grace. Your heart may be racing, with adrenaline causing havoc, but outwardly you must look at ease.

PRESENCE

109

Think of the graceful swan gliding across a lake: what we don’t see is all the paddling of the feet. This means using a minimum number of movements to perform any action. Remember, theatre is not the same as everyday life. It is life edited for artistic effect and therefore it’s based on the selection of detail. As Judi Dench put it: It’s that thing of ‘less is more’. When you’re a young actor, you don’t quite believe that. I tried every way to convey Ophelia’s madness. And I know now, I could have suggested it with just one gesture or on the turn of a line. That would have conveyed as much as I needed, but you don’t trust yourself.

WORKING BY YOURSELF Presence in time To demystify the question of presence, I’m going to focus on practical solutions. The exercises that follow will help put you in the right state of mind to turn on your presence – onstage or in everyday life – whenever you need it. To make them more effective, try to bring them into your everyday life, in little ways when there is no pressure. Put these exercises into practice and they will change your life, but remember: you are the one who does the changing. First I’ll deal with being present in time, then presence in space.

Observing the mind Just sit still, without talking to anyone for sixty seconds. Put this book down and try it now.

The voice in your head Now think back on that sixty seconds. What was going in your head? Where were you? When were you? If you are like most people there would have been a voice in your head: either it was talking to you or it was talking to someone else. Here’s an internal monologue that has just happened once I stopped writing for a minute: There’s music in the next room. Mozart. Which piece? A concerto. Oboe. Mozart oboe concerto. Katie … no, she played the clarinet. No, it was the flute. Is it distracting me? No, probably not. Haven’t been to a concert for

110

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

ages. I once took my mother to a concert at the Barbican. There was a Mozart concerto. Piano. She loved it. Is this minute up yet? Must go again some time. What am I doing next week back in London? No, I’d be too busy then. I’ve got … Before you know it, you’re not in the present moment; you’re dragged back into the past or forward into the future. And you’re not mentally here, but in some other place. The mind controls you and runs away with you.

Being in the now The aim then – and this is also a long-term solution to conquering stress – is simply to fulfil the task of being focused in the present moment. Or as the author Eckhart Tolle puts it, being in the ‘now’.1 Moment by moment, our senses are blasted by everything around us and it can be overwhelming. So what do we do? Often we block most of it out by retreating into our mind. Just watch anyone walking home from work: they’re usually unaware of their surroundings and you can tell by their eyes and the way they are looking at the ground that the little voice in their head is working overtime. Being fully aware is also the basis of the Buddhist-influenced practice of mindfulness, which helps you recognize your emotions, thoughts and sensations as they occur.2 The relevance to presence is that by being aware of your thoughts you have control of them. It’s a bit like that moment when you’re suddenly aware that you’re experiencing an emotion and your very awareness of it means that the emotion often disappears. Similarly, the moment you realize you are not present, you are present. I’m not saying that you should go around all the time like a monk in a state of enlightenment, but the more frequently you can have even brief moments of awareness throughout the day, the easier it will be to switch on your presence when you need it on stage.

Dealing with the voice in your head Sometimes the voice in your head can be positive and productive, for example when you use it to find solutions and solve problems. That’s conscious thinking as opposed to formless chatter. Once you identify that voice, simply ask yourself: What is this voice saying? Is it useful to me? For much of the time, it’s not: it can be running you down and undermining your confidence. That’s why it’s a habit you need to change. You don’t necessarily need to block it out, but you can disarm it just by being aware of it, as in: ‘There’s a voice in my head and it’s running me down.’ Being aware, you can choose your

PRESENCE

111

reaction. For example, you can have a command to stop it, such as: ‘Stop!’ ‘Change that programme!’ ‘Delete that!’

Silencing the voice Here’s an ingenious way to stop the voice in your head, instantly. ●●

●● ●●

●●

First of all, get the voice cranked up. Get it talking to you. Make the thoughts loud in your head. Give yourself thirty seconds to do that right now – a stream of thoughts. Now just let your tongue lie relaxed on the floor of your mouth and concentrate on that for a moment. Have you done that? What’s happened to the voice?

Yes, the voice has stopped. Discoveries in neuroscience have revealed that when we are thinking, the tongue makes the micro-movements of speech, known as subvocalizing.3 This is understandable because when we’re alone, we often experience a moment of transition from thinking silently to thinking out loud when we actually talk to ourselves. By relaxing the tongue, you have literally stopped it from talking. An alternative technique, practised in some Eastern meditations, is to place the tip of the tongue on the roof of the mouth. It has the same effect.

Focusing on an object Here’s a simple but effective way of being present by focusing visually. ●● ●●

●●

●● ●●

Sit comfortably and breathe deeply a few times, using your diaphragm. Relax your eyes and let them roam over objects until something grabs your attention. It might be a detail that’s part of a larger object. Zoom in on it, as if increasing the magnification. Don’t stare at it but let your gaze soften into that object. Notice its colour, its shape and its texture. Keep the eyes and your breathing soft. Be aware of your body. If you get distracted, just gently bring yourself back to the object.

Sensory walk You can put all of these exercises together with the ‘sensory walk’. ●●

First, sit comfortably and let your mind quieten, using ‘Focusing on the object’.

112

●●

●● ●●

●●

●●

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

Once you feel you are totally present, stand up and allow yourself fifteen minutes to go for a short walk without planning where you are going. Just be guided by your instinct: Do you turn this way or that way? For that fifteen minutes, try to be in the ‘now’, being fully aware of everything around you through the five senses: sight, sound, smell, touch, taste. Be receptive: think of receiving rather than projecting yourself onto the outside world. Be aware of the stream of your thoughts. You can also do the sensory walk for a longer period: say thirty minutes.

Presence in space Once you can focus your concentration to be in the ‘now’, you can start to develop the other aspect of presence: filling the space you’re in. According to the size of that space, your energy will need to vary. It’s important therefore to avoid going into tension that, as we have seen, will diminish your presence. You are therefore aiming to radiate an energized relaxation. On stage, everything you do, every movement, must have grace. That doesn’t mean stylizing the way you do things, but in moments of greatest presence, the physical form of what you are doing needs to look aesthetically pleasing, not awkward. You do that by ensuring that your body is free of unhelpful tension and the physical actions have clear meaning. This is what I call effective energy.

Active stillness To be fully present on stage, you also need to understand the power of stillness, because it is in stillness that great actors are often at their most compelling. But to radiate such energy, your body needs to be completely free, not stiff. When I once discussed this with Peter Brook, he recalled his experience of directing Seneca’s Oedipus at the National Theatre in 1968. For the first six weeks of rehearsal, he did nothing but physical exercises with his chorus, only to have them end up in the performance absolutely static, in fact chained to the theatre architecture. The reason he told the actors, when quelling their protests, was that: To be able to stand still in a totally committed way, and to speak in a way that is not the sort of declamation we want to get away from – this can only start from a body that is perfectly capable of doing every sort of movement, and we’re now doing the most difficult movement of all, which is standing still. But

PRESENCE

113

standing still has to be the ultimate achievement of a body that can move, not the limitation of a body that can’t do any better.4 What Brook was aiming for, and always achieved so well with his actors, was an active stillness, full of dynamic energy that would draw the audience in and make them concentrate fully on what the actors were saying.

Finding the form Finding the physical form is a key concept here. It’s at the heart of the work of the great Russian teachers Stanislavki and Meyerhold, the French mime teachers Decroux and Lecoq, as well as the traditional Japanese actors from Kabuki and Noh. As Yoshi Oida, who worked for many years with Peter Brook, explained to me, you’ve got to let the audience in to do some of the work for you. ‘It’s like a house,’ he said. ‘If the rooms are too cluttered, people can’t move around. You have to give them space to move.’ This means that if you’re over-emoting – doing the audience’s work for them – it has the effect of pushing the audience away. The great French actor Jean-Louis Barrault put it this way: ‘It doesn’t matter whether you cry on stage. What is important is that the audience cries.’ And you do that by finding the physical action that will have the maximum emotional impact on the audience. Once you’ve created that, your task is then to fill out the action with the appropriate concentration so that the audience reads it correctly. Great actors do this brilliantly. It often comes as a revelation to young actors to discover how little they have to do to have the most powerful effect on an audience. This is very much the process of every traditional Asian actor – in Kabuki, Noh, Kathakali, Beijing Opera and Balinese dance. However, in their case, they don’t have to create the form. They are taught the codified physical form, which has usually been passed down for centuries, and they must reproduce that exactly. Their task is then to make it their own without changing it, which is not easy. This is why, for instance, an average Kabuki actor can appear mechanical, while a great Kabuki star makes everything look fresh and natural through an intense presence that transcends all cultural barriers. How do they get there? Staying with Japan for a moment, the traditional training of the Noh actor (and this is the world’s oldest continuous acting tradition, going back to the end of the fourteenth century) comprises three elements: body, mind and spirit. The Noh actor achieves his skills through exercise, study and meditation. That kind of holistic approach seldom happens in the training of the Western actor. We usually settle for body and mind. But

114

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

it’s the combination of all three levels that gives Noh actors their extraordinary power and presence. Those three levels of the Noh actor stem from the philosophy of Zen and as part of his training the actor must learn deep humility. In his secret actor’s manual Kadensho,5 written in 1400, the great Noh actor and playwright Zeami talks about the stages of an actor’s career. Here is his advice to actors in their early twenties and it’s particularly relevant today, when celebrity and fame may hit an actor suddenly. The term hana (literally, ‘flower’) refers to the mystic suspension that is achieved on rare occasions between the actor and the audience. This is the period when the actor can achieve excellence in his art, expressive of his youth. Sometimes he may even win when competing with an established master, because of his hana – the flower of his youth. Then the audience will admire and applaud him, and he will fancy himself a genius. This is a very dangerous moment for him. This mistaking of the ephemeral flower, the charm of his youth, for the true one can lead him far astray from the real flower. Due to his inexperience, he does not realise that this premature flower will soon fade. He must ponder this fact over and over again. If he really understands his degree of development, this flower will never fail him to the end of his life, but if he thinks himself more advanced than he is, he will lose even what he has already achieved. This must be deeply pondered.

Concentration Here’s a series of exercises I’ve developed over the years to address those three levels and help give you a very strong presence in the space. For the moment, I want you to think of yourself, not as an actor but a martial artist. The analogy is useful, because around the world the various systems of martial arts have developed concentration to a superhuman level and top martial artists have an amazing presence. Just watch a Shaolin kung fu monk from China smash an iron bar over his head, or balance on a steel spike pressing against his abdomen. Furthermore, in all the Asian traditional theatre forms, the physical training of the actor has been directly linked to local martial arts forms.6 Therefore, the training of the martial artist has developed many powerful exercises, techniques and ideas that can be usefully borrowed by the actor to enhance presence. For example, in kalarippayuattu, the fighting art of Kerala in South India (which is closely connected to Kathakali), they have a saying: ‘The body is all eyes.’ Ideally,

PRESENCE

115

you should be that aware on stage, and you can practise that by sharpening your reflexes through the following exercise, which I learnt from Yoshi Oida.

Blocking the unseen attackers For this, you need to work with two partners. ●● ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

Stand, with your first partner at your side. Using a chopping motion of the hand, your partner aims a series of fast body blows close to you, withdrawing their hand immediately. You must try to block these with your arm or leg as the blows happen. Ideally there should be no physical contact because your partner withdraws their hand as soon as they have attacked. Your partner should vary the rhythm of attack to avoid becoming predictable. Now a second partner joins you on the other side. You should all be standing in a straight line. You now have two partners attacking you simultaneously, which means you must look ahead and rely on your peripheral vision to block the blows. Your partners can of course look at you. You can use both arms and both legs, but ideally none of the blows should connect because your partners should have withdrawn their hands before you can block. The calmer your concentration is, the more effectively you can perform this exercise. After a while, you change around so a different person is in the middle.

The vertical axis This is a powerful way of enhancing your presence on stage when you have one of those larger than life, universal moments in a play. I’ve adapted it from an exercise I learnt from Jacques Lecoq. ●●

●●



Stand in a neutral position, with your knees released, your ankles soft and your arms hanging freely. Remember to breathe. Test this state by speaking a line of text, for example: Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law My services are bound.

116

●●

●●

●●

●● ●●

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

Now imagine there is a string going up from the top of your head, as if you were a marionette. Imagine that this string passes down through your body like an axis, from the top of your head to the point on the ground between your feet. In your mind, extend this axis in both directions: it goes right down through the earth and right up through the sky to the stars. Bisecting this vertical axis is the horizontal face of the earth, on which you are standing. Widen your perspective so you imagine yourself standing on the face of the earth in a particular moment in time, with the vertical axis passing through you. Anything you say in this state will resonate and be heard by God at one end of the axis and the devils at the other. The classical equivalent is that you are aware of the Olympian gods at one end and Hades at the other.7 This moment becomes archetypal and universal. Test it by speaking the line of text again, but this time being aware that you are on that vertical axis.

The power of the vertical axis is that it’s like having an extra gear in a fast car: you display more power. Of course, the audience won’t sit there thinking, ‘Oh look she’s on the vertical axis,’ but they will somehow sense your heightened presence on stage.

PRESENCE

117

The six directions Here’s a similar way you can enhance your presence by radiating your energy in every direction. Stanislavski talked about circles of attention and it’s a useful concept for distinguishing between comparatively inward energy, when the actor is focused on himself or herself, and outward energy that the actor sends to another actor, or to the world beyond that. Examples are Mark Antony addressing the populous with the words: ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen … ’ or King Lear addressing the storm with, ‘Blow, winds and crack your cheeks!’ Here’s how I use it. There are two versions.

Being in the centre of the room This will develop your presence in intimate relationships between characters. ●● ●●

●●

●●

●●

●● ●●

●●

Stand in a released way, with your arms at your sides. Look at the wall in front of you and imagine you’re sending out the space from the centre of your body to that surface. Still focusing on the wall, imagine now that you’re sending the space through your back to touch the opposite wall. Now send the space through your sides to touch opposite walls, while still looking to the front. Then send the space up through the top of your head to touch the ceiling. And then send the space down through your legs and into the floor. You are now radiating space in six directions. You need to keep an energized relaxation so the body doesn’t tense up, but remains free. Still looking to the front, test your presence by speaking some lines of classical text in this state. While you are speaking, remember to keep sending the space out in every direction.

Being at the centre of the universe This will develop your presence on a more universal level. It’s like a threedimensional version of the vertical access. ●● ●●

Stand in a released way, this time with your eyes closed. Imagine you’re sending the space out to the wall in front of you, then to the wall behind you, then to the walls at your sides, then above you to the ceiling and below you through the floor. As in the previous exercise,

118

●●

●●

●●

●●

●● ●●

●●

●●

●●

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

you are radiating space in six directions. Keep an energized relaxation so the body doesn’t tense up, but remains free. Now imagine you are extending those points. Make the space travel through the four walls, up through the ceiling into the rooms or the roof above you, and down through the floor into the other rooms or the earth below you. Extend the space further in every direction so you include the buildings around you. Keep extending it to include the whole neighbourhood. Extend it further still to include the whole town or city you are in and keep extending that space to include the region of your country, with you at the centre of that region. Now go even further outwards to include the whole of your country and further still to include the whole continent and beyond that to the whole hemisphere. Push the space further in every direction to include the whole world. Now push it out further in every direction to include all the planets of the solar system, with you at the centre of that solar system. Keep extending even further to include all the stars of the galaxy, and further still until the space reaches out in every direction to infinity through the entire universe, with yourself, relaxed but energized at the centre of that universe. Once you have a strong sense of being at the centre of the universe, gradually start to pull the space back in, from the universe to the solar system, to the world, to the hemisphere, to the continent, to your country, your region, your city, your part of the city, your neighbourhood, back into the building you’re in until you eventually return to the room. Open your eyes and test your presence by speaking few lines of classical text. Walk around the room speaking the text. You will feel both a calm centre and a powerful presence radiating in every direction.

Incidentally, there is a famous movement in the Kabuki theatre called the roppo – literally the six directions. It’s used when the hero winds up his energy in a huge climactic moment, as for example when he is about to go off into battle. With his outstretched arms waving, he faces each of those six directions as if plugging into the power of the universe, and then makes a thrilling exit.

The still centre of the spinning wheel The Greek philosopher Heraclitus used the image of the still centre of a spinning wheel to talk about the concentration of energy. If you look at a wheel that’s

PRESENCE

119

spinning very fast, you may be able to get a sense of the spokes turning, but the very centre of the hub appears to be still, yet that still centre is full of energy and movement. As Peter Brook observed on page 112, the stillness of the actor needs to be like that – alive and full of vitality. T.S. Eliot used the same image in his poem, Four Quartets: At the still point of the turning world. […] at the still point, there the dance is …8 Here’s an exercise I developed to get a sense of the still centre. You can easily do this by yourself and it takes only a few minutes.

The internalized run ●● ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

Run on the spot. Have a point of focus on the wall opposite you. Run as if you were going to run for half an hour, with a sense of getting somewhere, while letting go any unnecessary tension. After a few minutes, make each step smaller and smaller, while keeping the same level of energy. Soon the running becomes completely internalized and outwardly there is no apparent movement: you appear to be standing still, but inside you are still running. What you end up with is a relaxed but held stillness that is full of concentration and a powerful presence, just like the still centre of the spinning wheel. See https://vimeo.com/channels/1486142/376358327

The concept of centre A question that the ‘still centre’ exercise raises is: Where in your body is that still centre? I’ve described the effect of various centres as an approach towards character (see page 89). But is there a universal, natural centre that we should aim to cultivate all the time, even in everyday life? We often talk about ‘centring’ our energy, which usually refers to breathing from the diaphragm and feeling that our body is grounded. While most actors agree with this, many find it difficult to achieve in practice. That’s where the martial arts are helpful. In almost all martial arts systems, your lower abdomen is regarded as your natural centre of gravity. In Chinese and

120

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

Japanese culture, they’re quite specific about it: two inches (5 cm) below your navel. This becomes an essential point of concentration. It is sometimes called ‘the one point’.

Feeling the centre ●●

●● ●●

●●

Put your thumb on your navel and measure with your middle finger two inches below that. Now put the tip of your finger on that point. Keep the whole area around this relaxed and keep your concentration on that point by thinking of your weight as being centred there. At the same time you need to check that this doesn’t pull your energy down so you end up looking at the floor. You should still stand up straight in a relaxed way and your eyes should be strongly focused outwards so the energy can project in front of you.

Why the centre is important The importance of centring is that when you imagine your weight centred around the lower abdomen, you are in balance. From a martial arts point of view, it would be harder to push you over, should anyone want to. However, when you’re upset, or in a rage, or otherwise blown away by emotion, your centre will naturally rise. That’s a human trait. Just watch two people having an argument: their voices become tight, the veins in their necks stand out and their faces go red because their energy – tense energy – has risen to the head. In this state, you’re seriously off balance. It’s also harder for you to think clearly. And that of course is not a good state for an actor to be in. What the martial artist learns, and what you, the actor can usefully practise, is habitually to concentrate on that low centre in all situations. This is a big shift if all your adult life your centre is rising to your head at the slightest provocation. But with persistence you can make it a new habit. Not only will it give you more relaxation and relieve stress, it will strengthen your presence in the space, whether that’s walking into a room full of people, or making a powerful entrance on stage. It won’t happen overnight though: you need to keep reminding yourself about it in little ways in everyday life, and eventually you’ll be able to use it to survive those big, high-pressure moments. You can do this by practising presence when you’re walking down the street. Make it a habit to look forward and outwards, seeing everything in your peripheral vision. It feels released and powerful. Besides, life’s too short to spend it looking on the ground. You may find a pound or two in lost coins, but that’s hardly a living wage.

PRESENCE

121

WORKING TOGETHER Now I’ll show you two immensely powerful ways that you can centre your energy and strengthen your presence.

Overarm and underarm energy This is a very simple, yet surprisingly effective way of centring your energy, instantly. It derives from ancient Chinese Buddhist practices.

When two people are talking to each other, we usually think of that as a direct, horizontal communication – eye to eye. Alternatively we can think of the communication as a circle of energy that passes between them. If you are the one initiating that conversation, the point is: Which way is the circle going? To use a cricket term, are you using an overarm bowl, or an underarm bowl? And which in this case is the stronger of the two? The answer is simple: if you’re on what I call ‘overarm energy’, your energy comes out through your head and enters the other person at their head. As a result, you’re off centre, which can take you into lots of tension, burn up wasteful energy, hurt your voice and make you look weak. Aggressive people in overarm mode often think they’re being strong and powerful, but this has the opposite effect. It’s a false energy. If on the other hand you’re on ‘underarm energy’, all your energy is coming through your lower abdomen, and it enters the other person there as well. In everyday life, this is a brilliant way of dealing with hostility by calming someone down and not being contaminated by their aggression. It also has a powerful effect on your voice, which becomes relaxed and full, because it’s centred. And of course, because you are more relaxed and centred, it gives you a lot more presence.

122

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

Using overarm and underarm energy Here’s a way you can test the two energies by yourself: ●●

●●

●●

●●

Find a point of focus on the wall and speak to it, in overarm energy. You can make it conversational or use some text you’re working on. Use gestures that reflect the direction of the overarm cricket bowl. For example, people in this mode sometimes use ‘stabbing’ gestures at head level. Notice the effect on the voice and how this direction wastes energy. Now speak in underarm energy, using lower gestures (with the palms facing up) that reflect the direction of the underarm bowl. You will find that the voice immediately sounds more relaxed and grounded. See https://vimeo.com/channels/1486142/376363491

As an alternative, you can do this exercise with a scene partner, either having a conversation or using a duologue. Do it first in overarm, then in underarm. You can also try it sitting down: the same principles apply. ●●

See https://vimeo.com/channels/1486142/376357799

Finally, remember to apply this in everyday situations when someone faces you with overarm energy. Use underarm energy to calm them down. This is not to say you’re being weak and speaking in ‘warm’ hushed tones. That will just sound patronizing. No, it’s about being clear, direct and assertive. You can in fact be as strong as you like, because you’re working from effective energy. The power of this in everyday life is that, not only can you metaphorically disarm someone who is in overarm, because they run out of steam, but you can also draw them unconsciously into an underarm energy, which is a more productive position to have a conversation from, and is more likely to lead to an agreement.

Underarm energy and acting choices Apply underarm energy to your acting choices and it will help you produce a natural high-status demeanour and an effortless impression of power and authority. That’s why business leaders find it so helpful when I’ve taught it to them. There is no situation, either on stage or in everyday life, when overarm energy is useful to you. However, you may have a situation where the character is in overarm energy, as often happens in comedies and farces. Actors must always use effective energy, so in this case you need to play the contradiction by thinking underarm

PRESENCE

123

(as the actor) while simulating overarm (as the character) through high gestures, which in this case are thoroughly controlled.

The power of ki In Japanese and Chinese culture, there is an ancient belief that we have channels of internal energy circulating through our body. When you’re in a state of good health, the energy flows freely; when you’re unwell, there are blockages in the energy. The aim is to keep this energy flowing and strong because it is the source of our vitality. The Japanese call this ki (pronounced kee) – roughly translated as ‘universal energy’ – and it’s the same as the Chinese concept of chi (pronounced chee, sometimes spelt xi). As I first studied this in Japan, I’ll refer to the energy as ki. The power of ki is that it can be channelled and directed. You can draw it in, just as you take in air when you breathe, and you can direct it outwards, for example through your fingers or your lower abdomen. Ki energy is based on relaxation rather than tension and when you use it in a focused way it’s very strong. In fact it can give you greater physical strength than what you can achieve with muscular tension. Ki is the basis of most Japanese systems of martial arts (and in China, chi is also the basis of systems of health and wellbeing, such as tai chi and chi kung). It’s an energy that many classical Japanese actors use on stage and if you have seen a great Kabuki or Noh actor, you will know that they have stupendous presence. I first learnt to use ki in Tokyo from the eminent aikido master Koichi Tohei. He taught a system of powerful exercises to centre your energy and extend ki. I’ve been practising ki for over forty years and I’ve found that it has enormous benefits, such as improving your health and dealing with stress, as well as heightening your presence. I’ve taught it to generations of actors, and years – even decades – later they still come back to me to say how effective they find it in giving them presence on stage or screen. Although this ideally needs to be learnt directly from a teacher, I’ll describe the basis of the system and some of the exercises, which are best done with a partner. Should you want to take it further, you may be able to find an aikido teacher who also follows the Tohei system. These are all mind/body exercises, so you need to develop a strong concentration while performing them. There are four principles:

1. Keep the one point This is the point in the lower abdomen, two inches below your navel and you aim to maintain that as a constant point of concentration. For simplicity we’ll

124

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

refer to it as ‘the one point’. The area around the one point needs to be relaxed because physical tension will block the energy. Think of the lower abdomen as the reservoir for the ki energy, so it’s the centre of your power. Therefore, when you make a gesture, think of that as originating and radiating from the one point. As an actor, this will give your movement a powerful organic quality that involves the whole body. Awareness of this low centre is also very good for getting your breath centred. ●●

●●

●●

●●

To test the one point, first stand in a tense manner so your body is stiff. Your partner pushes you backwards lightly at one of your shoulders. You will immediately lose your balance because the body is rigid and therefore weak. Now let the body be relaxed and shake both your hands vigorously at arm’s length beside your thighs. At the same time, think of shaking the weight down to your one point. Do this for at least thirty seconds. Your partner pushes you again and this time, because the body is supple and the weight is centred, your shoulder will yield and swing back into position, and it will be almost impossible to push you over. An alternative way of shaking the weight down is to cup one hand over the other and shake them vigorously just in front of the one point. My students find this very helpful for centring their energy as part of a warmup before a performance.

2. Relax completely Relaxation in this case means a state of alertness, without unnecessary physical tension. To maintain this state, you need to be aware of when tension arises, then you can consciously eliminate it. If you relax completely, it allows you to centre your weight and keep grounded. ●●

●● ●●

●●

To test this, make your body rigid and have your partner lift you from under the arms. If you are both of equal weight and strength, it should be relatively easy to get you off the ground. If you are heavier, then your partner shouldn’t over strain when trying to lift you. The main point is to feel the difference of weight in both modes. Now shake the weight down, as in the first test. Keep the body relaxed completely and concentrate on the one point. A dead weight feels heavier to lift than a tense weight, but this is something different: a relaxed weight that is centred. Because you choose to remain there, this time your partner will feel the difference and will be unlikely to get you off the ground.

PRESENCE

125

3. Keep the weight on the underside Under pressure, as I’ve described, your centre will rise, which puts you off balance. To remain centred, you need to think of keeping the weight on the underside – downwards. For example, the weight of the torso should go down to the one point; the weight of your arms should be down towards your hands. This doesn’t mean that you feel pulled down. You can still stand up straight, thinking of the axis through your body, but the weight itself is centred low. ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

To test this, hold one arm out horizontally with the palm facing upwards. Your body is relaxed and you’re keeping the one point. In your mind, direct the weight of the arm to the underside. Think of your arm as resting on the air, but you just leave it there with the weight underneath. Now get your partner to place two fingers under your wrist and gently try to lift your arm. As you choose to leave it there, it should be very difficult for your partner to lift your arm. To test this, put your arm out again and this time direct the weight to the upper side of your arm. Your partner applies the same pressure under your wrist and lifts your arm easily.

Your aim here is to remember to keep the weight on the underside at all times, especially when you are put under pressure or overcome by emotion. There’s an apparent contradiction here for actors of course. When you’re playing a character who is indeed blown away by emotion, or whose centre is very high, your technique requires that you, the actor, keep centred, with the weight on the underside, while simulating the high centre of the character. This is similar to the contradiction I described in underarm energy (pages 122–3).

4. Extend ki energy Now we come to the impressive part that tests the power of your ki. Here’s a simple exercise to show how effective ki energy can be. ●● ●●

●●

First, extend your arm and flex it so that it’s rigid. Your partner places one hand under your forearm and the other above your upper arm, and tries to bend your arm. This doesn’t have to be a fight to the death. It’s just to test the strength, so be prepared to give in before you feel any pain. Now put your arm out again, but this time the arm should be relaxed, with the weight on the underside. In your mind, imagine the ki energy flowing up from the one point, through your shoulder and along your

126

●●

●●

●●

●●

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

arm, then flowing out through your relaxed fingers. It continues right through the wall, in fact right through the universe. So we’re talking strong concentration here. The sense of movement is very important: imagine the ki energy flowing, like the water in a fire hose. It travels right out through your fingers, but the whole arm itself remains relaxed. When you have a sense of the ki energy flowing through your arm, get your partner to try the arm-bending test again. Your partner will be able to feel the difference of the energy straight away. It’s a kind of soft firmness. And if your concentration is strong, it will be almost impossible to bend your arm because you choose to leave it where it is, with the energy flowing through it. In this way, ki energy, based on relaxation, can give you more physical strength and power than what you can achieve with muscular tension. But be careful when you’re working on this: your partner should give in at a certain moment because there’s no point in trying to hurt yourselves.

Moving from the one point Putting all that together, this final exercise will show you directly how you can increase your presence, both in everyday life and on stage or screen. When most people are walking down the street or into a room, their mind will often be elsewhere, usually in the past. Just try this. ●● ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

Walk across the room imagining that someone is behind you. Your partner puts out their arm to stop you (across your shoulders). This is most likely to stop you because your energy is not centred. Now shake your weight down (as in ‘Keeping the one point’). Make sure that your body is relaxed and your weight is on the underside. This time before you walk, say to yourself in your mind, ‘I’m going to move forward from the one point.’ Use whatever image helps you, whether it’s a beam of light extending from your one point, or a laser beam. As you start to walk, extend your ki energy from that one point. Focus on the opposite wall you are moving towards and keep going until you get there, while remaining relaxed and centred. Your partner tries to stop you in the same way, but this time you are likely to sail right through. See https://vimeo.com/channels/1486142/376362043

PRESENCE

127

Using ki in everyday life This technique is marvellous in underground stations or wherever there are crowds: people instinctively get out of your way because almost all of them are in a relative dream and when they notice someone with presence coming along, they unconsciously defer. Try it for yourself. It’s not an aggressive energy – that would come from tension. It’s just that you are conveying presence and most other people are not. The crucial thing about using ki energy is that it must be part of your natural habits. So you should practise it in little ways, throughout every day – brushing your teeth, riding a bicycle, driving a car, washing the dishes, walking into the next room. As you start to get it into your everyday habits, it will be easier to use it in those big moments on stage or on a film set. And you won’t have to think about it so much. One of the benefits of using ki energy in everyday life is that, because you’re focusing on physical sensations, it quietens your mindstream – your stream of thoughts. This gives you an inner calm.

Using ki on stage Can you start you see why ki is hugely powerful for actors? Not only do you feel strong and grounded in the space, but all the clutter is naturally pared away. You find an effortless stillness, and a grace in your movement that’s full of energy and presence. Until it becomes habitual, it’s useful to think of consciously extending ki energy most of the time. When you make a gesture, think of extending ki through your relaxed fingers and don’t be afraid to hold the stillness for a second or two. There are scenes in the great classical tragedies when you must achieve a moment of powerful simplicity that is totally filled out so that, connected on the vertical axis, you speak for all of us. It becomes a universal, almost archetypal moment. For example, Lear carrying on the body of Cordelia, Hamlet asking himself, ‘To be or not to be … ’, Macbeth hearing the news of his wife’s death, Chekhov’s three sisters realizing they will never go to Moscow. Ki energy can give you the presence to fill out those moments.

Presence in a nutshell Centring your energy is crucial to unlocking your real power on stage and projecting presence. But that power must be based on an energized relaxation. With the right concentration, such as using ki, you can be totally in the present moment. You can radiate your energy outwards to heighten your presence and create the kind of magnetism that is a vital part of your charisma, which we’ll look at in the final chapter.

128

PART TWO

OUTSTANDING IN YOUR LIFE

130

6 GRIT The medieval building known as the Guildhall, which the drama school is named after, is one of the iconic landmarks of London. In its towering Great Hall, the banners and statues may bear the dust of centuries but it’s an inspiring place for a graduation ceremony. At one of these, a young actress came up to me afterwards and we chatted about ambition and goals. In particular, goals as pictures: if you make a picture of your goal, or can visualize it, this creates an emotional connection that pulls you along and increases your chances of achieving it. ‘That’s so true,’ she said. ‘Do you know, when I first arrived at Guildhall, I looked at the names on the Gold Medal board in the foyer and I said, “I’m going to have my name there.” I was set on that right from the start.’ In her hand was the Gold Medal she had just received from the Lord Mayor. In the following two chapters, I’m going to discuss the traits in your everyday life that can make a huge difference to your work and career as an actor. If you think of the outstanding qualities you’d like to display in performance on stage or screen as the tip of the iceberg, we now need to strengthen the hidden foundation of that iceberg, because this is what can give you the edge over other actors. First, grit.

What is grit? The psychologist Angela Duckworth1 isolated grit as one of the character traits most predictive of success in dealing with life’s toughest challenges. She called it ‘The capacity for sustained effort in the face of setbacks,’ clearly an important quality for actors, who statistically will face many more audition rejections than acceptances. Grit provides the motivation that pulls you along towards your goal. Without grit your ambitions will come to nothing. Without grit there will be no energy. Grit gives you resilience. It’s a special quality because most people lack it. Most people want something but give up before they’ve reached it. The formula is simple: talent + skill + grit = success

132

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

Talent without grit is fruitless: you’ve got to seize opportunities. Skill without grit is wasted. You need all three in order to succeed. Grit needs time and setbacks to reveal itself. The immediate, but not infallible signs of grit are a strong sense of drive and desire, communicated through what you say and do. People with grit want it.

How can you acquire grit? Almost all people who succeed – whether in sports, business, science, education or the arts – have grit. They are driven by desire and they stick at the task when others give up. Like the Olympic ice skater I mentioned on page xix, they’re comfortable with failure and they’ll fail repeatedly, overcoming all setbacks on their way to getting what they want. Grit is a quality you can learn to adopt by getting control of your mind and then prioritizing. To have grit, you first need motivation. To be motivated, you have to passionately want to do something. You need the appetite for it because success as an actor doesn’t just drop into your lap; even the most talented actors have to work at it. As Al Pacino put it, ‘Appetite is a good thing. Sometimes I believe desire and appetite trumps talent. I’ve seen it. Some of the most talented people I’ve ever seen – just too chaotic to focus. Too chaotic to function. So you know, it’s that combination.’ In the annual auditions at Guildhall, I often see this comment on the papers: ‘He’s hungry for it.’ We take that as a sign that this person has a strong enough desire to survive not just the rigours of the training, but the rejections of the profession. All drama schools are looking for actors who will have the necessary grit to keep themselves at peak performance level and simply not give up. All directors are hoping that their cast will have the grit to overcome the setbacks that crop up in almost every production. All agents want client actors with the grit to survive the knocks and build a successful career.

Grit and motivation Research from the business world2 shows that half of our motivation comes from within us (some of us are naturally driven and have been all our lives) and half comes from outside – the immediate world we live in. Therefore, to be outstanding not only do you need to find your personal motivation, you need to be sure that you’re in a motivating environment. This applies to the theatre company you’re aspiring to work for, the TV series you’re dreaming of doing or the drama school you may want to get into. Many students

GRIT

133

at top drama schools have got in on their second, third or even fourth attempt. This means they risked up to four years of their life to get into what they thought was the best and most motivating environment. Daniel Craig, for example, did not get into Guildhall on his first attempt. To keep motivated, you also need to surround yourself with positive, motivated people, choosing your friends wisely. In that environment you’re more likely to feel challenged, stimulated and inspired to achieve your full potential. This can be stressful if you feel you’re not up to it. But the example of others can give you the courage to stretch yourself beyond what you thought you were capable of. When actors start their training one of the most common anxieties I hear from them is: ‘Everyone else is so good. I’m worried I don’t really deserve my place here.’ This is of course rubbish because every drama school will take a lot of trouble over its auditions and if they offer you a place, it means that they believe in your talent and are committed to getting the best out of you. The same goes for a theatre, television or film production: you shouldn’t be overawed by the rest of the cast, because the director has faith that you can do the job. The people in power are on your side. To overcome this anxiety, focus on the positives that will boost your selfconfidence and give you the courage to take the kinds of risks you’ll need to take to be the best that you can be. That’s grit. Grit is one of the most potent qualities leading to success in acting and it is present in every high-flyer. It involves stamina and it embraces failure as a necessary step towards eventual success. Thomas Edison is famous for inventing the light bulb, but do you know how many attempts it took him before the thing worked properly? 50? 100? 500? No. It was over 1,000. In fact estimates vary from 3,000 to 10,000. But the point is: what if he’d given up after 990 attempts? Or 90, or even 9? As he put it, ‘If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.’3 That also sums up the very nature of the rehearsal process: a series of controlled failures that gradually reveal to you the best way of telling the story. But it needs the right attitude. Edison’s resilience was also driven by positive thinking, which we’ll examine in the next chapter.

Grit and proactivity At the heart of grit is the habit of being proactive, rather than reactive. This means engaging with the world to focus on the things we can do something about, rather than being stressed by the areas we cannot influence. It’s about where you put most of your attention. Singlehandedly, you may not be able to solve the problems of the national economy or climate change (unless you devote all your time to it), but when it comes to dealing with personal setbacks, widening

134

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

your circle of friends, or auditioning and getting better roles, your behaviour can influence the outcome. As research shows, almost all successful people, in any field, are proactive in seizing opportunities and making things happen. Take one of my former students, Natasha Gordon. She was approaching forty and frustrated at the prospect of being a perpetual supporting actor. As she explained to me, she had always had a sense of being patient and believing that her time would come: And then you start to look around you as you get older and you go, ‘Hold on a minute, if I don’t grab an opportunity’ … Actually, I’m waiting for somebody else to step in and go, ‘Natasha Gordon, you know what, after nearly twenty years we’ve finally seen what you can do, there you are – Lady Macbeth!’ No, it’s never going to happen. An actress friend of mine brought together a group of us, saying, ‘Are you as sick and as frustrated as I am, and if you are, can we talk about it please because the business can be so isolating and also when you’re a black actor, or an actor of colour the parts are few and far between.’ It felt like our way of subverting what goes on in the industry. So, we would meet every few weeks in the foyer of the Olivier Theatre [at the National] and explore different things. Natasha wanted to develop her writing and when she’d finished a draft of her play, the group read it in the foyer. ‘I’d never heard my words being spoken aloud,’ she told me. ‘And these are the women within the industry I respect the most and their honesty is not brutal but it’s frank. And one of them slammed down the last page and went “Yes! I love that. That has to go on in this building!” So, it’s extraordinary to think that that is exactly what happened. And that came about by this proactive energy, consciously wanting change and shift and not waiting for the opportunity to be handed down and passed to us.’ Natasha’s play Nine Night was performed at the National Theatre, where it won her the Evening Standard’s Most Promising Playwright Award. It later transferred, with Natasha now taking over the main role and being hailed as the first black British woman to have a play staged in the West End.

Grit as devotion For some actors, grit might come from their sense of devotion to the art. Before arriving in Britain, I spent some time in Kerala in the south of India studying the classical dance drama, Kathakali. Our classes began at 4.30 in the morning (considered in Hindu culture the best time for learning) and finished, with breaks,

GRIT

135

at about 6 pm. Because the physical form was codified hundreds of years ago, the learning is passed on through a punishing schedule of repetition. There is no room for improvisation or innovation. And you need grit to survive. For example there is an exercise called the churripu, a sequence of seven movements that involves the whole body making a graceful, circular swoop. Our teacher would say, ‘Do the first churripu’ and then leave us to it while he read the newspaper. We would usually do about 100 repetitions before he would say, ‘Now, the second chirripu.’ And so on. One day I counted these and got up to almost 400. In that time, as you go through the seven chirripus, you are also going through several states of mind. After about fifty repetitions, your mind starts to wander. After 100, boredom sets in. After 150, there is pain – considerable pain. After 200 there is sweat on the ground. But after 300 you become obsessed with the possibility of creating the perfect cosmic circle in the air as your exhausted body becomes a vehicle of devotion to the gods and the universe. That thought will keep you going for at least another 100. As one of my fellow students told me, ‘The teachers at Kalamandalam are the best in Kathakali. They are great teachers, but at the time of teaching they are cruel.’4 It’s the unrelenting repetition that gives Kathakali actors their awesome presence on stage. To portray the gods, they have to become like a god themselves and that means gaining complete mastery over their body, mind and spirit. They can’t get to that level of power with a training that will at best keep them merely interested and amused. Mediocrity is not an option in Kathakali. They have to push through the barriers of boredom and pain to achieve a superhuman level of devotion that is fit for the gods. Nothing less will suffice. To be outstanding, they need a jaw-dropping capacity for grit.

Graft Another quality of outstanding people is that they simply work harder than average people. They put in the graft. I’ve already mentioned the research by Anders Ericsson about the ten-year/10,000 hours principle. Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Outliers, gives further examples. The Beatles made an impact only after surviving the gruelling months in Hamburg, playing five or six hours a night, seven nights a week. And when the young computer whizz kids Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Paul Allen and Steve Ballmer were first given a special opportunity to work on the new university computers, they seized it with awesome hunger, put in their 10,000 hours and shot ahead of all others to found their empires. They put in the graft. As Al Pacino suggested, the effort trumps talent. Even Mozart could be considered an underachiever because he didn’t produce a single masterpiece until well after his 10,000 hours had been clocked up.

136

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

Rufus Norris told me of something he learnt when working with the composer Stephen Sondheim. ‘He basically said “There’s no such thing as writer’s block, there’s just laziness” and I think that applies to everything. If you’re having a struggle with something, then work, work at it, work at it and come in with three or four ideas the next day. I think one of the trickiest things to deal with in your career as an actor is the lack of control you have over the way it goes. But it is within your gift, what you take into the room and there’s no shortcut for hard work in any environment. I don’t think I’m particularly gifted at anything but I work very hard.’

Grit and passion To find the energy to succeed, you need to be totally focused, with a success mindset that will drive you through all obstacles. The casting director Anne McNulty talked about the best actors having a passion to do the work and fight for the part in auditions: ‘There’s an innate sense of hard work and dedication and determination. But the battle to be the best and the battle to achieve the mindset has to be balanced out by sheer hard work. And I think it’s less and less the case that people who don’t work hard can be successful.’ As directors know, actors with passion and the capacity to work hard are valuable because they can make a successful production just that much more attainable.

The 80/20 principle At the same time, the hard work you do has to be effective, otherwise you’re wasting time. To be successful you need some kind of strategy, which brings us to the Pareto Principle, often called the 80/20 Principle. The nineteenth-century economist Vilfredo Pareto estimated that 80 per cent of the property in Italy was owned by 20 per cent of the population. This 80/20 ratio was later found to work on many other levels: get the balance right and you can increase your effectiveness. For example in one business I worked with, 80 per cent of their marketing effort was producing only 20 per cent of their sales. Once they revised their marketing strategy, 20 per cent of their marketing effort produced 80 per cent of their sales and they shot ahead. It’s the same with you as an actor. Yes, there needs to be repetition, but you can spend fruitless hours doing exercises if you’re not clear what you’re trying to achieve. Do you do your personal voice and movement exercises with a full concentration that will produce the most effective development of your instrument? In marketing yourself, which are the networking events that are likely to produce the most fruitful results? In developing your career, which jobs

GRIT

137

are most likely to help raise your profile as an actor? A well-considered career strategy can accelerate your progress. Actors often think if they can get into a film, for instance, even a minor one, they’ll be made. But this is not necessarily a good strategy. As Nicholas Hytner told me: I think the most dangerous advice to listen to, is the advice that encourages you to turn down a potentially interesting job because something else better might be turning up. One good piece of advice is just numbers, and I say this as a theatre director. You can be seen at the Bush Theatre [London fringe] by as many people who will see most British feature films in their opening weekend. Casting directors will come and see a good play at the Bush. Directors will come and see a good play at the Bush. A mediocre film – nobody in the world is going to see. You are better off doing that play if it’s interesting.

Grit and luck You might also ask: Isn’t success all down to good luck? Yes, of course it is. Actors who have become hugely successful all had a lucky break that set them on the road to fame, riches and recognition. That handful of my students I mentioned at the beginning of this book were all lucky. But what were they doing that attracted good luck in the first place? The psychologist Richard Wiseman made a wide-ranging study of people who considered themselves either lucky or unlucky.5 He found that the lucky people followed certain habits and practices. This led him to formulate four principles that can help you to have more good luck. People who are lucky, he found: ●●

●●

●●

●●

Maximize their chance opportunities by building and maintaining a strong network of luck, which means being at ease with meeting new people and keeping in touch with them. They are in touch with their intuition and listen to their lucky hunches, which means they tend to make the right decisions. They are generally optimistic and expect good fortune, especially when meeting new people, so they persevere with trying to achieve their goals, even if the chances of success are slim (another example of grit). They see the positive side of ill fortune, thinking, ‘It could have been worse,’ and are confident that apparent ill fortune will eventually work out for the best, which means they have the grit to keep on keeping on.

138

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

To some extent, as Wiseman discovered, you create your own luck. The golf champion Gary Player famously explained his good fortune by saying, ‘The harder I practise, the luckier I get.’6 Yes, lucky people have the grit to practise, but they also recognize an opportunity as an opportunity and then take appropriate action. Outstanding actors may say, ‘I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time,’ but they were also doing something that helped put them in that right place. Many of us can be luckier than we think: we just don’t always see it that way. I’ll give you two examples of initially unknown actors (both former students of mine) who had a lucky break, but notice what they were doing to influence their luck. While he was still at drama school, Sam Blenkin helped set up a group where, once a week, the actors would meet and read through plays to sharpen their sight-reading skills. One of these was the stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. The actors picked the parts out of a hat and Sam got the role of Scorpius Malfroy. A year later, in a recasting of the West End production, he found himself auditioning for the very same role. Because he knew it well, this gave him an extra insight and, you’ve guessed it, he landed the part, which he played for over a year in the West End before later taking the lead in another play at the National Theatre. How instrumental was that sight-reading experience in him getting the job? ‘It just felt like the most extraordinary preparation for an audition,’ he told me. ‘It meant that I could walk in there with a real confidence in the fact that I almost knew what Scorpius was like and the way he saw the world. In terms of auditions I learnt something that I may not have realised before at drama school – the power of being able to be in that place that is completely relaxed as well as switched on. It’s not overarm energy. It’s underarm and relaxed. By being in that relaxed state I could give myself permission to fail and maybe not get the role, but also be pleased with what I’d offered in the room, and speak to them so they don’t feel like I’m trying to second guess them. That freedom and that openness has been a really winning formula for me.’ ‘Luck plays a huge amount in my career,’ Paapa Essiedu told me. ‘It feels like every job is “right place at the right time”. But I do believe that we have an ability to affect our own luck and that comes from an openness, and that in turn comes from readiness for opportunity.’ His big break came early in his career when he was playing a very minor role in King Lear at the National Theatre. I was cast as the Duke of Burgundy which is essentially a five-line part and all in the first scene. So I’m spending the next three hours like lifting chairs up and being a boisterous knight or whatever, and I remember being in that rehearsal process and being surrounded by the actors that I really admired, and I was frustrated with what I had to do in terms of – obviously there is no such thing as small parts – but there is only so much you can do.

GRIT

139

But I was so excited about being in it, and I said to myself very early in the process, ‘Look, I’m going to use this opportunity to watch and learn and to observe’. So I would always come in on other people’s rehearsals to the point where Sam Mendes [the director] was being like, ‘Can you leave so that we can run through the thing’. But I would just come into the room and sit and watch. Especially for Edmund because I was also understudying Sam Troughton in that part, which I found a really fascinating part and so literally I watched all of his rehearsals and afterwards I’m asking questions about it, like ‘Oh wow, so you made this decision, what was that about?’ and like a real dweeb basically, but in line with my plan to get the most out of this experience that I could. So when the moment came – the person that I’m understudying loses his voice in the middle of the show, on press night, on the National Theatre stage, and in the Olivier in front of everyone, including the reviewers and everything, and Oscar winner Sam Mendes comes to me to say, ‘Can you go on?’ This is the only time you see this incredibly confident and competent man suddenly filled with fear. And the success of his precious production is in the hands of a 21-year-old drama graduate: ‘Can you go on?’ I could say, ‘Yes’ because I’d been fortunate enough to have done all that preparation. ‘Can you go on? Can you go on without the book?’ ‘Yes, I can do that’ and then did it. And that is just like a kind of lightning strike moment, you know. You can’t legislate for that. And the thing about luck is like it’s only lucky if you’re able to take advantage of it. Otherwise it’s actually a really shit situation if you’re there and you don’t know what you’re doing. Ironically, within two years Paapa was playing Edmund in his own right in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of King Lear, having also achieved fame there as Hamlet. Now what both these actors were doing was preparing meticulously. They put in much more work than would normally be expected and when the moment of challenge came, they could be confident enough to seize it. You’ll see this theme of deep preparation coming up time and time again from the actors I spoke to. It’s an essential habit to acquire if you want to stand out. Luck is also partly dependent on your attitude. As Hayley Atwell told me, ‘I’ve had more luck in my life when I’ve had gratitude for what I do have in this current moment. When I felt I’d somehow stalled I would write down a list of all the things I currently had or the things I felt that I was good at, the gifts that I was grateful for, and how lucky I felt to be part of a profession that is encouraging me to develop my own voice. If you look at it in a very sincere way, you create within yourself a sense of abundance. One thing that I don’t think has ever increased anyone’s luck is sitting there going like, “Oh that didn’t happen, this didn’t happen”, the

140

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

kind of moping, misery, counting all the things that went wrong or the jobs we didn’t get. I think creating a sense of hope and abundance within yourself – that then has a knock-on effect from the people that you meet.’

Grit and objectives The irony of grit as a secret of success is that it is virtually a famous acting exercise applied to life. As a way of getting more consistently reliable performances out of his actors, the Russian director Stanislavski devised the principle of zadacha, usually translated as an objective, intention or want. You decide what your character wants in a scene (e.g. I want to win your loyalty; I want to make you love me; I want to dominate you) and by playing that want, you find the intellectual and emotional focus that drives you through the scene, overcoming all the obstacles in your way. Many actors regard this as fundamental, but how often do you consciously use objectives in everyday life to get what you want? Having a clear objective when you meet someone with influence, such as a director, agent or casting director, can be vital to the outcome. Some years ago, I led an enquiry into the training of directors. Just after my report A Better Direction7 was published, Adrian Noble, who had worked closely with me on the enquiry and was then artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, invited me to lunch. Was there ever a more golden opportunity for a career move? But at that lunch I had no clear objective, and he seemed to have no apparent agenda. So we chatted over this and that, and then went our separate ways into the streets of London. Was there ever a more wasted chance? For me that was a great lesson.

Grit and resilience Above all, grit is about not giving up. One of my former students, Neil Morrissey (of the TV series Men Behaving Badly), decided to be an actor when he was sixteen and living in a care home in the Midlands. They wouldn’t let him stay there to do the A Levels he needed in order to study at drama school, so he advertised for some foster parents, found some and sat the exams. He got an audition for Guildhall but the authorities wouldn’t give him the £12 train fare to London, so he got a job in a clothing shop. He was accepted for Guildhall but couldn’t get a grant to pay his fees, so he persuaded his local MP to intervene and the money was found. ‘I’ve always been a glass half-full type of guy,’ he later said.8 Not giving up also means lasting the distance as you age and move through different casting brackets. Research among five of Britain’s top drama schools9

GRIT

141

showed that about a quarter of the actors graduating from these schools gave up acting after five years. And these are the top schools. After ten years, it was roughly half. Yet, your big moment as an actor may not come for twenty years after you’ve left drama school. If you can be one of the ones who don’t quit, then the competition will progressively thin out. Therefore, you need to be ready for that moment by continually developing your skills. You may need to find supplementary work meanwhile, but to get better as an actor you need to keep at it. Never give up. You also need to make the most of every opportunity and keep your vision alive by focusing on what you really want.

Grit and vision On a winter’s afternoon in London’s Southwark Playhouse, twelve asylumseeking women from parts of Africa and the Middle East are on stage for the first time in their lives, sharing their stories, songs and humour with a rapt audience. Their surprise at touching the power of their culture and their growing confidence during the devised performance is matched by the delight of the audience. It is a deeply moving event. They have been working for the past three months with Compass Collective, directed by Mhairi Gayer. Success as an actor can mean many things. For Mhairi it’s not just about aspiring to commercial success. While still at drama school she spent time helping in refugee camps in Lebanon, Greece and Belgium, and also working in orphanages in India. ‘Coming back from those experiences, meant that I always had an awareness of what the world was like out there,’ she told me. ‘And I think that’s why, straight away after leaving Guildhall I wanted to do something that was practical, useful, socially engaged and important.’ With her twin sister Leah, she set up Compass Collective, creating platforms for refugees and asylum seekers to have a voice. To succeed in a project like this requires grit and enthusiasm. To win people over needs a spirit of warmth and generosity. But underlying all that must be an enduring optimism and selfbelief that you can make it happen. This means seeing yourself as an artist in society – creating things and making a difference. This is not for everyone, of course, but time and time again, when I’ve talked to actors who consider themselves successful, they’ve been making their own opportunities. This gives them something other than just waiting for the phone to ring with the next audition. They’re being proactive, outside their comfort zone, taking the risks that will help them achieve their potential. And what are the fruits of taking those risks? As Mhairi put it, ‘To witness people coming forward and finding the courage to speak out – that’s really fulfilling work and I feel like I am using my skills as an actor and everything that

142

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

I had the privilege to be taught. And I’m in service to people. I think it changed me as a person as well because I didn’t know that I was a leader and I didn’t know I had the business skills to run a company, and I’ve really had to rise to the occasion. It just means I’m now much more confident and relaxed.’

Grit and the road to success So, you’re driven by desire and powered by grit, but how exactly do you make your dreams come true? I’m now going to show you a process that will help you use your grit to step up to the next level and change your life. This is important because if you can be more effectively in your everyday life, you can open the door to become a better actor and have a more successful career. Several years ago I set up a new course at Guildhall, based on all the things I wish I knew when I was twenty that would have helped me in my work. I called it Life Skills. I’ve tested the ideas on hundreds of drama students, as well as in communities of deprived and unemployed people in London. I’ve also tested them on CEOs of multi-national companies all over Europe. The techniques are hugely powerful and they do work, so I’ll take you through a few of them now.

The power of goals People who are supremely successful, in any field, tend to have clearly expressed goals: they know what they want, where they are going and they get on with the journey. Most people don’t have a clear image of what they want, other than a vague idea that they would like to be happy, healthy and successful. Without a clear focus, their efforts in life tend to be less fruitful. But you might be thinking: How do I know what the right focus is? First, think of this on three levels: ●●

●●

●●

Your big dream, which can be broad and abstract – I want to be an outstanding actor. Your goals, which specify the route to that dream – I want a leading role in the RSC or on Broadway; I want a role in a Hollywood movie. Your tactics, which map out the route to those goals – I want a top agent, I want a leading role in a good theatre company, I want experience in a TV drama series, and so on. These give you a range of even smaller goals which lead you towards the bigger goal.

It’s important that you don’t get bogged down initially with how you’re going to achieve your goals. Concentrate instead on why you want each goal because

GRIT

143

that will keep your motivation strong and give you the grit to keep going. Now I’ll show you, step by step, how you can set the goals that will make a difference in your life and career as an actor. But if this is going to work for you, you will need to actually write out the exercises. No action; no result. It’s best to find a quiet place where you won’t be interrupted and do the exercises all in one go. Later you can make revisions and refine them.

Values In order to set an effective goal, you first need to know where you’re coming from. Most of our actions are determined by our values – the principles we live our life by. To clarify your values, you need to ask yourself: What is important to you? There are two levels to this. First: What are your personal values? These reflect your general approach to life and from that, what you bring to your work as an actor. For example, from the following list, which are your top ten personal values? Write them down now. Passion Success Enthusiasm Integrity Love Health Creativity Recognition Innovation Risk Excitement Wealth Pursuit of excellence Fairness Helping others Loyalty Control Honesty Trust Respect Fun And having done that, which are your top three? Decide on them now. That helps you prioritize what is most important for you. Later you can decide what kinds of goals will spring from those values.

144

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

The second level is: What is important to you in your work as an actor? This might give you a list that includes: Security Well paid Fame Leading roles Prestigious theatres or film companies Influential connections Feeling needed Hours not too long Recognition Or it might include the following: Stimulating people to work with Feeling that I’m making a difference A challenging director Adequate rehearsal periods Sense of adventure Risk Challenge Creativity Being stretched to the limit Opportunities to inspire Breaking boundaries Surrounded by enthusiasm These sets of values are quite different, yet they are both versions of what it means to be outstanding. It’s not that one list is ‘right’ and the other is ‘wrong’ but they reflect actors with contrasting agendas for their careers. Also, as your life changes, your values may change. To get a sense of what sort of actor you are now, write your own list. And again, select the top three.

Review your achievements Going on from that, here’s a simple but effective way of understanding what you want. ●●

Imagine it’s twenty years in the future and you’ve achieved everything you ever hoped to achieve. That includes the areas of work, family, health, finance, relationships and self-development.

GRIT

●● ●●

145

Write all of these things down – a long list. Then, to prioritize, pick out the ten most important ones.

The strength of goals is that they give you a clear idea of your destination. Just as an archer pulls back the string and fires an arrow to hit the target, the progress of your future life becomes the trajectory of that arrow. Keeping your eye on the target, you can start living your life with that end in mind. Suddenly you can begin to understand what is relevant and what is not.

Anniversary party When I’d been teaching at Guildhall for thirty years, I decided to have a party to celebrate. Former students came along and there were some speeches. That gave me the idea for the following exercise.10 Try it now. You’ll need to read through the instructions first before you put it into practice. ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

Take four sheets of paper and head them up: Family, Friends, Work, Community. Then put the paper aside. Sit comfortably with your eyes closed and put yourself in a state of deep relaxation (see pages 166–7, Breathing Meditations.). Now project yourself into the future and imagine you’re having a party to celebrate your eightieth birthday. You’re in good health and you’re surrounded by your friends and loved ones. Visualize in detail the room where this will take place, the sounds that fill that room and the people who will be there. At one point in the celebration, four people will give a little speech about you: the first is from your family, the second is one of your close friends, the third is someone you have worked with as an actor over the years and the fourth is someone from your wider community that you’ve helped, something that’s important to you – volunteering, a charity, a religious community, an arts club. Each of them, from their own perspective, will give a sense of what you have been like as a person. Think deeply for a few minutes. What would you like each of them to say about you and your life? What kind of character, what achievements would you like them to describe? What difference would you like to have made in their lives? Now take up those pieces of paper and write these down, under each heading, as quickly as you can. Don’t stop to think too much; just write the first thing that comes into your head.

146

●●

●●

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

Give yourself ten or fifteen minutes to write. Usually the ideas that come towards the end are some of the most profound. See https://soundcloud.com/user-348637583/anniversaryparty?in= user-348637583/sets/the-outstanding-actor-2e

In doing this, you’ve identified some of your deepest values. Now you can start to decide what really matters. What you wanted those people to say about you is your vision of success. And by projecting yourself towards the end of your life, you get a clear idea of your destination. Instead of meandering shambolically through life, you’re now moving with the directness of the arrow. Thinking of today as the moment you pull back the string and fire that arrow, is there anything you will do differently in your life from now on? Will you spend more time with friends and loved ones? Will you do more work on your voice? Will you read more plays? Will you write a play or start up a theatre company? Will you take up meditation? Will you learn new skills? But the crucial thing is to do something, not just think about it. That’s the difference between people with the grit to succeed and those without it. An Australian palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware11 asked her terminally ill patients about their regrets as they reached the end of their lives. She found that common themes surfaced again and again. The top regret was: I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. As Ware explains: When people realize that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled. Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made. People with grit are seldom in that position. They decide what they want and commit themselves to achieving it, whatever it takes.

How long is a piece of string? Although you are presumably not at the end of your life, how long have you got to fulfil those dreams? It’s very easy to look back and think, where did that decade go? What have I been doing with my life? Here’s a very effective way of dealing with the question. ●●

Take a paper tape measure that measures 100 cm and count each centimetre as being one year. If you don’t have a paper tape measure, you can mark out the centimetres on a large strip of paper.

GRIT

●●

●●

●●

147

Cut it at the point you think you’d like to retire from acting, say, 75 cm. Bear in mind, Sir John Gielgud was over ninety when he made his last film appearance. Now cut the tape measure at your present age, say, 35 cm. That would give you 40 cm, which is forty years. That’s how long you’ve got to achieve everything you want to do. You’ll need to get started.

Roles and goals As you move towards your important goals, you can start by deciding the roles you have in your life, then your goals in these specific areas. You could, for example, write a list of your roles, which might include: Self Student Actor Family member Partner Friend In each area of your life, you identify some results you’d like to accomplish. For example in your role as a friend, your goals might be: to keep in regular touch with my friends; to be fun to be with; to support them and be there for them when they need me. In your role as self, it might be: to keep myself in optimum condition and develop myself in body, mind and spirit.

Personal mission statement Now it’s time to summarize everything and pull it into focus. Having written down ideas from all these exercises, have a look at what you’ve got, because there will be a picture emerging. Underline some key ideas, any recurring themes that are coming through, or what stands out as really important to you. To focus your vision, you’re now going to formulate a personal mission statement – an idea popularized by the writer Stephen Covey.12 This can take any form: bullet points, key phrases, a series of sentences, poetry. Whatever works for you. Your mission statement is your personal constitution. It’s your contract with yourself that reminds you why you think you’re here on the planet

148

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

and where you want to go in your life. It’s an expression of your vision for yourself. And it’s an immensely powerful tool. A mission statement doesn’t get written in five minutes. It needs to evolve over time, so once you’ve drafted it out, keep coming back to it and refining it until you’ve got something that will work for you. Once you’ve got it right, it’s like a map that will guide your life. But you need to keep it close to you so that you can look at it regularly, which stimulates your motivation and gives you the grit to live that vision, whatever stands in your way. Here’s an excerpt from an actor’s personal mission statement dealing with the professional side of her life. SELF (in relation to my career) Commit to developing my skills, with passion Manage myself to be disciplined, focused and energized Keep myself in peak condition Use the freedom to fail Have the courage to go out of my comfort zone Cultivate curiosity Retain humility Be pro-active in striving for excellence CAST MEMBER (in relation to rehearsals) Never be ashamed of what I have to offer Appreciate and be patient with the progress of others Risk together and give each other space to fail Enjoy playing together Bring positive energy into the room Cultivate emotional intelligence Listen openly and embrace constructive feedback Challenge myself to risk and fulfil my potential ACTOR (in relation to audiences and other actors) Love the audience and give them a good time Aim to engage and inspire Serve the text and tell the story clearly Be present, totally Remember why I am there Do the work and get on with it Be true to myself Keep a twinkle in the eye

GRIT

149

Setting your goals Why do you want it? With your personal mission statement in place, you will now have a much clearer idea of how to express your goals. Some will be short term – to be achieved in three months or a year – while others will be long term – five years, ten years, twenty years. Don’t worry too much about how you’re going to achieve them but ask yourself: Why do I want this goal? For example, you may want to be a millionaire. But why? Where’s that coming from? Is it fear of ending your life in poverty without an adequate pension and no support? Or is it because you’d love the freedom to be able to travel, have lots of leisure or start your own theatre company?

SMART In the business world, there is a model known as SMART. It states that your goal should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-driven. This helps you focus on practicalities, especially in a short-term goal, such eating more healthily, getting your finances in control or finding an agent. But there’s a problem with SMART goals: they’re not always helpful for your dreams. For example: I want to play Juliet in the RSC before I’m thirty. That’s clearly specific, measurable and time-driven. But achievable and realistic? You might then think, well no, that’s not very realistic because the chances of me playing any lead in the RSC are zero. So you lower your sights: I want to play good supporting roles in the RSC before I’m forty. And you might think, that’s not very achievable either. So you lower a bit further: I want to play good supporting roles in a reputable regional repertory theatre. Do you see my point? The realistic and achievable part causes you to lower your goal. Of course, if there are fifty of you out there, all aged twenty-five and all passionately wanting to play Juliet in the RSC, you’re not all going to get a go at it before you’re thirty because there won’t be enough productions. But to paraphrase Michelangelo, ‘Better to have aimed too high and failed than to have aimed too low and succeeded.’ Besides, the RSC might give you Rosalind, or Cordelia, or Ophelia.

PPP A more stimulating approach to your goal is the PPP model: make it Personal, Positive and Present tense. For example: I’m thrilling audiences with my Juliet in the RSC. A famous example is the great boxer Muhammed Ali’s catchphrase,

150

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

‘I am the greatest!’ It’s personal, positive and present tense. Not, ‘I will be the greatest, one day.’ The psychology of this is that by imagining the goal as if it has already happened, and the emotional feeling that comes from that, you trick your unconscious mind into believing that it’s true. I’m not trying to make you delusional, but if you indulge the feeling of it, then your unconscious mind starts to lead you along towards it. You’ll behave slightly differently, perhaps exuding more self-confidence or passion. And you’ll also pick up more relevant signals from around you, which will in turn affect your behaviour. All this means that you’ll start to look and behave like a more castable Juliet than you did before, leading you of course, closer to the goal.

Choosing your goals Naturally you can have more than one goal, but having too many goals will overwhelm you, so you need to whittle your list down. Seven is a good maximum number. But how do you get there? Here’s a very practical method. It may take twenty minutes, but once you’ve done it, you’ll have a much clearer focus than you thought possible. ●●

●● ●●

●● ●●

Take a sheet of paper and write down 101 things you want to achieve before you die. Yes, 101. Keep writing, without thinking about it too much and without stopping. If you get stuck, think of the various roles you have in your life and make sure you are setting goals in all of those roles. Interestingly, the further you go, the more you drill down and you may find that some of the last goals on your list are the really important ones. Now have a look over your list and get it down to the top ten goals. Now reduce that to the top seven.

Making your goals happen Once you’ve got your goals, how do you achieve them? There’s no point in having a list of seven beautiful goals and then forgetting about them, because they’re unlikely to happen. You need to keep those goals in the forefront of your mind. Not just your conscious mind, but also your unconscious mind because that’s the part that drives you on. Which brings us back to grit. You’ve got to really want it deep in the core of your being. Otherwise, it will not happen. How do you get that into your unconscious? You can carry around a statement of your goals, or your personal mission statement, and have a look at it every day. Intellectually, that will keep reminding you of what you want. But to get it

GRIT

151

deeper into your unconscious, there needs to be a more emotional connection that will bring you closer to believing it. One way is to picture the goal, like the Gold Medal winner at the beginning of this chapter. At first this might sound difficult, especially if it’s an abstract goal, but I’ll give you three brief examples. In 1990, a struggling actor in Los Angeles sat down and wrote himself a cheque: $10 million. For acting services rendered. Date: Thanksgiving Day, 1995. He later said, ‘I gave myself five years to be one of the most successful working actors, to be given the best material, and the best scripts – things that people would never expect in a million years that I could do.’13 He carefully folded the cheque, put it in his wallet and carried it around with him always. By Thanksgiving Day 1995, after the success of films like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask and Dumb and Dumber, Jim Carrey was commanding $20 million a movie, making him the highest-paid comedy actor in the world. When his father died, he recalled, ‘I put the cheque in my father’s pocket in his casket because it was his dream too, and he followed me the whole time and it was kind of a completion of all that.’ Conrad Hilton owned a chain of hotels but it was his life-long dream to own the most iconic hotel in New York, the Waldorf Astoria. Hilton’s desk had a glass top, and for years he kept under the glass a photo of the Waldorf Astoria, on which he’d written the words, ‘The greatest of them all’. Every day he looked at it. In 1949 he became the manager of that hotel and in 1972 finally bought it outright. Visualizing goals has long been a powerful process for sportspeople. The great boxer Muhammad Ali, in the weeks leading up to an important fight, would visualize in detail exactly how he wanted the fight to go. He would use all his senses to imagine the sound of the crowds cheering, the heat and glare of the lights, and particularly that final moment when he held up his arms as the winner. He called this ‘future history’. By constantly replaying that movie in his mind, he was programming his unconscious to make him win the fight. Then, when he eventually did step into the ring, his whole being was geared up for success. His unconscious mind would tell him what to do. As he once said, ‘Champions aren’t made in gyms. Champions are made from something deep inside them: a desire, a dream, a vision.’ Equally though, we can unintentionally programme ourselves to fail, and indeed for many people the dread of losing is more motivating that the desire to succeed. You know the kind of thing: ‘I’ve got this audition tomorrow and I’ve no chance of getting the part, because it’s so competitive. They’ll probably be very rude. I’ll be awful because I won’t have time to learn the script properly – they never give you enough time. I’m really dreading it. I know I’ll be crap.’ That becomes your future history: you’re programming yourself to fail. Then, when you walk into the room, your unconscious mind will tell you what to do.

152

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

Visualization As an example, here’s how you can use positive visualization in an audition. ●●

●● ●●

●●

●●

●●

Imagine the feeling of confident anticipation as you are about to enter the room, knowing that you are well prepared. Imagine yourself shaking hands with the director, who is smiling. Picture the room and imagine the feeling you have as you express your ideas or tell your story with confidence. Your voice is strong and clear. Your body language is positive. You express yourself with passion and enthusiasm. Imagine the director listening to you with full attention, smiling and engaged. You feel the strong rapport and you know that you are right for this part. When you speak the lines of the script, you feel that you are projecting the energy and qualities that this director is hoping for.

Once you’ve got the scenario worked out, through all the senses, then replay it in your head regularly in the days leading up to the audition. You’re programming yourself to succeed. And what if the director is grumpy? While you can’t change someone, your positive demeanour will certainly have an effect on them and help you get the best out of the situation. After all, the director will be wanting you to succeed, even before you enter the room. Once you realize that you can choose the way you think, you liberate yourself from the negative mental habits that lead to failure.

Positivity One of the secrets of making a goal happen lies in the language you use. It’s simple: focus on what you want, not on what you don’t want. This is partly because your mind can’t easily deal with a negative. What happens when you read: ‘Wet paint, do not touch’, or ‘Don’t think of a pink elephant?’ You have a compulsion to do just that. This idea is effective because the positive language you use affects your thinking, which in turn affects your behaviour. Imagine, for example, that you want to get into a better theatre company. If you’re constantly thinking: I’ve got to get out of these profit-share jobs, I’ve got to stop working in the fringe – the focus on what you don’t want is likely to keep you working at fringe level, and better things will feel a long way off. Whereas, if you focus on what it will be like to work in a good regional company, or the West End, or on Broadway, you’ll be pulled along towards that. You’re also more likely to take positive action to achieve that goal.

GRIT

153

Another example: ‘Why do people cut me out in groups? Why do people exclude me? Why am I isolated?’ Result: you appear to have no friends. Concentrate on showing interest in those around you and you find that people are becoming more friendly. At first this may sound improbable but it does work. Try it for yourself. By focusing on the positives, you are unconsciously changing what you say and what you do. So your actions and language become more constructive. It also works with relationships – professional and personal – because when the signals you are sending out become positive rather than negative, other people pick these up and respond accordingly.

Chunking it down You will have big goals and smaller goals in your life. But sometimes a major goal can be so overwhelming that you hardly know where to start. In this case, break it down into a series of small tasks. To do this, I use a spidergram. It’s a great tool because it encourages rightbrain, more creative thinking: you just get ideas down, as they occur, without having to think analytically or in sequence. That can come later. I used it for planning this book. The method is simple: on a sheet of paper put your main idea in a circle in the centre (expressed in a short phrase), then the specific tasks in circles around it. Each of these will generate even smaller tasks outside those circles, so you’re working your way towards the edge of the page. What you have in the centre is massive but the smallest circles on the outside are more achievable tasks that you can easily make a start on. As you start to tick them off, you find you are moving ever closer to the big goal in the centre. For example: Big goal: You still want to play Juliet in the RSC. Smaller goals: The specific tasks that will make this possible (in no particular order). ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●● ●●

Get a showreel Get an agent Do more networking Meet casting directors Keep in physical shape Develop my voice Improve my RP See more Shakespeare productions Get experience in theatre – even fringe Get experience in classical theatre in a regional theatre

154

●● ●● ●● ●●

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

Get into the RSC as part of the company Get to know influential directors Keep working on my voice Keep studying the role.

And of course all of these can be broken down to even smaller tasks.

GRIT

155

OST Now you can start to look at the whole thing in a more linear way. In his years as director of communications and strategy for the Blair government, Alastair Campbell devised a plan of objective, strategy and tactics (OST). Your objective, as in acting, is what you want to achieve or where you want to get to. Strategy describes broadly the overall direction you need to go in. Tactics are the specific steps you will take to implement the strategy. You start with the objective. As Campbell says, ‘It should be ambitious enough that winning really will feel like an achievement. It should also be ambitious enough that failure will feel truly galling.’14 Here are some examples: Objective: I want to start a new theatre company. Strategy: Differentiation (what will be unique about my company?) Tactics:  Get a great team around me, explore funding opportunities, research the competition, set up relationships with suitable theatres. Objective: I want to get a leading role in a TV drama. Strategy: Improvement (develop relevant skills). Tactics:  Define what I need to develop, find training opportunities in screen acting, research and build relationships with production companies and casting directors, develop my profile. Once you have the OST defined, you can start to prioritize your tactics, which also break down to a range of smaller tasks.

Dealing with setbacks Achieving a big goal is, of course, not easy. Things will get in the way to stop you. As the writer Jack Canfield15 points out, there will be considerations: all the reasons why you shouldn’t try in the first place. For example, ‘They’ll be so many people going to the audition and the competition will be so tough that it’s not even worth me trying.’ There will be fears: the fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of being judged, fear of making a fool of yourself. For example: ‘I’m crap at sight-reading and I’ll just look like an idiot up there.’ There will be roadblocks: the obstacles that the world throws at you. For example: ‘I really want that part, but I know they’re looking for someone with more experience.’ Unsuccessful people see these considerations, fears and roadblocks as Stop signs because they lack the grit to deal with them. Successful people see them as a normal part of the process. They should appear. If they don’t, you haven’t set your goal high enough. It is desire, belief and expectation that will give you

156

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

that grit to by-pass the roadblocks, banish considerations and overcome your fears. Successful people take the knocks but they bounce back more quickly. For instance: ‘So I didn’t get the part. That’s probably because I hadn’t read the play properly and I didn’t project much confidence when I walked into the room. Next time I’ll prepare better and practice projecting more confidence with strangers.’ Or in a case where you simply weren’t the right fit, which is out of your control: ‘At least they now know me, and I’ve learnt a lot more about what this director is after. Next time I’ll approach it differently.’ That’s what grit is about. Some years ago, one of my students in his second year fell off a drain pipe from a third floor window. He landed on a concrete terrace and broke his back. When I visited him in hospital a few days later, he told me that the doctors had operated on him but were still not sure which way it would go. He could be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. But this student had grit. There was something about him that gave him enormous determination and you just knew he was going to succeed. Two weeks later, confounding all the doctors’ expectations, he walked out of that hospital. But he was still in a plastic body brace and when he came back to drama school, unable to do much of the physical training, he naturally became despondent. I offered to talk it through with him, so we went next door to have lunch together. We were queuing up at the till and I put down some money to pay for us. ‘Let me pay for myself,’ he pleaded. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll buy you lunch today. You can buy me lunch when you’re a millionaire.’ His name was Orlando Bloom.

Grit in a nutshell Success is never an unearned gift. To know where you are going and what you want, you need to clarify your goals. Then you need grit to follow them through, overcoming the failures and setbacks along the way. The signs of grit are that you really want it and you will never give up.

7 CHARISMA Into the crowded lecture theatre at Guildhall walked a 73-year-old Al Pacino. His long hair was tousled, the trousers of his designer suit were sagging slightly around his trainers and his waistcoat was unevenly buttoned. In the first one and a half seconds, and without breaking his stride, he took an all-embracing look at the audience and clapped his hands together, causing a hundred drama students and teachers to burst into instant applause. We would have applauded anyway, but Al was not taking any chances. He flopped into a chair, slumping back, never taking his eyes off the audience, as he half listened to the flattering introduction. Then he huddled forward in a deliberately low-status position and launched into his thoughts about acting. Within a minute, he had the audience spellbound. ‘I love being here,’ he told a hundred beaming faces. ‘We’re actors. We’re in a family of actors! We understand a certain language. We speak it together.’ The charisma of Al Pacino that day did not rely on his past as a Hollywood legend; it manifested itself in the way he engaged everyone, moment by moment – now leaning back, now tying himself up in knots, now springing up and thrusting out his arms with a shout of climactic triumph as he told his stories that ranged from the intimate confessional to the barnstorming tour de force. Despite his age, he had the lithe expressiveness of an animal, and always there were a seductive warmth and a twinkle in the eye. He seemed to be the living embodiment of what this book is about.

What is charisma? Put the six other qualities together and they add up to the most important of all: charisma. The outstanding actor projects a charismatic personality that the audience will find attractive and individual. In every era, the greatest actors have been noted for their charisma, as we can see in contemporary accounts of Garrick, Kean or Olivier, for instance. They had a flamboyance that entranced audiences.

158

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

But charisma is one of those vague terms that can mean many things, mainly because it’s constantly being redefined. The Oxford English Dictionary calls it: ‘Compelling attractiveness or charm that can inspire devotion in others.’ Other definitions include: ‘Strong personal appeal or magnetism.’ It’s also been called ‘the X-Factor’, or even ‘mojo’. The word comes from the Greek χαρισμα (favourgiven, gift of grace), which in turn comes from χαρις (charis) meaning ‘grace’. It’s obviously worth having. But is it ‘a God-given gift’, which was yet another of its early meanings, or can everyone have a piece of it? Research in the business sector, where it is a valued quality among leaders, tells us that charisma is a combination of power, presence and warmth.1 To this I would add passion, which makes you express your ideas with greater commitment and enables you to influence others. While charisma is a quality we can judge only subjectively, when we translate it into acting terms, what we notice is a strongly focused concentration, producing a forward, radiating energy and animation that gives the actor effortless authority on stage. It’s the personality behind the presence. One indicator is the intense, positive expression of the eyes. Charisma is what the experts I spoke to were thinking of when they talked about uniqueness, individual personality and the ‘stand-out’ quality. While finding it hard to pin down, they often described this quality in terms of magnetism. The crucial thing about charisma is that something travels outwards from the actor, making a strong connection with the audience. And something comes back to you from the audience: there’s a cycle of attention. In this chapter, I’ll examine what exactly that something is and how you can develop it.

Recognizing charisma The agent Dallas Smith told me: ‘When you see it, you know. They walk on stage and you just look at them and think, that’s what it is. It’s an indefinable stand-out quality, which is why, when you get somebody who has it, they’re inundated with the representation offers.’ The critic Michael Billington admitted: I’ve no answer except to say, it’s the cultivation of the individual personality that’s going to lead to interesting actors. So it’s the stand-out quality, whatever that is. But that quality is going to differ. It’s got nothing to do with regularity of feature, looks, shape of face or whatever. It’s to do with something that is distinctive, odd, peculiar. The stand-outs I’ve met have always been unusual, different, eccentric. And the dull actors are those who look a bit like other actors. The good actors and the great actors are those who look only like themselves. That seems to me the essence of it. It’s the projection of a unique self in acting.

CHARISMA

159

Dallas Smith explained what he looks for in drama school performances: ‘You go there to watch someone who is going to knock you between the eyes. It’s a completely subjective, personal response. There’s just something they do on stage – it’s a sort of intelligence, a presence, possibly a look – something they bring to the part, which makes them stand out. It’s sort of all embracing. You look at them and think, “I want that”.’ Such impressions can be vividly memorable, as Michael Billington confirmed when he recalled seeing the 21-year-old Albert Finney in 1956, in a play at the Birmingham Rep, Happy as Larry: This chorus of tailors came on, all with their tape measures round their necks, wearing black waistcoats and black trousers. In the middle of them was this strange looking guy with a centre parting and a rather moon face – Albert Finney. And you could not take your eyes off him. He was literally in the chorus. He was literally one of six or seven people, and instantly you were drawn to him. And this goes back to that distinctive physical presence. He’s a classic example I think of an actor who’s had it from the start, this extraordinary gift to make you look at him. It’s inhabiting that role and just almost shamelessly being distinctive. Even though it’s a chorus. Why was he the one we looked at? It’s a sense of detail, occupying the space and projecting a unique personality.

How do you strengthen your charisma? When I questioned actors in more detail about what they did to strengthen their own charisma, they found it just as hard to pin down. But what came through were an attitude and set of values that determined the way they worked. Judi Dench, for instance, asserted that: Over-confidence is no good. Timidity is no good. It’s energy put to a working cause. It means that you use all that fear and energy and vitality, putting it into what you and the director and all the other actors need, in order to present that story – your bit in it, not overflowing into anybody else, but contained in it, and yet embracing everybody else, embracing the story. I am not interested in the actor who comes on and takes over, to the exclusion of others. Jude Law aimed for what he called a mysterious juggle between incredible selfconfidence and faith. The confidence carried him through periods of fear and self-doubt where nothing seemed to be connecting, or the lines wouldn’t get into his head. But he constantly reminded himself that acting is an art form that demands individuality.

160

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

You need to absolutely shine – no actor on the planet is like me, and I’m not like any one of them. We all have our self to draw on. It’s really believing in the skills that you have as an individual. What can you offer a part that no-one else can offer? There are things that impress me, when I see an actor and I think, ‘I can’t do that. How the hell did they do that?’ And it’s usually that they’re doing something that I couldn’t do because I’m not them. Paapa Essiedu was struck by the way that charismatic actors can be quite the opposite off stage, reinforcing the idea that, mystical though it may seem, charisma is something that can be consciously turned on and off. Charisma isn’t even about the person who’s the life and soul of the party and tells the best jokes and drinks the most and is the sexiest and everything like that, it’s not even about that. Some incredible, award-winning actors, are incredibly introverted and shy and actually quite boring in real life, but you just see something explode out of them when they’re in front of a camera or when they’re on a stage. And that is always just so satisfying to see that transformation. We’re all astonished by people’s ability to do that. I think often that it’s also about bravery, about having the courage to really peel off like layers of yourself and show something. Lily James thought charisma comes from ease and confidence. As she put it, ‘It’s willing yourself into the moment so you’re really engaging with people. When someone really looks at you or really talks to you and puts their energy into you, that’s so appealing.’ When I spoke to Ashley Zhangazha, during his long West End run as the charismatic Ike Turner (in the musical Tina), he also believed one of the keys to charisma is eye contact. ‘A lot of times actors don’t really look each other in the eye,’ he said. ‘If you have that sense of really connecting, if you’re actually trying to connect with everyone on the stage I think it does something to you, it does something to your presence.’ But what most made a difference for him, he had found, was the attitude to the audience: It’s almost like they’re people that you’ve invited into your home for the evening. Like imagine that the audience have come round to your house for a dinner party. I think that helps your relationship with the audience and it can allow that charisma to come out, if you think, ‘I’m the host tonight’. But if you’re thinking like, ‘It’s an exam’ then it’s like you’ve come into their house and immediately you’re on the back foot and then you emit fear rather than opening yourself up. So I think charisma comes from confidence and an open, positive energy and I think you then have that the audience are on your side. I’ve done this over 200 times, I know this arena better than them, so I

CHARISMA

161

think of myself as the host, bringing them in and it’s like, ‘Okay, so you’re just going to spend some time with me and the cast for the night’ rather than ‘Oh God, they’ve paid £100!’

Charisma onstage These views give us a clearer idea of what charisma is, but in practical terms what can you personally do to make yourself a more charismatic actor? There are three crucial charismatic qualities that will give you the edge if you make them part of your everyday habits. These are: Focus Ease Confidence. I’m now going to show you why they make a difference and how you can adopt them.

Charisma and paratext Here’s a powerful way of getting stronger focus and accuracy of thought into a monologue. Paratext in this case refers to words that run alongside the main text. You’ll need an acting partner to help you with this. ●●

●●

●●

●●

In a standing position, speak the text to your partner, who is also standing. That will give you a base line to compare later. Now you speak it again, while your partner forcefully interrupts, answers back, contradicts you, challenges, throws up objections. For example: ‘How can you say that? I don’t believe you! That’s rubbish! You never loved me! You’re lying!’ Keep going, but deal with this abuse, passionately, though the words of the text. You’ve now got to fight to get your point across with your partner and it becomes a dialogue. Now speak the text again, this time without your partner interrupting. You still have the memory of the paratext in your mind and you retain the energy but now with more control.

This exercise can propel you into finding unexpected levels of intensity in dealing with the paratext that’s coming back at you. Watch that you don’t push it into physical tension, though. It has a surprisingly powerful effect, charging the speech

162

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

with energy, commitment and passion. Suddenly, with the emotion unleashed there is a different level of ownership. There’s also more musicality, nimbleness of thought and flexibility in the rhythm. Once you’ve achieved that level, it may be ‘over the top’ for what’s required, but you can then easily internalize it without losing the focus and detail.

Charisma and focus: Them not you The single most effective thing you can do to strengthen your charisma on stage or on screen is to give complete attention to the other actor, without being selfconscious. Paradoxically when you do this, you shine more brightly yourself. Not only does that energy have a powerful effect on the person you’re speaking to, but an audience watching will read it as charisma. It’s as simple as that. When I’ve tested this idea on actors in my workshops, I’ve been stunned by the results. And here’s a simple but striking way you can prove it for yourself: I call this my ‘secret weapon’ exercise. Ideally you’ll need to do this with a scene partner, but if you’re working alone you can direct your performance to an object on a table, a vase for instance, to give you a point of focus. But you’ll need to imagine that you’re talking to a real person. To test the results, you should record the exercise in close-up on a phone or camcorder. ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

First, talk to someone while concentrating on yourself. If you’re speaking a text, think about how your performance is coming across, your accent and gestures, and to what extent you’re being impressive. If you’re improvising a dialogue, keep thinking about your level of skill in improvisation, and how you are phrasing your words, modulating your voice, and creating the appropriate gestures. It’s almost as if you are up on the ceiling looking down at yourself. This produces an inward energy: it’s all about you, it’s self-conscious and the energy turns inwards. As a result, your voice will probably sound a bit flat and your eyes will be slightly dead. It may be competent but there won’t really be much ownership of the words. Now repeat the dialogue, this time giving total attention to the other person – forgetting about yourself and concentrating fully on changing that person in some way. It might be to make them feel sad, or guilty or cheerful. Watch how they’re responding. If they’re not affected, adjust your strategy moment by moment. Make it about them, not you. This gives you an outward energy: it’s now about the other person and the energy shoots forwards.

CHARISMA

●●

●●

163

As a result, your voice will be brighter and your eyes will be full of life. And there’s much more ownership of the words. See https://vimeo.com/channels/1486142/376362563

Once you play back the recording, you’ll be struck by the difference of energy and the way you have suddenly come alive on the screen when you’re focusing on the other person. Watch the eyes carefully. Note the way they become warmer, more naturally expressive of the changes of thought, more connected to the other actor. This in turn gives you complete ownership of the text and looks absolutely natural. Now you might say, we should be focusing on the other actor anyway. Of course we should. But time and time again, I’ve seen potentially charismatic performances shrink because the actor was setting up a barrier caused by anxiety, nerves or self-consciousness. Or they just came across as self-regarding. This also happens in auditions when you are trying to do your best, but you’re very aware of yourself, which makes the energy more inward. The key is to try and affect the other actor. When I discussed this with Michael Billington, he recalled that the actor Frank Langella always kept in his breast pocket a piece of paper with the one word that he thought was the key to acting: ‘Focus’.

Charisma offstage To be fully successful, you need to be aware that there are two sides to your work: your acting performance onstage or on-screen, and your communication offstage with your work colleagues: the casting director, the director, your fellow actors, the crew and eventually the media. Of course, you don’t need to be charismatic every time you go to the supermarket. As one of the most flamboyant stage actors, Antony Sher, once told me, ‘I have no offstage charisma. So something must happen in putting on the costume and make-up that releases in me something that I don’t have in real life.’2 But it is important to know how to turn it on, offstage when it’s useful to you. Take Marilyn Monroe, one of the most charismatic movie stars of all time. She was once out shopping with a friend, who couldn’t understand why no one seemed to recognize this great star in their midst. Monroe explained that it was because she was ‘offstage’. To demonstrate her point, she then switched on her star quality and within minutes, there were crowds of people wanting her autograph.3 Presumably, Monroe’s ‘star quality’ was the result of subtle shifts in body language and the focus of energy. Charisma was something she could turn on, like a light. As Lily James explained, this kind of charisma is what usually happens on the red carpet before a film premier or awards ceremony: something that can

164

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

be totally manufactured. However, it can be a daunting experience because it’s you, without a script: The red carpet is mayhem but it’s about preparation in a more vain way. If you feel good, if you’ve got a great dress and you’ve spent five hours doing your hair and make-up, then at least you can go out and stand there with a sort of forced ease. But I think it’s like a sport as well – you can get good at it. You have to almost treat it like a character, like ‘I’m going to go out there and I’m going to be poised and I’m going to be amused after this photo’, or ‘I’m going to be sexy.’ So you have to channel an energy. For Hayley Atwell, the key to exuding confident charisma on the red carpet is to keep focused the reason you are there and what you need to project. ‘You’re playing a version of yourself,’ she said, ‘and you’ve got to figure out who your public persona is and be kind of consistent with that. It’s taken me so long and I still get it wrong. The reality is it’s a bank of shouty men with cameras going “Hayley, Hayley, lee, lee, lee, lee” and you feel slightly bewildered. But you’ve also got to just look like you absolutely belong there. In that moment you’re a salesperson. You’re going to make the product you’ve made – the film or the TV show – look as shiny as possible and you do that by kind of looking like your most glamorous self because that aesthetically draws the eye. But it’s not a comment of who you are personally.’

Charisma and ease Although it’s ‘offstage’, it can be helpful to exude a degree of charisma when you go for an interview or audition. You will need to look at ease, comfortable in your skin. But in this case, you must also look totally authentic. Unfairly, a lot of fine actors let themselves down at this point and don’t get the work they deserve. When it comes to getting the job, the charisma you bring into the room may make all the difference. Charisma in the audition is something you should therefore learn to master because an actor’s life is famously full of insecurity and the moment when you feel most insecure is usually the audition. You’ve got to walk into a room and make an excellent impression on a complete stranger, who may actually be looking for someone who is taller, shorter, leaner, plumper, darker, lighter, older or younger than you are anyway. As Rufus Norris admitted, a lot of it is out of your control: ‘It’s a totally unfair situation in a sense because you might have 20 minutes or 15 minutes, you might only have 5 minutes, the part may already be cast, it might be the end of the day, the person who came in before you was more right than you.’

CHARISMA

165

To help survive this, remind yourself that, statistically in your career you will be facing a lot more rejections than acceptances, just because of the sheer nature of auditions. Many directors don’t like auditions because they can be so time-consuming, uncertain and stressful. As with any employer conducting a job interview, most of the stress comes from trying to predict the future: How is this person going to get on with the rest of my cast? Could they handle the pressure? What if I make the wrong decision? It’s not surprising that many directors, myself included, prefer to cast from people they already know or have previously worked with. Also, directors want to be put at ease, not disconcerted by your nervousness. Crucially, a lot will depend on how you are feeling about yourself. Directors talk about actors having ownership of a text. In an interview, you need to have complete ownership of your ideas and demonstrate that commitment. How much passion or enthusiasm comes across? How much confidence do you project? How positive is your body language? The charismatic actor will have a sense of ease, even under pressure, so I’m going to show you some powerful tools that will help you maintain this state. These involve first, keeping relaxed to eliminate stress and secondly, seeing the wider picture when you’re under pressure.

Keeping relaxed Dealing with stress The enemy of relaxation is stress and as a charismatic actor you will need to conqueror stress. It’s important though to distinguish between positive and negative stress, because the right kind of pressure can be stimulating and motivating. Actors thrive on positive stress. But when the pressure exceeds your ability to cope with it, you tip into negative stress. Or to put it another way: being ‘here’ but wanting to be ‘there’. This really depends on whether you feel in control of the situation or it is in control of you. For instance, you’re going into an audition: you can afford to fail it, but you’ll enjoy it anyway (positive stress); or does your life depend on getting that job (negative stress)? Directors can usually spot the difference. As Ceri Evans reminds us, the more effective habit is to see an uncomfortable situation not as a threat but a challenge and to enter it with the right mindset (see pages 77–8). ‘The world can kind of shrink into, How do I get this audition?’ Paapa Essiedu told me. ‘How do I show them how great I am at acting? What are people looking for? What do people expect from me? So many questions are outside your control that you can get really hung up on them. And that can be a really

166

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

disempowering position to find yourself in. I try to push those questions out of my mind and focus on what I can control and what I can influence.’ If you can break the patterns of negative stress, you may be able to get better work and enjoy a healthier life. The following exercises will help you find ease and relaxation in both work and everyday life.

Breathing meditations To be charismatic, you need to be energized but at ease in your body. As an actor, you will be constantly battling with tension and dealing with adrenaline, so throughout your life, you will need to have effective ways of letting the tension go and finding a useful level of relaxation. And remember the separation between actor and character: sometimes you will be playing a tense, awkward character, but you the actor must always portray such a person with effective, efficient energy, based on relaxation. Here are two simple meditations, based on breathing, which you can do anywhere, almost any time.

The body scan ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

Sit comfortably with your feet flat on the floor, your hands in your lap and your back supported by the back of the chair, though not slumping. Breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth. With your eyes closed, imagine you’re breathing energy into the top of your head. As you breathe out, imagine you’re breathing the old energy out through the top of your head. Next, imagine you’re breathing energy in through your face, then breathe the old energy out through your face. Then breathe in through the throat, the shoulders and right along the arms down to your fingertips. As you breathe out, the old energy passes up the arms, across the shoulders and out through your throat. Next, breathe the energy in through your chest, then out through your chest. Then through the abdomen (the solar plexus, just below the rib cage), then out through the abdomen. Breathe in through your lower abdomen, below the navel, and out through that point. Finally, breathe the energy in through your groin, along your legs and down to your toes. Then breathe the old energy out from the toes, upwards along the legs and out through your groin.

CHARISMA

●●

167

See https://soundcloud.com/user-348637583/body-scan?in=user-  348637583/sets/the-outstanding-actor-2e

Scanning through these points, your whole body is able to let go tension and your mind also quietens. For an even deeper level of relaxation, you can try breathing through each of those points four times. Even then, it takes only a few minutes.

Breathing by numbers Many Eastern breathing exercises are based on a slow inward breath, which gives you a deep relaxation, and also quietens the mind. ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

Sit comfortably, feeling yourself grounded and balanced, with your hands resting on your knees and your eyes closed. Using the diaphragm, each breath should feel as if it’s dropping right down to your lower abdomen. Notice any minimal tensions, for example around the lips or the jaw, and gently release them. Breathe in through the nose on a slow count of 5. You can base this on your heart beat. Hold the breath in for 5, then breathe out through the mouth for 5. Hold it out for 3. So that cycle goes: 5, 5, 5, 3. Next breathe in for 6, hold in for 6, breathe out for 6 and hold out for 3. Thus: 6, 6, 6, 3. For deeper relaxation, this cycle of 6 can be done three times. Then come back to the cycle of: 5, 5, 5, 3. Next do a cycle of: 4, 4, 4, 2. Then 3, 3, 3, 2. Then 2, 2, 2, 2. Finally you can return to normal but slow breathing for a short while. See https://soundcloud.com/user-348637583/breathing-bynumbers?in=user-348637583/sets/the-outstanding-actor-2e

The important thing here is to take it at your own pace: you don’t want to feel you’re suffocating. If you initially find it difficult to breathe in slowly, it helps to think of allowing the breath to come in a little at a time, rather than drawing it in. It then becomes a passive rather than an active breath, which also helps relax the torso. Although it takes only a few minutes, this exercise gives you a very deep level of relaxation.

Sleep Finally, some tips on that early casualty of stress: sleep. For many actors, this is a perennial problem because the mind refuses to shut off. And when your mind is darting around, it will usually end up churning over lots of anxieties and

168

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

worries. New research shows that not only does your mind think less clearly with lack of sleep, but even two days shortage of sleep takes a toll on our health. So the amount of sleep (ideally not less than seven hours a night) and the quality of sleep are important. Obviously it’s not a brilliant idea to go to sleep in an anxious state, because you can expect to have a troubled night. An effective solution, therefore, is to give the mind a focused task that will make it tired, provided your final thoughts for the day are pleasant ones, which in turn will affect the quality of the sleep you are about to have.

The gratitude exercise ●●

●●

When you’re lying in bed and are ready to go to sleep, spend five minutes reviewing the day by going through the good things that happened in the day: things you can be thankful for. You can choose whether you start at the beginning of the day and work through it chronologically, or start at the end of the evening and work your way back.

Once you’ve done it over a few nights, a new habit is established and you may find that you seldom get all the way through this exercise because you’re already asleep. If you go to sleep with positive thoughts that raise your self-esteem and make you feel good about yourself, you’re more likely to have a restful night’s sleep.

Seeing the wider picture While many people can’t usually see beyond the detail, those with charisma are able to stand back when they need to and see the wider picture. Consequently they have a sense of perspective about their life and work.

The helicopter view This is a brilliant way of dealing with that moment when you just want to scream. Have you ever been in a plane or a helicopter and looked out the window as you were taking off? Everyone on the ground gets smaller and smaller, and their little lives seem increasingly far away. Next time you’re in a crisis or blown away by stress, try this immediately. ●●

Imagine you’re going up in a helicopter. Look down on yourself and ask: How important will this be in ten minutes?

CHARISMA

●●

●●

●● ●●

●●

169

If it’s going to be hugely important in ten minutes, then go up a bit higher and ask: How important will this be in ten hours? And if you’re still going to be upset, go up a bit higher and ask yourself: How important will this really be ten days from now? That should help you see the moment in perspective. But let’s imagine this is a real crisis that’s going to be rumbling for ages. Go up higher and ask: How important will this be in ten weeks? Still not enough? Keep going up. How important will this be in ten months? And if it really feels like the end of life as you know it, go right up and ask: Really, how important will this be ten years from now?

170

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

By all means, scream and shout in the moment of crisis, but the helicopter view helps you to get perspective and see the wider picture, with the result that you can bounce back more quickly. And here’s the crucial point: having seen the wider picture, decide what action you need to take. Then do it. In this way, you deal with the crisis not by retreating into a ‘poor me’ mode, but by acting proactively.

Managing your time Being at ease and seeing the wider picture also mean deciding what is important; in other words, prioritizing. Most actors oscillate from having loads of time on their hands to being frantically over-worked. If you can use the down-time effectively to prepare for the work time, it will increase your readiness as an actor when the work does appear. And if you can manage your time effectively to get things done, it will enhance your charisma because of the positive energy this sends out. This is another quality of outstanding people: they can navigate themselves through the tasks crying out for attention to focus on what is really important. Here are the three most powerful methods of time management that I’ve used to help both actors and business executives.

The Four Quadrants Sometimes known as the Eisenhower method,4 this helps you to understand the weight of all the tasks you have to do, and then prioritize them. Setting up a matrix based on urgency and importance, you divide everything you have to do into four quadrants as follows:

Important

Not Important

Urgent

Not urgent

1 ACTIVITIES Crises Pressing problems Audition preparation Learning lines Deadline-driven projects

2 ACTIVITIES Developing skills Relationship building Networking Recognizing new opportunities Planning

3 ACTIVITIES Interruptions, Some phone calls Some email Some meetings Friends’ requests

4 ACTIVITIES Trivia Some email Some phone calls Social media Time wasters

CHARISMA

●●

●●

●●

●●

171

Quadrant 1 (urgent and important), if it is too full, leads to stress and burnout because everything has been left till the last minute and you’re overwhelmed by one crisis after another. Quadrant 3 (urgent but not important) is also stressful because you feel you’re dancing to everyone else’s tune and all your goals are sliding away. Quadrant 4 (not urgent and not important) leaves you dependent on others to get anything done and you find yourself frittering your days away. Quadrant 2 (not urgent but important) is the important one you aim for. Try to get most of your tasks into this box: it’s based on vision and discipline, and you find yourself leading a balanced, fulfilling life where you are strategically moving towards your goals.

The only way to get more time in Quadrant 2 (urgent but not important) is to take it from Quadrants 3 and 4. And the only way to keep out of Quadrant 1 is to deal with these activities when you can still put them in Quadrant 2, before they become urgent. All this means saying ‘no’ to some of the things that are leading you away from your goals. For example, you have an audition coming up tomorrow and you haven’t learnt your lines as well as you’d like to because a friend urgently needs your help with a personal problem, or you spent too much time on Facebook last night. Or you want to write a play, but all the day-to-day things that bring in money are coming first. The solution is to prioritize by reserving time for the things that are most important. Learn your lines, then help your friend, or see if someone else can help them. Reward yourself with Facebook time once you’ve prepared for the audition. Commit to a set number of hours each day, at a certain time, to work on writing that play. And plan ahead so you can keep track of deadlines that are coming up.

The Five Things This is a marvellously simple way to prioritize all your tasks and make them happen. ●●

●●

●●

At the end of each day, list the five most important things you want to do tomorrow. The next day, you work at that list, trying to get them all done. Those five have priority over everything else. If you don’t get one of them done, you carry it forward to the following day.

Having only five tasks forces you to decide what is really important.

172

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

The One Thing If you want to narrow your focus even further, you can use the ‘one thing’ model.5 Reflecting the Russian proverb, ‘If you chase two rabbits you will not catch either of them’, this is a reaction against multi-tasking, where we end up doing nothing well because our attention is so fragmented. Success comes from doing one thing at a time. So, you ask yourself the focusing question: ‘What is the one thing I can do that will make everything else easier or unnecessary?’ You can apply this to any situation and also give it a time frame. For example, ‘What is the one thing I can do this week to get me better work as an actor?’ ‘What is the one thing I can do today that will start moving me up to the next level?’

Charisma and confidence As I’ve shown, you don’t always have to have charisma offstage to be an outstanding actor. But those who can turn it on, authentically, are at an advantage. And if you practise it, in little ways in everyday life, it will be easier to use it when you’re under pressure. People with charisma attract others to them because they are radiating confidence. They walk into a room and they look effortlessly important. They walk on stage and your eyes are riveted to them.

Think positively To exude charisma, you need to look, sound and be confident. To become confident, you need a default of positive thinking. In the chapter on grit, I showed how positivity is essential for achieving goals. We enter controversial territory here because sceptics insist that relentless positive thinking can lead you towards unrealistic expectations, which in turn will make you even more negative and depressed when you fail to reach your goals. Furthermore, in a social media world, where everyone seems to project delirious happiness, you can feel guilty about having a negative day and not looking happy enough. And this can put you under pressure to project a mask rather than your authentic self. However, the research in psychology comes out so heavily in favour of positive thinking, as an overall default, that you’d be foolish to ignore it. Repeatedly it’s been found that going after what you want produces better results than trying to avoid what you don’t want.6

Be an optimist With positive thinking goes optimism. Charismatic people also tend to be optimists, which is another trait of almost all successful people, whichever field

CHARISMA

173

they’re in. When anything bad happens, pessimists tend to go into a downward spiral, while optimists bounce back more quickly by looking on the bright side. The difference between optimism and pessimism is partly a question of language, for example: Is your glass half empty or half full? Once you’re aware of the language you’re using, you have a choice, and you can train yourself to think more optimistically. Here’s a conversation I recently overheard: A. B. A. B.

Hello there. Hello, how are you, today? Fine thanks. Great. How’s yourself? Not too bad. Can’t complain.

One person expressed himself in positives, the other in negatives; one focused on what he wanted and the other focused on what he didn’t want. Neither of them was aware they were doing this: it was their habit. That was just a snapshot moment, but imagine spending a whole week of your life thinking mainly in negatives. How would you feel at the end of it? Imagine spending a year, or ten years in mainly negatives. What would you look like? The good news is that to a large extent you can choose the way you think. The benefits of positive thinking and optimism, as a life-long habit, are that it will show on your face, in your body language and the words you use to talk about yourself and your feelings. Charismatic people tend to be optimists. However, when confronted with a negative crisis, the challenge of being optimistic is that, at the time, we can’t always see how any good can possibly come out of it. In fact we judge it there and then either good or bad. Indeed, in the middle of a crisis, it’s difficult to see the wider picture and take the helicopter view. But, as I showed in Pressure and Performance (page 77), if you can see the crisis as a challenge, you are more likely to move into it rather than run away from it. You can then accept the situation, take the necessary action and move on to trust that, in the end, everything will work out for the best. Years ago I applied for a job I really wanted – and was rejected. At the time I was bitter and angry about it, but I took decisive action and before long, went on to get a much better job, and that initial rejection turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. But at the time it didn’t feel like that. This is particularly relevant to actors because if you don’t get the part in one audition it may open the way to getting a better role in something else. But it won’t feel like that at the time. The advice of one of my friends was: ‘If you don’t get the part, allow yourself one day of mourning, then put it behind you and move on.’ There should always be hope and expectation. And you are sometimes faced with agonizing dilemmas: When offered two jobs, do you choose this one or that one? Without a crystal ball you can only be guided by your intuition, which is another reason why you need a calm, relaxed centre to work from.

174

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

Optimism makes you more inclined to be proactive, with the result that you are better able to spot opportunities and act on them. Cast in the apparently unrewarding role of the creature Gollum in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Andy Serkis found himself suddenly the expert on performance capture acting. He made this his thing and quickly became the go to actor for digital characters, then went on to set up a multi-million-pound business based on performance capture technology. And in 2020 he won a BAFTA award for Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema. Optimism, however, doesn’t mean going through life with an insane smile and a reckless disregard for reality. When beginning a project the wise person will always plan for worst case scenarios, but they will move forward, expecting to succeed. Successful people tend to be optimistic. The top actors I spoke to may have faced knocks in their lives but basically, they were all optimists. So, which comes first: the optimism or the success? Research shows that in most cases, optimism paves the way for success. Optimism reveals itself through your behaviour, and you can choose how you behave. When you walk into a room, do you make the place a little bit darker or do you light it up? On a trip to New Zealand I spotted this motto painted on the back of a truck: ‘Nobody ever went blind looking on the bright side.’

The snapshot test Does the way you feel on the inside reflect the outside? We may think we’re being generally positive, or optimistic, or friendly, but that may not always be what people are picking up. Here’s a simple way of testing where you are on the optimism scale. ●●

●● ●●

Think of someone you know very well – a friend, a family member. What is the expression on their face? Are they smiling, looking thoughtful, worried, serious? This ‘snapshot’ impression is the sum total of all your memories of seeing them. It gives you an instant default picture of them. Think of another person and note their expression. Now, perhaps on the phone, ask someone who knows you very well to say what expression they see in their snapshot picture of you. That’s how you’re coming across to them. Are there any surprises? Is there anything you would like to change? We show a different side of ourselves to different people, so to get a more accurate picture of yourself, you could ask several people for their snapshot image of you.

CHARISMA

175

The audition interview exercise To prove that optimism is a choice you can make, try this exercise, preferably recording it on your phone. It’s one of the most powerful demonstrations of positive thinking I’ve ever come up with. Ideally you need someone to ask you the questions, but you could also apply it straight away in a real-life situation. ●●

●●

●●

Role-play an interview for an acting job, answering questions about yourself, your acting experience, your hopes for the future and what you can bring to this job. But you do it twice. In the first version, you prepare yourself in a negative frame of mind. Be specific, with thoughts such as: ‘I haven’t got enough experience for this role,’ ‘I’m probably the wrong type,’ ‘I’m much too young,’ ‘I don’t think she likes me,’ ‘Anyway, I’m crap at improvisation, so I wouldn’t cope.’ Then, in this negative frame of mind, try to do your best to make a good impression. Don’t throw it away with ‘negative acting’, but make the negative thoughts strong enough to affect your concentration while trying to do your best. Then you do the same interview again. This time, prepare yourself in a positive frame of mind. Keep your thoughts specific: ‘My training has prepared me well for this,’ ‘I’ve got the skills they’re looking for,’ ‘I’d be brilliant in this role,’ ‘I seem to be creating a great rapport with her,’ ‘I love talking about my passion for acting.’ Again, try to do your best to make a good impression and make the positive thoughts very strong.

When I’ve run this exercise with actors and drama students, and also with hundreds of senior executives role-playing a meeting, the difference between the two versions has been striking. Nobody is going to employ the first person, but the second person just makes you want to say, yes. The reason is that, for a start, when you’re in a negative frame of mind, your confidence melts away. It’s harder to formulate sentences and get your thoughts out coherently. You sound neither articulate nor enthusiastic. You’re likely to lose eye contact, the body language becomes closed and the voice starts to sound monotonous. Crucially, this drags down the energy of the interviewer as well and makes the interview hard going. Also, it becomes harder for them to listen to you and keep focused on what you’re saying. In a positive frame of mind, your confidence soars. You naturally sit up and look the interviewer in the eye, your body is animated, your voice brightens, and you convey an energy and enthusiasm that make you more attractive – and charismatic. This gives energy to the interviewer who is then more likely to listen to you with enthusiasm. As discoveries in neuroscience show, the mirror neurons

176

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

that are activated in conversations like this mean that we are affected by the other person, and that influences the way we feel when talking to them. The key point of this exercise is that in both cases, you were trying to do your best. The different outcome was solely because of your negative or positive state of mind. Now you may be thinking: this is obvious – nobody’s going to go into an audition or interview doing the negative energy thing. But while we may know this intellectually, we all have bad days and at those times we’re not always aware of our thinking patterns. Sometimes, there may be things going on in our private lives that cast a shadow over us and the danger is that we can bring that cloud into the room. Actors know this very well in performances, where you just have to put everything behind you and focus on the job in hand. The show must go on. But offstage, in something as simple as an audition or an interview, we can forget that and unconsciously slip into a negative frame of mind. So, as a professional discipline, it’s useful to face any situation in a positive frame of mind, expecting a successful outcome. This also increases your chances of succeeding against the odds. It increases your confidence and of course it heightens your charisma. Furthermore, positive energy tends to make you attractive to other people. This was proved by the young and out of work George Clooney, who quickly learnt to hustle with charm. At his first agency, he would flirt with the receptionist, who then slipped him the casting breakdowns: ‘So I would call and pretend to be an agent, and pitch myself: “There’s this young actor, George Clooney, who you should see for this part. This guy’s really great.” I got myself five or six auditions that way.’7

Painting the wall Finally, here is proof that positive thinking not only affects the way you feel, it also affects your physical energy. Try this exercise now. ●●

●●

Imagine you’re painting a wall in your home. Pick up an imaginary paint brush, dip it into the imaginary paint and mime the action of painting the wall. Do this for one minute, with negative thoughts. Find a constant stream of reasons why you don’t want to be painting this wall: ‘The colour is terrible. Why me? No one’s going to like this. The paint goes on terribly. It’ll need at least two coats. The colour is totally wrong, I’ll probably have to do it all again with a different colour. The smell is awful. It’s filling my lungs.’ Keep the scenario going in your mind.

CHARISMA

●●

●●

●●

177

After a minute of this, put your brush down and notice how you are feeling. Your arm will probably feel tired for one thing, and you may be surprised how much energy you’ve used up. Now pick up the brush again and paint the wall, this time with a stream of positive thoughts: ‘It’s going on like a dream. So smooth! And the coverage is wonderful. It might only need one coat. The colour’s just right. It makes the room look much lighter and friendlier. Everyone’s going to love it. It’s really good to do something physical for a change. Very relaxing.’ After a minute, put your brush down and notice how you feel. Although you’ve been painting for an additional minute, I’ll bet you don’t feel tired at all and your emotional state is much brighter.

That’s a physical effect, yet it was all in your imagination. Both times you were just pretending. The point is that your unconscious mind can’t always distinguish between imagination and reality. If you still don’t believe that, try this:

The lemon test ●● ●● ●●

●●

Imagine a fresh lemon on the table in front of you. You pick up a knife and carefully cut the lemon in half. You pick up one half of the lemon, you look at the cut segments and raise the lemon to your mouth, then squeeze the juice onto your tongue. Are you salivating yet?

And here’s one more you can try that shows the relation between the inner (how you feel) and outer (what you project). The power of this exercise is that by being aware of the outer you can choose to change the inner.

The frown/smile test ●●

●●

●●

●●

Continue doing whatever you were doing but for the next two minutes, just frown and stay in that frowning expression. Time yourself. When two minutes are up, let go the frown but notice how you feel. I’m guessing you’ll now be somewhere between grumpy, depressed or even angry. After a little while, continue what you were doing before and this time adopt a broad grin. At the end of two minutes, notice how you feel. You’re almost certainly now in a good mood.

178

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

The reason you felt angry or happy was that for two minutes your brain was confused and couldn’t tell the difference between really feeling that or faking it. Interestingly, when I’ve asked a class of actors to frown while I talked to them for two minutes, they found it difficult to stay focused on what I was saying. So our attention deteriorates as well. You can also try the negative-positive mindset with a real-life activity, such as learning your lines, and notice the difference.This is why it’s important to get control of your mind and start setting a default of positive thinking. Not only will that change the way you feel, but your physical behaviour will reflect that, which in turn will affect the way other people respond to you.

Charisma in a nutshell Charisma is what makes you stand out from others. Actors with charisma follow certain practices: they place their attention not on themselves but on the other actors; they have an ease, which comes through relaxation; they exude confidence, which comes from a predominantly positive mindset. By adopting these habits, both on stage or screen and in everyday life, you can strengthen your charisma and pave the way to a more successful career, which we’ll discuss in the next chapter.

Summing up All my research and experience have shown that, while successful actors project a range of positive traits, the seven qualities I’ve identified are the key factors that make a difference between average and outstanding. Furthermore, they are all qualities that you can nurture in yourself by checking your values and adopting the most productive work habits. The crucial thing is to realize that you can control your mind: you can choose how you think. This leads to positive habits that will help you get the best out of your acting talent. And remember, that talent was your starting point: it is never fixed. It is therefore what you are doing with that talent now that makes the difference, through a growth mindset that will enable you to take risks, learn from mistakes, pick yourself up and move forward to greater success.

PART THREE

OUTSTANDING IN YOUR CAREER

180

8 THE PATH TO SUCCESS So, you’ve got all your values in place and you’re projecting the seven key qualities, but we’re still not quite there. Having watched so many of my former students flourish, I’m going to finish by giving you the key tips that will help you navigate your way through the business to have a long-lasting, successful career. As I’ve made clear, success in acting depends not just on what happens in rehearsal or performance, but also on what you do outside that. Remember, there are two aspects to succeeding: doing exciting work and getting the job in the first place. As you will see in this chapter, how you behave offstage will affect what happens onstage. In this chapter, we’ll examine some of the key practices, mainly outside performance, that helped top actors to become successful, and I’ll show you how you can adopt them yourself. We’ll also look at how successful actors have engaged with changes in the profession. There is a minefield of obstacles you need to negotiate if you are to succeed, and we need to be realistic about that. The actors I spoke to talked candidly and openly about these issues, and their advice can save you years of unnecessary anguish. Yes, being an actor is challenging and there can be long periods out of work. But then, why do so many people around the world aspire to acting as a career? It’s because the rewards of thrilling an audience are well worth the effort. Because when it goes well, you feel you’re making a difference in people’s lives. And consequently, you feel a sense of purpose in being on the planet. Keep focused on that higher purpose and it will give you the motivation to carry on. In everything that follows, the message is simple: be prepared, be proactive, be true to yourself. Otherwise, you can be taken by surprise and stumble. This final chapter will show you how to face the challenges and succeed.

Manage you career Working with agents Whether you’re working with an agent or without one, you need to be proactive in managing your career. The positive side of agents is that they can help you get

182

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

auditions, they can give you moral support and they can be good at negotiating terms for you. They can’t actually get you the job. The negative side is that they can unintentionally lead you into a passive approach where you leave everything to them, which causes you to moan a lot: ‘My agent doesn’t work hard enough for me.’ See it as a business partnership. It’s useful therefore to know what the agent is looking for from you. For one thing it’s an actor who is not afraid to use their intuition and taste, and not frightened to discuss things. The most stimulating actors, according to the agent Dallas Smith, are focused on what they really want to do, rather than drifting from job to job. ‘It’s the ability to make the right choices,’ he said. ‘It’s the ability to manage their career and have a focus about where they want to go. That’s what makes a great actor.’

Me.com To manage your career, you need to see yourself not just as an artist: you have to become your own manager and run yourself like a business. Think of yourself as ‘Me.com’, which will give you a more objective approach. It will also make you more resourceful and resilient than actors who rely on their agents to do everything for them. This means adopting an entrepreneurial spirit: the same energy, commitment and enthusiasm that anyone needs when starting up a new business. The first thing any start-up business needs is a business plan, which lays out what they are going to do and how they will do it. As ‘Me.com’, you need a clear plan that is going to help you achieve your goal of getting good, regular work as an actor, and a sense of career progression. What follows are some of the steps you can take to achieve that.

Persistence with patience When you one day look back on the long span of your career, you will probably pinpoint one period as the golden age, when you did what you consider your best work. And that will be different for everyone. It’s important to accept that your time may not come when you’re in your twenties: it may be much later. As Paapa Essiedu put it, ‘There’s an individuality to your journey and that doesn’t necessarily demand immediate gratification or immediate success.’ Think marathon, not sprint.

Focus on your vision Your dream of being an outstanding actor will sometimes feel within your grasp and then it might fade into a far-off mirage, only to come closer again further

THE PATH TO SUCCESS

183

down the line. The day-to-day demands of survival can easily take your eye off the bigger picture.

SWOT analysis When you find yourself stuck it’s useful to do a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), which immediately gives you an objective perspective on your situation at that moment. It’s very simple. ●●

●●

First, list all your Strengths as an actor, then your Weaknesses. These first two categories concern your traits and abilities: what’s got you to this point in your career. Now list the Opportunities that surround you, then the Threats that face you. These categories concern the world you live in, the effect it has on you and how you can engage with it.

The key section is Opportunities because this is about you being proactive to take control of your life. You can only deal with the threats by concentrating on the opportunities. A well thought-out SWOT will give you a practical action plan of what you’re going to do to achieve your goal. Here’s an example of one I did with a young actor. But be sure to do your own because the focus of your SWOT may be different. It’s a tremendously valuable tool. STRENGTHS Sense of humour Determination and ambition Energy Youth Openness Hardworking Commercially attractive I’ve had a very strong training I don’t have any domestic commitments yet I can do both American and British accents I have an agent Good contacts in the profession I live in London – able to meet people swiftly WEAKNESSES Not much experience in the profession My voice could be stronger Limited finances No showreel Not much audition experience

184

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

I’m a bit shy in dealing with professional people I tend to lose confidence quickly OPPORTUNITIES I can market myself more actively I can get articles about me in newspapers and magazines I can write articles in newspapers and magazines I can increase my networking chances – go to more industry events I can get new photos taken I can make a showreel (audio and video) I can improve the quality of my self-tapes I can make a short film I can write and produce my own solo show I can write letters to key potential employers I can make better use of social media – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram I can draw strength from my circle of actor friends I can create good alternative work with my transferable skills I can say no to unsuitable work I can use down time to broaden my intellect and knowledge I can create my own theatre company THREATS A new wave of fresh actors will come into the profession in July Funding for the arts is very low Coping with frequent rejection Low pay Alcohol abuse I might lose my state of fitness Confidence is eroded with lack of work The popular press, gossip and social media Domestic and financial pressures Living in London is expensive

Which job? As an actor you’re bound to be faced with tantalizing dilemmas. Ashley Zhangazha once told me he had just been offered a part in a two-year world tour of Hamlet for Shakespeare’s Globe. ‘I turned it down,’ he said, ‘because it would take me out for two years when I’d miss other opportunities that might happen.’ ‘What was the part?’ I asked. ‘Hamlet,’ he said.

THE PATH TO SUCCESS

185

Six months later he was about to join a production of Hamlet in Manchester to play Laertes. ‘I’m certain I made the right choice,’ he later told me. ‘I wanted a bit of variety. And hopefully, the part will come up again in the future.’ It’s a gamble. Some actors have a knack of making the right decision, while others see their careers blighted by a series of wrong turnings. Sound judgement is knowing when to say no. At the heart of the dilemma is the difficulty of trying to work out whether, even in the short term, it’s better to take any work, and therefore keep building your skills as an actor, or to wait for a better job that could mean a quantum leap forward in your career. Sometimes, this might mean turning down something that seems immediately lucrative. As Damian Lewis commented: My agent said, ‘I can keep you in work eleven months of the year doing bits of this and that. But if you want a career, you’ve got to say no to going and doing the first job that comes along, just because that job feels exciting. I know it gives you three months’ work. Or you might be desperate for the money.’ But she would always encourage you to say, no. And that’s the hardest thing as an actor. By saying no, you make yourself available, more stuff comes in hopefully, and there may be something better, more exciting, or just different for you. All the actors I spoke to agreed that the ideal career comprises a balance of stage and screen acting. Working on stage builds your sense of craft, while screen acting can additionally give you a higher profile, which in turn will influence your earning power. But the important thing is to keep on working and building your skills in both media so that you get better and better. Then the opportunities will come. After a run of film work, Orlando Bloom found himself looking for an opportunity to return to the stage. Having not been on stage for six years since his Broadway debut as Romeo, the prospect was both daunting and exciting for him. But the experience of playing an unexpectedly nasty character in the West End hit Killer Joe was so refreshing that he told me at the time he vowed to do this more regularly. Reminiscing, Orlando said: ‘As Ian [McKellen] had once told me, “it’s the best way to sharpen the tools.” It’s the clarity you need. It’s the discipline of that work that gives you focus and concentration. Standing in front of an audience for eight shows a week is challenging and incredibly liberating. Working together as a company of actors will always be a great litmus test and an incredible opportunity to reconnect to your passion for creativity and developing character.’

Do well in auditions Too many good actors fail to get the part because they have the wrong attitude to the audition or haven’t prepared properly. Audition technique is crucial in the

186

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

business nowadays because, as the agent Dallas Smith said, ‘I can do the deal, I can get them into the meeting, but I cannot do the audition. And I’ve seen people fail auditions if they haven’t got the skills to do it. Make them interested in you. You’ve got to create an atmosphere where they want to work with you. I’m not sure that a lot of actors necessarily get that.’

Preparing well Directors and casting directors say they are too often confronted by ill-prepared actors. In film auditions for instance, it’s essential to learn the lines (or ‘sides’ as they are known). Find out in advance how long the audition will be and what form it will take. If it’s ten minutes, you need to get everything into ten minutes. If it’s half an hour, you need to prepare differently. Come with ideas and be prepared to discuss them. If the director says, ‘Do you have any questions,’ make sure you’ve thought about them in advance, then be concise and to the point. Find out as much as you can about the play, the writer, the director. The casting director Anne McNulty finds herself telling actors, ‘You need to know what the play is. You need to have done your homework and there’s no excuse not to, because there’s Wikipedia and the internet. You don’t have to go to the library, get a book out, spend three hours reading a whole play and going, I think it means this. You can do that in a snapshot moment because it’s all set out for you.’ At the same time, it can be very challenging to find the right level of openness, even for top actors. Lily James described flying to New York to audition for Steve McQueen and what she learnt: My agent said, ‘There’s only a few of you in it. You can get this.’ It actually turned out there was loads of girls still in the mix. And I just put so much pressure on myself. We did one scene once, second scene once. And then at the end of the third scene, I’m thinking ‘No, no, God! It’s getting away from me, it’s running away from me!’ and at the end I said, ‘Oh I’m sorry, that’s just not how I imagined it at all’. And he told me that that was holding me back, that whatever happens in the moment is right, you can’t try and control it. So I think, try to prepare, prepare, prepare and then go in and just be really relaxed and open. Let it fall out of you.

Finding focus In addition to your openness, you need to project your enthusiasm for the job, but without tipping into arrogance. And maintain that subtle balance between being desperate and coming across as laid back. What the director needs is an

THE PATH TO SUCCESS

187

idea of your range and what you will be like to work with. It’s therefore vital to bring something of yourself into the audition. This is also about being honest. Don’t be afraid to be assertive if something’s not working. With a track record of lead roles in major Italian films, Maya Sansa talked about how easy it was to be thrown in a British audition. ‘The casting director was being very British and very patronising,’ she told me. ‘And I felt uncomfortable because I wasn’t used to this anymore. It was like, “Oh, my God I’m at school”. And I said it: “Guys I’m sorry, I’m feeling like I’m at school right now. I need five seconds, I need to laugh about this,” And the director really enjoyed it and said, “Oh yes, really Maya I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Should we move the chairs, shall we move the camera?” And I’m like, “Yeah let’s do that.” So you need to be able to speak up and say, “Fuck fear!”. But sometimes we don’t believe in ourselves. And “Fuck this audition” as well. I will never get the job if I stay in this state of mind, so let’s create, let’s put myself maybe in a dangerous position. Maybe they’ll be annoyed but let’s get out of this state, whatever happens.’ Rufus Norris suggested that one way of demystifying auditions and overcoming nerves is to get experience on the other side. ‘As you go on in your career you will get to know directors personally,’ he told me, And if somebody’s auditioning for a show that you’re not right for, ask them if you can read for them – not to audition but to help them audition. Then you spend a day in auditions on the other side of the table and you understand a deal more about it. Both about what actors bring into the audition room, and what the director is looking for or what the part requires. Often actors who come in are just not right for it; you can be completely brilliant but you can be not right. Ultimately the main thing I would say about audition technique is to learn how to deal with the inevitable rejection that comes with it.

Self-tapes An increasingly important trend, especially for trans-Atlantic work, is the online audition, either live or as a pre-recorded self-tape. And that is a technique you need to be comfortable with. Fortunately you can easily practise this with your iPad or phone. But check everything carefully – lighting, camera angle, make-up, and so on – before you send it over. Pay particular attention to the sound quality: lapel microphones are relatively cheap but can make all the difference. A tripod is well worth having, too. As Rufus Norris explained, ‘I have cast people in leading roles in films from self-tapes, surprisingly. On both those occasions it was because the actor really put the work in and probably that was take 30, you know. It’s not just “Oh I’ll

188

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

read it out and see if … ” You’ve only got one pitch but make it one that you’re really happy with.’

Getting the tone right Whatever level you’re at, the main challenge of auditions is to maintain an aura of confidence, enthusiasm and openness. However you are feeling, you need to bring a positive energy into the room because that will help give the director confidence in your ability. Dallas Smith warned, ‘There’s a vicious circle, because if you don’t do a good audition, you start to lose your confidence, and then you go into the next audition and people can smell fear. It becomes almost impossible. And that’s a horrible situation for any actor to be in.’ One way of focusing on the positivity is to remember that, much as you may want the job, it is after all a two-way process. Jude Law reflected: I remember being given some great advice early on. It’s not something that I fully understood at the time, but I look back now and I wish someone had told me when I was very young. When you’re at an audition, in a way you’re also auditioning the director, without them knowing. If you sit there and you think ‘This person’s terrifying, and why is he shouting at his assistant like that?’, you will think, ‘Do I really want to work with someone who’s going to terrify me? Will I work to my best? Or if this person just doesn’t seem to be interested, and yet I got the job, what am I going to get from this? Or is this person engaging and full of ideas, and suddenly asks me something I’ve never thought about with this part that I’ve been reading?’

Be courteous Courtesy is one of the most important habits you can adopt if you want to have a successful career. It’s about respecting the people you work with and treating them the way you would like to be treated. Not everyone does this, however. I’ve heard of Hollywood starlets sweeping all the food and drink off the catering table on a shoot because their favourite dish wasn’t there. And a Hollywood executive producer recently told me of scriptwriters having to drastically trim the dialogue because big stars hadn’t bothered to learn their lines properly. I also know of an actor who was rude to a casting director who kept him waiting, and he was never called again. But in general, the successful actors I know are courteous and they have impeccable manners. The importance of this is that people remember you positively and it builds up goodwill.

THE PATH TO SUCCESS

189

As Hayley Atwell observed, ‘It’s the foundation of the professional working life. People talk, it’s a small industry and our reputation is very important to having a healthy career and establishing working relationships. The greatest compliment I’ve ever had from a director is more employment from them. It shows that not only have I just been able to perform well, but the director wants to work with me again because of what I bring to a rehearsal room.’ This also means understanding that in filming, the ensemble extends to the crew and you need to make an effort to understand what everyone does. As Hayley observed, such courtesies can be a great way of dealing with nerves on the first day of shooting: It’s not waiting for people to come up to you to introduce themselves but going up to members of the crew and being like, ‘Oh Andy, the gaffer. Hello, nice to meet you. Andy, what is a gaffer? Like, what do you do?’ and they go ‘Oh, oh, yeah I’ll tell you about my job’. I used to think that, ‘Oh no, I’ve got to concentrate on my bit so that on “Action” I’ve got to keep in my world’ and actually the opposite is true. When I know that Andy the gaffer is over there and the focus puller is doing his thing and Geoffrey over there is rigging up that new Chinese light, then it just demystifies and humanises and levels out what this building site set is. The crew love it and I feel delighted when people go, ‘God you know, you’re not like usual actresses. You’re so easy. You come in, you do your job, you say hello to us in the morning, you’re just nice’. And in my mind I’m going, ‘Why is that rare? I should not be the exception here’. Even outside the job itself, you can show courtesy in many ways, for instance in thank you notes: when you’ve been auditioned by a director, send them a note to thank them for seeing you and saying how much you enjoyed the experience. But you need to keep the balance between being courteous and sycophantic: it must be well judged and sincere. Pay particular attention to the assistants, who will one day have the big jobs and the power. Freddie Fox is one of the most effortlessly courteous actors I know and significantly, from the time he entered the profession he has been almost constantly in work. I asked him how he does it: I cannot tell you how many opportunities to work with somebody a second time have been afforded me by just sort of being affable and amenable and you know, wanting to get on with people and be ‘charming’, which sounds probably a bit schmooze, sort of sleazy, when actually it isn’t at all. To be charming is to make people feel good in your company. Whether it’s a fringe show or a Hollywood film, it’s about spending time with people, showing an interest in them. You’d be amazed the amount of

190

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

people in this business who don’t ask you any questions. Something I’ve learnt over the years is to be curious about people. Ask of them, enquire of them, you know, ask them interesting questions and then people let you into their hearts. There are so many people competing that you’d be a fool if you weren’t charming and polite and kind and wanting to give the best impression of yourself and be generous to people, because otherwise you know you won’t get as much work as if you did.

Be an outstanding networker Some of the most successful actors are also very skilled networkers. They know lots of people, they are ready to help others and they know who they can turn to when they need help themselves. Networking often gets a bad name because it can push people out of their comfort zone. Yet it’s a key part of your life as an actor, so it’s a skill you should develop. You may be thinking: I hate networking, I’m terrible at parties, and at receptions I’m too shy to go up to strangers and start a conversation. Then you need to adopt new habits. Mark Simon, CEO of The Bruton Group, has been running high-level executive networking events for twenty years. As he told me, it’s all about mutuality: ‘l want to meet you as much as you want to meet me. So, it’s not just me throwing stuff at you. With networking the old adage of, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” still stands, but there’s a little bit more to it than that: it’s not just who you know, it’s how well you know someone.’ Here are some ways you can increase your networking skills.

Be positive If you walk into the room in a negative frame of mind – ‘I don’t know anybody here’, ‘Everyone’s ignoring me’ – people will read that in your body language and tend to keep away. Carry a positive energy into the room and people will tend to be more attracted to you. As Mark advises, ‘It’s not just about picking out the important people and focusing on them, it’s just going into it with an open mind, telling yourself, “I’m looking forward to this, I like meeting people”.’

Show interest in others When you meet someone important, your first instinct may be to give out a lot of information about yourself in order to sound as impressive as possible. That has the reverse effect. Why? Because we are all the centre of our universe. We

THE PATH TO SUCCESS

191

are mainly interested in ourselves, therefore we like to talk about ourselves rather than listen to other people talking about themselves. And that’s exactly where the other person is coming from. The key networking skill here is curiosity: to show a genuine interest in other people. As Freddie Fox put it, ‘Being front-footed and asking them questions and complimenting them, in a non-obsequious way about what they’ve done. It can feel like a massive effort getting there, and sometimes you desperately don’t want to socialise with your own fingernails, let alone a room full of people. But when you are there, the key is to attempt to enjoy it and use it as an opportunity to be gregarious, doing something that you just don’t do every day.’ So ask them questions, not making them feel they’re being interrogated, but developing a relaxed, lively conversation. Try to find what their interests and passions are so you can work towards common ground on which a rapport can be created. At a dinner party, I once met a rather reserved landowner, and I was floundering somewhat with her until I discovered that we both shared a passion for French theatre. From that point, she became warmer and more animated, and we’ve since become great friends.

Create rapport Research in psychology tells us that we tend to like people who are like us, so the quickest way you can build rapport is to narrow the gap between you and the other person. This concerns both content (your views, your ideas and the language you use to express them) and behaviour (the way you move and speak). Authenticity is crucial. You must still be natural and true to yourself, otherwise you’ll come across as affected, but within your natural range of expression you do have room for manoeuvre. For example, if the other person speaks quickly in a clipped manner and you speak slowly in a languid drawl, you will only widen the gap between you. If the other person uses animated, lively gestures and open body language, and you stand with your hands in your pockets, that also will widen the gap and rapport will be much harder to achieve. I’m not saying that you should blatantly mirror everything the other person is doing because you will usually be found out, leading to a communication catastrophe and an abrupt end to the conversation. However, as an actor, you are likely to be highly attuned to the nuances of body language and vocal inflection, so you’re practically on home ground here. The subtle matching of body language and vocal patterns is enough to draw the other person in, and besides, when we are in natural rapport with someone, we unconsciously do this anyway.

192

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

Play the host To give yourself more confidence at any networking event, Mark Simon’s best advice is: ‘Before you walk in, think “I’m going to act as though I’m the host.” If you see someone standing by themselves, go up to them and talk to them, smile, say “Hello, how’s it going?” It doesn’t matter if you don’t know them. It’s the same in acting as it is in the world of work: whoever you engage with, you want them walking away saying “I really like him”, “I should be working with her”, or “I wonder how I can use him in my next production”. At an event, instead of waiting to be introduced, see whom you can introduce to someone else. Suddenly you feel as if you’re at the centre of the action.’

Help others One of the most powerful parts of networking concerns your attitude to the other person. Rather than be on the lookout for how you can exploit a new contact, think about how you might be able to help them, even an important person. To paraphrase President Kennedy: ask not what people can do for you, but ask what you can do for them. That might be through a particular action, some advice you give or knowledge you share. This is hugely powerful because it will interest people in you. They will see you as a generous person and in turn they will be more likely to want to help you when you need it. It also builds up your network of influence across a wide range of people in all sorts of areas. But your attitude is crucial: not going in with the cynical thought, ‘If I do her a favour I can get something back’, but rather giving everything away freely. It may feel at first that you’re giving more than you’re receiving, but so be it. All the while your influence is building. And of course it’s crucial to follow through on it, not offering anything you can’t actually deliver, which instantly breaks trust. There are many ways that you can help others: for example, casting information. You may be up for a casting that’s not right for you, but it may be just right for one of your friends. So let them know about it. There’s plenty of room for everyone.

Success and fame A lead role in a hit play or film will often bring fame. This level of success may sound glamorous, but it has to be very carefully handled because it can be a dizzying experience. For Ewan McGregor, for whom fame struck at twenty-five with the film Trainspotting, success is like a wave. ‘You can see it all the time with people who don’t deal with it very well, become carried away with themselves,

THE PATH TO SUCCESS

193

start believing what’s written about them, and feeling all powerful, morally feeling above the rules. And it’s an easy way to destruction.’ For some actors fame comes with awesome swiftness. Al Pacino talked of the effect of sudden success on the New York stage at twenty-seven, then becoming a movie star at thirty-two with four Oscar nominations for four films in a row. ‘That was like being shot out of a cannon. I’m tellin’ ya, I was shot out of a cannon. I didn’t know where I was? I was lost.’ Paapa Essiedu talked about the need to keep grounded under the pressure of fame by focusing on the work itself. ‘It’s a really dangerous game,’ he said. ‘Because it can take, take, take then spit you out. Then what do you have? Whereas the thing about the work is that it will always give back to you. The work is always consistent throughout your career, but I don’t think you can rely on fame or celebrity to be as loyal to you in that way.’ Lily James observed that when you reach a certain level of fame, there’s a clash between the sort of persona you’re supposed to give off versus who you want to be as an individual. ‘You feel stifled by that,’ she said. ‘I think you have to take control of your destiny, really powerfully and then let go of control in the work. You have to have a thin skin when you’re acting but then the thicker skin when it comes to responding to the you that’s projected back at you by the media.’

Use social media prudently Social media is a part of our lives and few actors can afford to ignore it. When it first appeared, through channels such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, it gave ordinary people a voice. Riding a vast wave of empowerment, they could express themselves to a potentially global audience. Inevitably, celebrities – actors included – had to catch up and they found that they could do it even better, with more glamour and more followers than anyone thought possible. But the pressure to show the world your best face led many people into a fantasy existence: the social media self as movie star. I don’t know how long the intensity of the trend will stay at this level, but so many of the people I spoke to for this book expressed their distrust and anxiety, as if they were seeing social media for the monster it had become, with them as its prisoners. How does this affect your chances of work? Handled well, social media is a brilliantly cost-effective way of spreading your network, promoting yourself and perhaps attracting the attention of employers. In the words of Kim Kardashian, it also enables you to control your narrative – you take responsibility for the story. But has it got out of hand? Rufus Norris expressed bewilderment when he told me, ‘There’s a whole movement now where people are being cast because

194

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

of the number of followers they’ve got. And now films are being made where they don’t have to worry about the reviews because the cast have got so many supporters that they can make the figures work.’ The older generation of actors, who grew up without it, has tended not to get involved in social media, so they’ve had little to lose. But younger actors expressed to me the stress of satisfying an insatiable public thirst. And they looked nostalgically back to the golden age of Hollywood when stars still enjoyed the mystique that came from distance. As Lily James told me: They did do interviews and stuff, but not in the way that we do now. And with social media, everything of ourselves is shown to the world. I can see a difference between me and actors who are four years younger, that now it’s about giving all of yourself and holding nothing back. That invites such intrusion. I have this personal battle with social media because I find it really difficult. I feel my mental health is much better when I go on breaks and don’t engage with it, because if you’re constantly having your own image reflected back at you and engaging with what people are saying about you, and having to portray a certain version of yourself, it becomes a sort of edited version of your life. Who wants to edit their own life? You just want to live it. Clearly, it does have benefits as a powerful tool that can serve your interests well, for instance if you urgently need an audience for your Edinburgh fringe show, or you want to spread the word about a friend’s new play. But you don’t want to end up as its slave. My advice, and I use social media myself, is to limit yourself to the channels that work for you and have clear lines about how you will use it and why. Acting is after all a profession and once you start inviting the world into the most private aspects of your life, you may be opening a door that is hard to close. Besides, if a casting director knows everything about you through your social media, will it make it harder for them to imagine you as a character that’s very different?

Deal with the media This leads us to the vital skill of engaging with the media, at all levels. From the fringe to Hollywood, every theatre and film company will be looking for publicity to promote its latest production and the easiest way of getting a story in the press is to set up an interview with one of the cast. Sometimes, it will be written into your contract. This is where many actors have come seriously unstuck, regretting things they’ve said for years to come. Theatre and film companies will very rarely invest in getting you media-trained, so your skill in handling the media is something you need to take responsibility for yourself.

THE PATH TO SUCCESS

195

The peg Every interview relies on a ‘peg’ – the reason for running the interview at that particular time. It will usually be the production or film you’re appearing in, so your main purpose is to promote the show. From a commercial point of view, a cover story in a national magazine is free to the production company and saves enormously on the advertising budget. So it’s important that you do it. But be on your guard because the newspaper’s or magazine’s agenda will not always be the same as your agenda. They want the juiciest story possible, because they in turn have to keep their readers happy. As Jude Law told me: I was led to believe early on in my film career that I had to do a certain amount of press every time I did a film. I was taken aside literally and advised, ‘Look, it’s best you do all of this because it keeps the studio happy, because it’s your responsibility in the part.’ Now whilst part of that is true, I wish now someone had also told me, that once you open that door as widely as they encourage you to, you are setting yourself up later on, to be judged on things that you say when you’re 22. Or photo shoots where you may be looking back 10, 15 years at a photo shoot and you think, ‘Oh really. I took my top off for that?’ Or for a girl: ‘Why did I wear that revealing dress?’ or ‘Why was I just doing it in my underwear?’ Leading arts media trainer, Tine van Houts explained that one of the main problems of actors being interviewed is that because they’re usually so nice and helpful they can easily fall for the traps of journalists who may want a confession or a tantrum. She described the best way of dealing with a tricky question you’d rather not answer: ‘Always acknowledge the question and then bridge immediately to what you want to communicate. For example, “Yes, that was a small problem, but it’s now going very well and we’re … ” And if you bridge to a good story about it, the journalist will not ask that question again. But if you don’t acknowledge the question, they’ll keep asking it again and again.’

Making the interview a success Here’s what you can do to have a successful interview and avoid being stitched up. ●●

Ask what they want to interview you about, then prepare yourself with one or two anecdotes about what it has been like working on this production. Your stories are vital because they give colour to the article. As Tine van Houts puts it, ‘Paint a picture’ by being specific rather than vague. Besides, research shows that stories, well told, stay in our

196

●● ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

minds much longer than a catalogue of facts because they engage the emotions as well as the intellect. Try to be positive about the process and never speak badly of anyone. Be clear about the main message you want to get across. Perhaps prepare three key points and make sure you get them in. Tine’s advice was, ‘Always remember that when you’re talking to a journalist, you’re not talking to them, you’re talking through them to your audience – the public.’ Have one or two ‘sound-bites’ ready because they make good, concise quotes. But beware of the negative throwaway remark. In a Sunday Times interview, the film star Bill Nighy happened to say, ‘I have a tendency to project doom.’ This appeared as the headline on the cover of the magazine. Was that really the image he wanted to get across? Avoid interviews in your home, which would be the dream choice for your interviewer because it gives away so many clues to your private life. Do you really want to be described as the person without any books, or with a terrible taste in interior decoration, or with a dozen wine bottles in the recycling bin? Find out about the interviewer, their style and their likely tactics. Do they have a reputation for ‘hatchet jobs’ where they’re out to get you? Some interviewers are very aggressive, but the ones who seem to be full of empathy can also set traps. Watch out for leading questions, such as ‘Don’t you feel that … ’ and hypothetical questions: ‘If you had to choose between family life and your acting career … ’. If you find yourself battling to avoid a topic you don’t want to talk about, you can think of it as a scene: the journalist is your scene partner and you are each playing a conflicting objective. Always be polite. The journalists are only doing their job. The interview is often a battle about who’s in the driving seat of the conversation, so try to keep it under your control. Never lose your temper and never shout. And remember to use their name, which makes a warmer impression on them, and a studio audience if it’s television. Remember that the interview has only finished when you and the interviewer have parted. Great careers have been dented because prime ministers, presidents and CEOs didn’t realize the microphone was still switched on when the interview had formally ended, or before it had formally started. The same goes for newspaper interviews. It doesn’t mean that the interview has ended when the journalist closes their notebook or turns off the audio recorder. The best quotes are often collected in the hallway on the way out. That might not be what you had intended.

THE PATH TO SUCCESS

●●

197

Finally, if you do land a main role in a high-profile production, and you have an important interview lined up, you can always ask for media training to get the best out of the opportunity.

The celebrity circus One of the major problems for actors who attract media attention is that they get drawn into the murky circus of celebrity culture, which knows no rules. The main thing is to be aware of this and play the game with your eyes open. As Jude Law commented, ‘I’ve looked into this an awful lot because the whole relationship with the media has had a huge impact on my life. I got sucked into a bizarre slough where they were literally, for four years, bugging my house and hacking my phone and interfering with my internet and all sorts, to write stories based on nothing. Based on a photo that they happened to get – of me coming out of somewhere with my child.’ It’s important that you realize you have a choice and therefore a degree of control. But you need to be clear about the terms of your contract with the media. It’s not helpful of course to say, ‘I don’t do press’ because that will make the media even more ravenous. At the same time, it’s dangerous being seduced by the initial glamour of celebrity without thinking it through. Again, Jude Law’s advice was: From a very young age, be really confident and strict about how much you reveal and how you are projected photographically on magazines and so on. Really ask yourself, do you want that in the long run? Because an awful lot of actors never do any of it and they do fine. They may not become Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt and Angela Jolie, but ask yourself, do you want to be that? Do you want to live a life where you’re surrounded by security guards? It’s an odd life. But that’s the deal you make, to go out there and sell those things like that. It’s a career choice. But it opens the door to other things. And it’s not necessarily beneficial to your acting. In fact it can get in the way.

Engage with the business side Major success, especially in films and television, will bring with it commercial pressures and you’ll soon be aware that acting is not just art but also business. Increasingly, the ‘star’ actor has to combine both those aspects and not be afraid of it. Al Pacino observed, ‘In order to be an actor that’s successful today in Hollywood, I believe you need real business acumen. You’ve got to have a good sense of business, which I don’t. But I was lucky – I came from another era.’

198

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

Jude Law pointed out: ‘It’s not just through the goodness of his heart that Tom Cruise spends three hours on a red carpet doing photos with absolutely everyone and travelling the world for two years with his projects. That’s brilliant business sense. He’s going around the world making sure everyone goes and sees his film.’ Damian Lewis’s advice was: ‘Just keep reminding yourself that it’s an artistic endeavour. I go to America. I act opposite a lot of business women and business  men. And I think sometimes there’s an imbalance between business and art. Still, there’s a contradiction because what they can teach us in America is not to be afraid of the fact that it’s a job and a job has a business aspect to it.’

Keep challenging yourself As a young actor, I grew up in the repertory system where you performed one play in the evening while rehearsing the next one in the daytime. This meant that it was largely about versatility and transformation, rather than looking the same in every play. I was often in wigs, false moustaches and beards. Today, you will tend to be cast according to what you look like, which can leave you feeling initially pigeon-holed into a narrow range of roles. Think of the young Hugh Grant, Leonardo DiCaprio or Charlize Theron. Then, as you get older, you find the need to draw on different resources and in many ways your work becomes more interesting. Think of these same three actors, for example, in their later years. Outstanding actors will continue moving forward, challenging themselves, growing and finding a new richness in each decade, which brings new casting opportunities. But this means keeping your vision alive through good times and lean times. When I spoke with Orlando Bloom he reflected, as he reached his forties, on the way he had moved on from early ‘matinee idol’ roles and realigned his priorities: I was on this jet-fuelled ride throughout my twenties and into my early thirties. I went from one trilogy of movies to another. I had the energy, enthusiasm, and my training to support me. Pirates of the Caribbean was a matinee idol type of role, but the thing is I never saw myself as a matinee idol, nor did I anticipate that I could be pigeon-holed in that way … It’s only with hindsight that you see how different one’s own personal experience was compared to the perception of an audience or the industry. But after such a huge run, it’s a bit like Bilbo Baggins says in Lord of the Rings, ‘I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.’ I

THE PATH TO SUCCESS

199

guess you could say I was experiencing burnout. In some of the roles that you see young actors playing – there’s a passion, a fire in their belly, a drive. They are not distracted. There is nothing but a focus and a deep desire to achieve and succeed. The fire and excitement in youth is something I don’t ever want to lose sight of, even as I mature as an actor. I suppose what I’m referring to is understanding your internal world. For me it’s my Buddhist practice. As an actor you need to understand yourself on a very deep level in order to be able to carry a multitude of different characters – to know yourself and have a really deep understanding of what your strengths are. I think it’s about staying passionate. So I would say don’t give over your power, and don’t give over your career or the choices you make to agents or anyone else. They have to be your choices and you have to stick by them. And I would suggest that you do whatever it takes to maintain a certain level of passion, focus and creativity so that you can continue to deliver throughout your career.

Is it harder for women? There are two issues here: How do you cope if you are a young actress liable to be pigeon-holed into shallow stereotypes; and how do you survive to get good work when you’re much older?

Being young Eleanor Wyld, starting out in her early twenties told me of her surprise at finding the industry much harder to crack than she had expected: ‘As a woman you have to navigate your way round a ton of stereotypical, badly-written dross to get to the gems,’ she said. ‘I might get an audition through for “Debbie – twenties, blonde, pretty, slutty.” And it will involve two scenes of flirty dialogue, followed by a sex scene. I am now very picky with which castings I go to.’ The dilemma facing young actresses is that such stereotypical castings, if you win the role, can sometimes open a door to better work with top writers and directors. Therefore, if you choose to accept the audition, you need to give it your best shot. While one solution is to challenge the stereotypes at the point of casting, many highly successful actresses still see this as a battle yet to be won. As Emma Thompson put it, ‘Never let yourself be defined by how you look because it’ll be over and you won’t develop. So if people go on about how you look, you have to challenge it. You have to exist as a person and a character and a brain.’1

200

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

Meryl Streep, reflecting on the beginning of her film career, said: I didn’t think of myself just as this sort of ‘modelly’ person with this gigantic long blond hair and a mournful look in the eye. I thought that there was so much more and I certainly wanted to have more fun in my career. And so I looked for opportunities to screw with how I looked, how I sounded. It was conscious in a way to not be pigeon-holed because I thought I’ll die if I can’t beam and throb and make a mess and all the things that are wonderful about acting.2

Having a family For actresses there is a period, usually in your thirties, when you may stop acting altogether because you want to raise a family. Many find it hard to return because the profession is not easily conducive to family life. Filming often happens over long hours, six days a week. Theatre can take you to different parts of the country or the world. Your weekends are interrupted by a matinee and evening performance on a Saturday. As Lesley Sharp told me, ‘It means that perhaps as a young actor what is acceptable and lovable about the intensity of our working hours becomes more difficult if you decide you want a life that includes family and security and reliability. It’s the great charm of the freelance life, wondering what might happen next. But it also is the reason that people drop out of the business at various times in their career. Parents find it hard if they’ve got a young baby or school age child to find the appropriate care. We work strange hours, it’s expensive. If you don’t have a supportive partner or a relative that’s able to step in at short notice it can be a nightmare. I can remember sometimes that my weekly wage didn’t cover the cost of the childcare I needed.’ However, despite the difficulties, especially when both parents are acting, many actors achieve long and happy relationships through give and take, and the careful organization of their time.

Being older A few actresses may be lucky enough to get good work throughout their lives, but for most, there is a clear dip when they reach their fifties. However, if you can survive into your sixties, the situation can change, provided you play to the strengths of your maturity. After playing most of the great classical roles throughout her long career, Judi Dench didn’t find international fame until her sixties when she starred in films, such as Mrs Brown, Shakespeare in Love and seven James Bond films starting

THE PATH TO SUCCESS

201

with Golden Eye. After a similarly glittering career, Maggie Smith achieved a resurgence of popularity in her late seventies in the television series Downton Abbey. And having taken a break of twenty-three years to be a Labour MP, after winning two Oscars, Glenda Jackson triumphantly returned to the stage at the age of eighty to play King Lear. Meryl Streep, who achieved early fame in films continued to find deeper and more challenging roles in her sixties and she has celebrated this as a wider trend: ‘I think it’s changing. I think I’m forging a path. I’m out there on behalf of all the old broads and I’m proud to be there. And some people are happy about it and some are not. So, screw ’em.’

Negotiate how your body is seen Especially in film and television you will tend to be cast according to how you look. But a disturbing trend in Hollywood movies is the pressure on actors to alter their body shape for a film (putting on weight or taking it off) and also to reveal more flesh. When these demands involve a leading role, the actor who isn’t prepared to go there might be missing out on a major career move: Matthew McConaughey lost almost a quarter of his body weight for The Dallas Buyers Club and was rewarded with an Oscar. So was Joaquin Phoenix in Joker, but it cost him 24 kilograms.

The ‘perfect’ body But appearing emaciated is the exception. The need to have a ‘perfect’ body, encouraged by fashion ads featuring near-naked models, has had a direct impact on how actors, both on stage and screen, are expected to look. Most leading men nowadays will at some point have to unveil an enviably muscular torso: for example, Daniel Craig iconically stepping out of the waves in his James Bond debut. Or anyone on stage playing ‘beefy’ roles such as Coriolanus or Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Leading ladies feel even more constrained to reveal an improbably slim figure, which sometimes seems to count for more than acting ability. As Hayley Atwell pointed out, ‘It’s much harder for women. We have a lot more pressure on us in terms of our weight and our image. And sometimes, fantastic actresses who have tremendous talent and power will be overlooked for someone who is beautiful and thin and famous. And there doesn’t seem to be much justice in it.’ For Emma Thompson, the way forward is for young actors and actresses to be more assertive until attitudes change, because they are the ones most likely to feel pressurized into compromising themselves:

202

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

The same goes for boys, but it’s particularly bad for girls at the moment because they seem to be required to be models as well as actors. If someone says to you, ‘You have to be thinner’, you have to challenge them by saying, ‘Why? Is my character a thin person? Is my character thin because they are suffering from some sort of eating disorder? Give me a reason. Because if this is a cosmetic reason, then what you want is a model and not an actress.’ So be firm. The more of us who counteract that, the more it will go.

When should you take your clothes off? Then there is the tricky question of nudity, which is no longer confined to porn movies. It takes courage to bare all, but even greater courage to say no if you think the nudity is unnecessary for the story. Hayley Atwell’s advice was to find your own level of comfort with it and carefully consider the consequences. Once you commit that to film, it’s immortal. It’s all over the internet and you will get fan mail from people who have freeze-frame photographs of you naked on the screen, and getting you to sign them. And you just feel really cheap. And to anyone who would say, ‘You have to get naked for this role otherwise you don’t get it,’ I would walk away. The key thing here is to recognize your control and to negotiate. You can, for instance, ask the director, ‘Where are you putting your camera? Can I see a playback?’

Sex scenes in the #MeToo age The TV series Game of Thrones smashed the limits of sex and nudity on mainstream television, putting enormous pressure on its young, often inexperienced actors. At about the same time, the producer Harvey Weinstein’s serial abuse of young women was exposed and the #MeToo movement meant that actresses started speaking out. Those in power were suddenly more careful about what they asked for. As Lesley Sharp observed, ‘There are notices from Equity in every theatre about the working practices and behaviour that are expected. It’s great. No hiding in plain sight. Anyone who is creepy or insensitive or downright inappropriate is therefore liable to be called out. Perhaps disciplined, even sacked.’ The rules may have changed for the better, but if sex on screen is becoming increasingly explicit, how do you negotiate such fragile situations? Lily James’ advice was that for a start you must have a strong contract in place because then you are safe-guarded:

THE PATH TO SUCCESS

203

Then, when it comes to the day, it’s just being honest with yourself and with the director. It’s your body, your morality, it’s what you feel comfortable with. But I do think, with what’s happened with #MeToo, you feel supported and I think people are really scared now to screw up, so they all listen to you. That makes me feel more powerful, more confident, more self-assured because there’s a solidarity in it. Then it means that you can actually feel braver and freer because you know you’re protected. And I think you probably end up giving the director more of what they want anyway. One result of the #MeToo movement has been the increasing importance of the intimacy director: someone who is brought in to negotiate and choreograph sex scenes in a way that won’t trigger a panic reaction between the actors. For Yarit Dor, who helped establish this practice in Britain, it starts with a conversation: The minute I know what your boundaries are and you know mine, we can talk about what is this moment of the kiss? What are we searching for? What does your character need to get from this moment? What do I need to get? And how do we structure this together? And it just feels like a communal agreement that we’re going to explore it together, rather than us kind of going like ‘And now I pounce on you’ and we don’t quite know what that is. Once an actor knows exactly where their hands can’t go but they know where their hands can go, that frees them up. So then you can be really creative within those parameters. And the story gets much clearer. In stage productions, the budget may not allow the luxury of an intimacy director, in which case, Yarit Dor advises, you should follow the same process, talking about it, but say what your idea is before you touch. ‘A lot of actors want to follow their impulse in the moment and the problem is that can actually trigger someone,’ she says. ‘The mistrust happens when I say my idea as I’m going to do it. Because then I don’t leave you time to consent to it, or to let you know that you can’t grab here but you could go two inches higher and its fine. That would be my biggest advice. The biggest problem I hear is, hands going to places that weren’t agreed. So each night the hands go somewhere slightly different and although an actor can feel like “Well that’s what my character would do”, the problem is it makes the other actor step out of their character and feel it as themselves. This doesn’t mean you can’t follow an impulse, as long as the parameters of touch are known and communication is open and accessible.’

Outstanding in a diverse industry If indeed ‘All the world’s a stage’, then clearly the stage should reflect the makeup of that world. The growing willingness of theatre companies and drama

204

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

schools to accept actors from more diverse backgrounds has opened up many more opportunities, especially for actors of colour. As Ashley Zhangazha told me, ‘I would never have thought, leaving Guildhall that there’d be a production where I would be able to play Biff in Death of a Salesman or Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls. And nine years later it feels like there’s a more open kind of industry. So I think there’s been positive changes in representation, which is an ongoing thing, but I think it can still go much further.’ While it’s great to have these new casting opportunities, the good intentions can open up all sorts of issues and put an actor’s identity under scrutiny. Success can thrust you into the role of ambassador for your ethnicity. When Paapa Essiedu opened as Hamlet for the RSC, the press stories were almost all headlined, ‘First black actor to play Hamlet for the RSC’ rather than focusing on the quality of his award-winning performance in both Britain and the United States. ‘I’ve always found it frustrating and reductive,’ he told me. ‘Especially the media narrative around that production, I found it really reductive and disrespectful. And there were times when it would make me really angry.’ Natasha Gordon felt a similar impact on her identity with the success of her play Nine Night. ‘You lose your sense of self for a while,’ she told me, ‘because people are busy defining who you are. They expect that suddenly you’re the voice of all black British female playwrights. And with that comes a responsibility to all the others because I stand on their shoulders. So, if you are lucky enough and things suddenly change direction, you also have to be surrounded by good people to keep you grounded.’ So how should actors of colour negotiate this minefield? Paapa’s advice was: Fiercely protect your sense of identity and your historical stories. And don’t let anyone beat that out of you, or tell you that it’s worthless. Understand that there is something phenomenal and singular and special about every person’s story. That’s what’s going to make you a great actor, so hold onto that. And also be prepared to branch out and learn and expand, to allow yourself to transcend people’s expectations of you, to have that curiosity and openness, to be able to push yourself to reach as many different versions of yourself as you can.

Keep yourself in readiness Like a firefighter, an actor must be ready to go at a moment’s notice. It’s therefore crucial that you keep yourself in peak condition: body, voice and mind. At drama school the long days are mapped out for you, and with daily voice and body workouts, you leave the place in peak condition. As a freelance actor, left to

THE PATH TO SUCCESS

205

yourself, it’s much harder to maintain that level, so you need the discipline to make the time each day for some work on your voice, your body and your sightreading skills. It needs to become part of your routine, because maintaining yourself is part of the job. The research on talent and success shows that high-flyers simply work twice as hard as the rest, which confirms the concept of growth mindset: it’s your effort that makes the difference to your innate talent. High-flyers weren’t necessarily better to start with; they just became more skilled and experienced. You can, for example, attend acting classes and workshops, so you’re not only maintaining your existing skills but also learning something new. For instance, working on your voice, you may feel that your RP (received pronunciation) or other accents could still be improved, opening up more opportunities. Why limit yourself to a narrow range of casting? Training is not something you do just once at the beginning of your career. It should go on throughout your working life. That way, when you’re constantly learning something new, you’ll never feel stale. For the past thirty years, I’ve made a point of attending someone else’s workshop or course at least once a year, whether it was on improvisation or Kabuki, so that I’ve been constantly refreshing my own teaching. In his late sixties, Laurence OIivier was still taking private voice classes once a week.

Take care of yourself As I write this, there is a worldwide awareness of climate change and a concern for the ecology of the planet. More frequent forest fires, famines, floods and melting glaciers have grabbed our attention and forced us to take action. But on a microcosmic level, how attuned are you to the ecology of your own body and mind? Do you listen to the warning signs when it tips out of balance? What action are you taking to keep it in harmony? As an actor, your lifestyle will determine your longevity. Even when you consider yourself in peak condition, the pressures of performance on your body and mind are enormous, and you’re constantly battling with nerves and adrenaline. So this is another area where you need to be well prepared. Acting can take its toll and it hits us each in different ways. The issue is complicated by the long and romanticized tradition of actors as hell-raisers who live a wild life offstage and can drink anyone under the table. The result of this is that many actors at a young age develop a drug or drink problem, which affects the rest of their life and in some cases even ends it prematurely. Al Pacino pointed out that heavy drinking can make an actor unnecessarily difficult to work with. His strategy has been to avoid it altogether: ‘In the old days,

206

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

I used to drink and drug,’ he said. ‘I don’t do that anymore. I haven’t done it for twenty-five years.’ Ewan McGregor recalled the effect that heavy drinking had on his early work. I was a big drinker. I drank all the time. I loved it. I felt like it was a sort of identity, to be a big drinker and always be up for a party, always the last person standing at the end of the party, or maybe not standing, often. It started making me very unhappy. It’s a difficult thing that, because as you realise you’re unhappy you do more of it to make yourself happy again. And that’s a big spiral all the way down. And I realised it was affecting my work in that I would often not be at my best when I was working. Sometimes I was really at my worst. And all my choices were gone. I got away with it somehow. But I think when you’re acting like that, if you’re really hung over, or indeed if you’re drunk, you’re picking a choice and you hold onto it for grim death, because you think, ‘I can play it like this. It’s okay, I can play it like this.’ But you’ve got no choices in your work anymore, really. I stopped all that behaviour, partly because I realised that I had to. And partly I realised that I was not going to be very successful as a father and as a husband and as an actor any more if I carried on. And the choice was made for me really. It was quite clear and easy. It was a long time ago, quite early – I was 28 or 29 when I stopped drinking and doing stuff like that. And now I can see that my work is like all of the rest of my life – it’s much better. I’ve got much more choice. I’ve got much more confidence. This is not a new issue. Back in the nineteenth century, one of Britain’s greatest actors, Edmund Kean, ruined his career by drinking and towards the end was seldom sober on stage. If, like me, you’ve worked in a production where one of the cast was an alcoholic in denial, you’ll know the tension this causes on stage when you never know whether or not you’re going to get your cue, or how you’re going to help that actor get through the performance without the audience noticing too much. It’s wonderful for an actor to have wildness, but the knack is to have wildness with discipline. Despite the temptations to live it up, if you want to be an outstanding actor with a long and happy career, it’s going to be easier if you keep off the drugs and drink with moderation, while you still have the choice.

Cope with insecurity Earlier on I described how the best actors embrace risk as a necessary step towards projecting danger in a performance. But getting to danger is never easy.

THE PATH TO SUCCESS

207

What happens when you’re trying to take risks, yet the challenge seems so big that you feel on the verge of being out of your depth? This brings us back to the power of grit and the growth mindset, where failures, big and small, and the right recovery from them, can be the surest way towards success. When rehearsing Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie at the Donmar, Jude Law became very aware of the need to trust in the process as a way of building confidence: I felt, three weeks in, I’d taken the character to far greater extremes than I’d imagined. I’d been lifting weights and trying to build up a big physique. I was doing an accent. I was trying to get on top of this very tricky dialogue. And I suddenly thought, ‘What am I doing?’ It just felt like a jumble of decisions that weren’t coming together in any way. And I remember over a period of a week, sort of coming home and doing my work, and then sitting with my head in my hands thinking, ‘When is this all going to come together? What have I done? What do I do?’ And all I can remember was thinking, ‘Just keep at the process. Keep at what you’re doing. Keep practising the dialogue. Keep practising the physicality, the mannerisms, keep learning your lines, listen to the director, and you’ll come out of it.’ And then I thought, well, that’s all I’ve got. And if that’s all I’ve got and I come out of it and it doesn’t work, then you know what? I’ve done my best. I’ve learned something. And luckily we were very well received. But in the end it was that case of being in a black room and thinking, okay, either I panic or I very carefully go around each wall until I find the doorknob and then I’ll get out. So it’s keeping one’s head when one’s heart is terrified. Even the very greatest actors can feel chronically insecure, but maybe this is linked to their capacity for vulnerability on stage. For Judi Dench, the vulnerability of being unsure is very important, even though it comes from fear. ‘I’m always frightened,’ she told me. ‘I’m frightened about the next job. Trevor Nunn said to me once on the first night, “Why are you always in tears on a first night?”. I said, “Because I think this is the last job I’m going to be asked to do.” And I think an element of real uncertainty is good.’

Be ready for your moment Success, at whatever level, usually follows particular patterns. If things work out well for you, the shape of your career will have a healthy trajectory. You may be lucky enough to get very good work in your twenties, but don’t expect your big break to come until you’re in your thirties if you are a woman and almost forty

208

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

if you are a man. This is mainly because of casting: the important leading roles tend to require people of those ages. To be very successful, you need to be ready for that moment by having done sufficiently good work in the lead-up, so that you’re ready for any challenge. Good work doesn’t have to be high profile. Most of the greats started in a modest way, Hugh Grant in fringe theatre and Kate Winslet in an episode of Casualty, for instance. What you can do, therefore, is: have a strategy, have stamina and use your intuition to make the best career choices. Consider the trajectory of Meryl Streep’s early career. After graduating from Yale School of Drama, she appears in eight stage productions in quick succession, and seven films until at the age of thirty-three she wins her first Best Actress Oscar for Sophie’s Choice. Or take Daniel Craig. At the age of twenty-four, he begins appearing in ten television dramas, a few stage performances and twenty-seven films until, with all this solid work behind him, when he’s thirty-eight, along comes James Bond and he’s ready for it, and he’s even escorting the Queen to the opening of the 2012 London Olympics. Or Matthew McConaughey. He too begins at the age of twenty-four, appearing in thirty-six films, until at forty-four he wins the Best Actor Oscar for The Dallas Buyers Club. Or take Damian Lewis. From the age of twenty-two, theatre work with RSC and other theatres, a string of twelve films and seventeen television dramas, then at forty, along comes the American television series Homeland and he finds himself sitting next to President Obama for dinner at the White House. These actors didn’t just arrive out of nowhere. They had been preparing steadily and strategically all the time. I’ve been talking about highly successful actors, but success is relative and at every level, the same principles apply. Your career high-point may be a leading role with a regional theatre company, or a feature role in an independent film. The good work you did in the lead-up will have got you to that point. You need to be ready for that and keep moving forward.

Conquer the pressures of film and TV Returning to the job itself, for an actor accustomed to working mainly on stage, the relative lack of rehearsal time in film and television can be unnerving. Hours and hours are spent dressing the set and lighting a shot, and then the actors are brought in at the last minute and expected to do their stuff, swiftly and faultlessly. So your personal preparation is crucial. Al Pacino recalled, ‘The best advice I was ever given was from Lee Strasberg: “Darling, you must learn your lines,” he said.’

THE PATH TO SUCCESS

209

Ian McKellen talked about the difficulty of adapting from large theatres to screen acting. I had to learn not to project, not to select what I was going to give them, let the audience just observe and perceive, work it out for themselves. You think it and the camera will note that, and then the audience in the cinema or at home will eventually get it. But your responsibility is much, much less than it is in theatre, and at the same time is much, much more. Because you’ve got to exist in the moment. All that preparation which you do in the rehearsal room has to exist in the moment that the camera is turning and recording not your performance but you, really – your character. Understandably, many actors can find this terrifying, especially if a busy work schedule means that they feel they haven’t arrived on set fully prepared. For Lily James, preparation is the most important thing. ‘What I struggled with recently was not giving myself enough time to really prepare for a role,’ she told me. ‘If you go from one thing straight to the next, you’re doing yourself a disservice really, because on the day I sometimes think, “Oh but I wanted to do this, I wanted to do that” but at the time there’s just 10 billion things happening. Relaxation is key and it’s really hard to be relaxed on a full set because it’s a very unrelaxing place.’ Being on a film set, as Damian Lewis vividly described it, can be potentially chaotic and is very different from rehearsing a play. So you need at all times to keep your nerve: In the theatre we’re nurtured and mollycoddled. Lovely big soppy womb that we’re in for five or six weeks as we creep towards the themes of the play and we learn together and we play games together. And it’s gorgeous. And we get all that time to discover it together. It’s ensemble work and it’s lovely. That won’t happen in film or TV almost ever. You will sometimes get a very actor-centric director, because it means he or she really wants to work with and spend time with the actors. You might get a week before the first day of filming where you all come together to discuss things. You might get to go through your scenes for a morning or an afternoon or a couple of mornings. But that will be the extent of it. Mostly though, you must come prepared. Self-reliance is the big key word of the day. If you want to go into film and TV, come prepared, ready for any eventuality. Larry Kasdan [film director and screen writer] said to me, ‘You’re like an Olympic athlete. You’re like the 100 metre sprinter. You might turn up at the track at ten in the morning. You might not race until four. And you’ve got eight and a half seconds to blow the world away.’ And that’s what it is like when you’ve been stuffed in your trailer, put there at eleven in the morning.

210

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

They said, we’ll be with you at one and they’re still not with you at six. And then they call you out of your trailer. Everyone is shouting. You arrive on set. Chaos. People are lighting things. People are putting bits of track together. The DP is shouting. He hasn’t got the right prime lenses in. The lighting is being done. Make-up and wardrobe come running towards you. They’re poking you, putting your tie straight. Sound want to change the battery in your pack, which is down your pants. You’re being prodded and poked and it’s five minutes till the end of the day, otherwise we go over time and the producer hasn’t got any money to pay anyone any over time. You’re on. Action! You’ve got to be ready. You’ve got to know what you want to do with your character. And that’s why the verbs [actioning], in film and TV acting, are so important. Don’t worry. You think, ‘What happens if my verbs don’t coincide with any of hers or his on the other side? I’m doing it all like this and they obviously think the scene is all like that.’ You might not have had a chance to have a conversation about it. But don’t worry. And miraculously it always works out. Because you and the director will essentially have agreed on what the scene is. And it will just be happening subliminally while you’re doing it. But make sure your thought processes are clear. And if you don’t have time to say to the director, ‘Do you think we could just have a little rehearsal – five minutes?’ They say, ‘No I’m sorry, we’ve just got to go.’ Just be ready and know what it is you want to do. It’s not as fun sometimes in terms of a shared experience with other actors. It’s a different sort of experience. But it’s brilliant in other ways because you get a chance to be absolutely microscopic, totally internal, let the camera come to you. You have to be just as precise as you are on stage. The thoughts have got to be just as clear. Because the camera is looking right into your eyes. And then, just find your way. You’ll find your way with each different set. You’ll be on some sets and think, ‘Bloody hell, I’m not going to ask the director what he thinks my character is doing because I think he’ll throw something at me.’ It’s the same in theatre. Make sure you know what your character is doing. Good directors – brilliant, collaborative – you’ll have a wonderful, intimate, sharing experience with them. But it won’t happen very often. So you must, must, know what you’re doing. Be responsible for your own characterisation. And I believe that of theatre too. Don’t be an actor who says, ‘I’m lost, the director is not helping me at all.’ Ultimately it’s not their responsibility. It’s yours. How do you do that, then? The huge pressure of being on a set is a given and you can’t control that. What you can control is your perception of the situation. Before playing major roles on screen, Ian McKellen’s strategy was to get experience in small parts so he could try to get relaxed and feel less intimidated by the distractions. He recalled a pivotal moment:

THE PATH TO SUCCESS

211

One day, there was the usual crowd of people behind the camera, because although the audience is here [the camera], there were these other people that I felt judging me – shaking their heads, not approving, making me more nervous. And then one day I realised, ‘No, no, no, the man looking through the camera is trying to make you look really, really good. And the director giving you notes is trying to make sure that you’re really, really good and the costumier has provided clothes to make you look fantastic, and the makeup and the wigs, and the sound man giving you little bits of advice – they’re all there to help. They’re all on your side. They’re not criticising you, they’re longing for you to be marvellous.’ And once I realised that I couldn’t wait to go in next day and meet them all and gain their approval, but not in a showoff way. And from then I’ve enjoyed filming as much as I have acting in the theatre.

Be your best self One of my actor friends told me, ‘There are five actors who look like me and they’re getting the work because their CVs are better than mine.’ That’s a pertinent issue. How do you project your unique qualities to get you the parts you want? Given that you have the core competences (strong vocal and physical technique and coherent acting process) and that you’re the right fit, the qualities that will get you the work are likely to be the individuality of your personality and the uniqueness of your imagination. The actors you most remember are the ones who filled out each moment truthfully in a way that no one else could have done. It might be how they said a particular line or made an unexpected gesture. Those moments seemed special to them. And the actors got there through taking risks, which gave them danger. To do that, you need to start confidently with what is special about you. Identify your strengths, then build on them to achieve peak performance, unafraid to dream big. Why waste your time aspiring to mediocrity? To recall the OST model (page 155), you can choose to aim high through a breathtaking objective, you can set a strategy to reach it and you can commit to the tactics that will get you there with grit, but the person who makes that journey must be your best self. At the same time, you should allow that a large part of your success is about navigating the conditions of the world you’re in. Even with the most positive outlook, chaos theory, the study of random or unpredictable behaviour, operates on your career. Consequently, there is seldom a straight path to success. Every Hollywood movie star has had their flops. And in 2020 the coronavirus closed the theatres of Britain, Europe and America, while bringing untold misery around

212

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

the world. All you can do is to keep open to what fate puts in your path rather than fighting the universe. As Ben Wainwright pointed out, ‘Some jobs that seem to have immediate appeal, whether financial or artistic, might turn out to be the most hellish, and the least enticing might be the most rewarding. You truly cannot know what is around the corner.’ This takes us back to your values: if you make decisions based on correct values, you’re less likely to go far wrong. So we need to embrace the unpredictable rather than shy away from it, trusting that moments of grace will emerge fleetingly out of that chaos. The outstanding actors I’ve quoted have learnt all these things through the pain of trial and error. Whatever mistakes they may have made, their values and habits have carried them through to become increasingly successful. They have been open-minded, they have embraced risk and they have continued to learn and grow throughout their careers. They didn’t know all these things when they started out. Which brings me back to the purpose of this book: to give you a reliable process that will help accelerate your own progress as an actor, both onstage and offstage. Here is Ian McKellen’s summary advice to you. For him the key is in your attitude, keeping curiosity alive to portray the variety of human nature and to communicate truth: Actors are thought to be not ordinary people. I think we should be the most ordinary people. Because that’s what we’ve got to present on stage. Yes, sometimes you will be required to be extraordinary, you might be playing Dame in a pantomime – well what life knowledge will help you with that? Well, looking at your grandma, looking at your aunty, looking at the woman on the bus. Don’t dab your fucking phone there, because the person who’s going to help you play the part has just walked past. So, put your iPhone away when you go outside, because the love of your life has just walked past and you’ve missed them. Your life could have changed forever and you were trying to keep your life the same. So don’t go in taxis: go on buses, go in the tube, walk, look, watch! And here is Judi Dench’s advice: Have enough energy to do it. Be single-minded about it, but not to the exclusion of other people. Always question. Always question everything, especially yourself. Watch other people. And hope for good luck. Go forward with your glass half full, not half empty, because that’s an eroding measure. Don’t give up. And if you, for a moment, think there might be something else you want to do, get out of this business. See what everybody else is doing. Watch everybody else. And for Christ’s sake, laugh, because otherwise you’re lost.

THE PATH TO SUCCESS

213

The ultimate key to success To conclude, if I had to boil everything down to one single key to success, I’d say it’s this: Take action! In its Zen-like simplicity that has everything. By all means have a dream but take action to make it happen. In my experience of working with thousands of people around the world, both in the arts and the business world, I’ve seen that many have a dream but fewer really take action to achieve it. A dream of course is vast and vague. So much so that you can easily think: How could I ever achieve that? The answer is simple. Break the dream down into specific goals, and break those goals down into specific steps, and break each of those steps down into smaller steps, and make a commitment to take the first of those small steps. And you’re on your way. Then ask yourself each day: What step am I taking today? And finally, keep on taking action. Again, I’ve seen lots of people start out on a goal and then give up when the going gets tough. You need the grit to keep at it, overcoming the setbacks. As the Japanese saying goes: Fall down seven times, get up eight times.

Keep your vision and values alive Being an outstanding actor is about excellence, not mediocrity. If you are really going to go all the way, as well as keeping yourself in peak condition you need to keep your vision and values alive. In times of doubt, keep asking yourself: Why do I want to be an actor? Remember the flame that inspired you in the first place. It may have been an extraordinary performance you once saw as a child, or the surprising exhilaration you felt being in a school play. Keep connected with that moment by revisiting it. Be clear about your vision and be true to it. Your vision is fuelled by your values and your values should be aligned to make you the best actor you can possibly be. To stay on track, keep coming back to your personal mission statement: Are you living up to it every day? And keep focused on your goals. In this book, I’ve given you a plan that will enable you to step up to the next level. But you are the one doing the stepping up. The key qualities – warmth, generosity, enthusiasm danger, presence, grit and charisma – can make a huge difference if you work at them. Keep coming back to the exercises that you’ve found most useful and apply them in rehearsals, performances and everyday life. If you want to be better, ask yourself: What would ‘better’ look like? What would you be doing differently that you’re not doing at the moment? That will give you a focus, then you know what you’re striving for.

214

THE OUTSTANDING ACTOR

A profoundly difficult question to face is: How much do you really want it? To be an outstanding actor means dedicating yourself to develop skills that most people can only dream of. That’s why they are down in the comfortable seats and you are up there on the stage or the screen. Not only do you have exceptional powers (your voice can be heard at the back of the auditorium, you can memorize entire roles, you can hold the concentration of a thousand people), but you will have made great sacrifices to get there. Relationships may have suffered. Family life may tear you in different directions. The immediate financial rewards may be insultingly meagre. You may be constantly dealing with stress. You may be frequently on tour, away from your loved ones. How much are you prepared to let the job of acting cost you? You must face that one honestly, because it may determine how far you can go. The actors who have gone furthest have almost always been the ones who were prepared to make sacrifices to give it their best shot. They had endless passion. The younger you are, the more likely you are to be able to do that. There is a time to go for it and there is a time to consider a more balanced life. Once you have a family or a mortgage, the gamble may be harder to take.

Keep going! If you really do want to be an outstanding actor, and you’re prepared to pay what it costs, then my advice is: don’t give up. Keep going! If it’s not all happening for you at the moment, this may not be your time. But your time may come. Think of your talent as just the starting point. Even if you didn’t have the lead role in the school Nativity play at five, or appear in your first movie at eight, or star on Broadway at twenty, you can still make up for it with deliberate practice and getting good work that will challenge and nourish you. Your career is a long-distance race, not a sprint. See your life as a work in progress, and always be eager to learn and grow. A violinist who is a prodigy at six is often overtaken in adulthood because other, less talented violinists worked harder. So it is with actors. A lot of the acting game is about persistence, and I’m not talking months but decades. Think of it as a marathon: to do well you need power, grit and stamina. At the start, all the runners are crowded together in one big, hopeful bunch. Ten miles on, the bunch has hugely thinned out: some are way out in front and the stragglers are scattered at the back. Some will have dropped out altogether. The profession is like that. As you get older, there will be fewer actors of your age around you, so it’s important to keep going. Some who achieved fame in their twenties may have disappeared before they reached forty. For some of you, it may not happen till you’re in your fifties and sixties. What if you had given up when you were still in your thirties?

THE PATH TO SUCCESS

215

A major part of your journey will be to discover what it means to be true to yourself. Yet, in an industry that is increasingly embracing diversity, many of us can still feel like outsiders. You should challenge this. Be proud of your roots and use them as a strength, because that will give your work individuality and authenticity. If it’s acting that you passionately want to do, then honour the talent you started with by going for it with all your heart and giving it your best shot, however hard the path may seem. And if you put into practice the seven key qualities I have outlined, you can succeed. And this will be because you worked harder than most of the other actors around you, you took risks and you kept going in the right direction. For nearly 3,000 years, communities have wanted theatre and they always will. So there will always be work. And there will always be room for one more outstanding actor. Now it’s over to you. Go for it!

VIDEO AND AUDIO RESOURCES All videos can be found at: https://vimeo.com/channels/1486142 The levels of tag p 16 Chorus on the disc. p 40 Chorus with emotional provocation p 41 Chorus with text p 42 Frogs and stones p 45 Frogs and stones with language and story p 46 Negative space p 50 Negative space with story p 51 Between A and B p 82 The fluid dynamic p 87 The angular dynamic p 88 Internalising the dynamics p 88 Moving from different centres p 90 The quality of the centre p 91 The quality of the centre with text p 91 Characters from colours p 96 The still centre of the spinning wheel p 119 Over arm and under arm energy p 122 Over arm and under arm energy, with text p 122 The power of ki p 126 Make it about them, not you p 163 All audio files can be found at: https://soundcloud.com/user-348637583/sets/ the-outstanding-actor-2e The Anniversary Party p 146 The Body Scan p 167 Breathing by Numbers p 167

NOTES

Introduction   1 Brian Master, Thunder in the Air, Oberon Books, London, 2000, p. 19.   2 For the sake of simplicity, throughout the rest of the book I shall refer to all titled actors and directors by their names alone.   3 To give you an overview of the picture in Britain, for example, in 2013 over half of British Actors Equity members earned less than £10,000 from performing. But each year in Britain more than 10,000 people audition for places in eighteen accredited drama schools. For the top drama schools the competition is even steeper: LAMDA sees 3,000 for 30 places, Guildhall sees 3,000 for 28 places and RADA sees 3,500 people for 28 places. Then, in the profession, of the 40,000 Equity members, threequarters are likely to be out of work at any one time. In the United States, of the 49,000 Actors Equity America members, over 85 per cent are out of work on any one day. And in the top three drama schools: Tisch at NYU sees 800 people for 16 places, Yale sees 900 for 16 places and Julliard sees 1,500 for 18 places.   4 Carol S. Dweck, Mindset, Ballantine Books, New York, 2008.   5 Dweck, p. 6.   6 Dweck, p. 7.   7 Matthew Syed, Bounce, Fourth Estate, London, 2011, pp. 79, 121.   8 K. Anders Ericsson, The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance, Psychological Review, Vol. 100, No. 3, 1993, p. 366.   9 You can read more on this in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers (2008). 10 Ericsson, p. 389. 11 The interviewees were asked, among other questions, when they first saw a theatre production, when they first took part in informal performances (such as performances around the house) and when they first started formal classes or rehearsals, either at school or in youth groups. 12 Brian Bates, The Way of the Actor, Century Hutchinson, 1986, pp. 49–50. 13 Lucy MacDonald, Learn to Be an Optimist, Duncan Bird Publishers, London, 2004, p. 23. 14 Brian Hiatt, How to Grow Old Like Johnny Depp, The Times Magazine, 6 July 2013, p. 29. 15 Bates, p. 51. 16 Carole Catwalladr and Leonardo Di Caprio, The Observer Review, 28 January 2007, pp. 4–5.

218

NOTES

Chapter 1 1

Keith describes this in his book Impro for Storytellers (Faber, London, 1999).

2

Brian Masters, Thunder in the Air, Oberon Books, London, 2000, p. 144.

3

In his excellent book Story (Methuen, London, 2000), Robert McKee expresses the idea that in film, if a scene opens with a positive charge (for example where the two characters are happy), it should end with a negative charge. If the charge is the same at the end as it is at the beginning, then the scene hasn’t moved the story forward.

4

Rasa, a Sanskrit word, means relish or flavour. In Indian classical theatre, such as Kathakali, each scene is played in a particular rasa, and the informed audience judges the performance on how well the actors convey the rasa. It might for example be erotic love (shringara), anger (raudra) or valour (veera). There are nine types of rasa in Indian classical theatre, known as the navarasa.

Chapter 2 1

Keith Johnstone, Impro, Eyre Methuen, London, 1981.

2

Act One, Scene Two.

3

Neuro linguistic programming, an approach to rapport developed in the 1970s by the psychologists Richard Bandler and John Grinder.

4

Lecoq’s mime school in Paris, the Ecole Jacques Lecoq, was one of the most influential forces in developing the study of the physical life of the actor.

Chapter 3 1

Meredith Belbin, Management Teams: Why They Succeed or Fail, Butterworth Heinemann, Oxford, 1981.

2

Bruce W. Tuckman, Measuring Educational Outcomes, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1975.

Chapter 4 1

Richard Bebb, quoted in Irena Sedleck, Catalogue to a Series of Statues, 1994.

2

Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, Calder Publications, London, 1983.

3

Meryl Streep: A Life in Pictures, 17 January 2009, http://guru.bafta.org/merylstreep-life-pictures-video

4

This widely used phrase has been attributed to the tennis coach, Chuck Kriese.

5

Kenneth Rea, A Better Direction, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, London, p. 78.

6

Ceri Evans, Perform under Pressure, Thorsons, London, 2019.

NOTES

219

7

One of Frankl’s most famous sayings was: ‘Between the stimulus and the response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.’

8

In Japanese, the word kata is used: the same term used for movement routines in martial arts, such as karate.

9

Jean Newlove and John Dalby, Laban for All, Nick Hern Books, London, 2004.

10 Based on a literal translation by Alexandra Tsarkova. 11 Rea, A Better Direction, p. 79.

Chapter 5 1

For an excellent explanation of this, see Ekhart Tolle’s The Power of Now (New World Library, USA, 1999).

2

Mindfulness, which uses formal and informal meditation techniques to make you fully aware of your emotions, thoughts and sensations, has become increasingly popular in the fields of education, psychology and business.

3

Chris Parnin, Subvocalization – Toward Hearing the Inner Thoughts of Developers, Georgia Inst. of Technology, Atlanta, 2011.

4

Kenneth Rea, Peter Brook: The Physical Life of the Actor, Drama, Quarterly Theatre Review, No. 162, 1984.

5

Zeami, Kadensho, trans. C. Sakurai, S. Hayashi, R. Satoi and B. Miyai, SumiyaShinobe Publishing Institute, Kyoto, 1968.

6

Kalaripayattu with Kathakali, Tachimawari with Kabuki, Kung Fu with Beijing Opera, Pencak Silat with Indonesian Wayang Orang. Curiously, until relatively recently, fencing was an important basis of the physical training in European theatre.

7

However, in classical mythology, Hades in the underworld doesn’t really listen to anyone on earth.

8

T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, Four Quartets, Faber & Faber, 1943.

Chapter 6 1

Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, Scribner, New York, 2016.

2

John Adair, Leadership and Motivation, Kogan Page, London, 2006.

3

Encyclopaedia Britannica: Edison, Thomas.

4

Kenneth Rea, Theatre in India, Part One, Theatre Quarterly, Vol. VIII, No. 30, Summer 1978, p. 12.

5

Richard Wiseman, The Luck Factor, Arrow Books, London, 2003.

6

This quote has also been attributed to the golfer Jerry Barber.

220

NOTES

7

Kenneth Rea, A Better Direction, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, London, 1989.

8

Michael Odell, It’s not Macbeth but I loved being Bob the Builder, The Times, Section 2, 31 May 2014.

9

David Cox, A Statistical Survey of Acting Course Graduates Remaining in the Profession, unpublished, 2005.

10 This was loosely adapted from an exercise in Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (Simon & Schuster, London, 1989). 11 Bronnie Ware, The Five Top Regrets of the Dying, Hay House, London, 2011. 12 Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. 13 Interview: Bravo’s In the Actor’s Studio, also Oprah Winfrey Show, 1997. 14 Alastair Campbell, Winners and How They Succeed, Arrow Books, London, 2016. 15 Jack Canfield, How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, Harper Element, London, 2007.

Chapter 7 1

Olivia Fox Cabane, The Charisma Myth, Portfolio Penguin, London, 2013.

2

Kenneth Rea, Did They Die at Your Hands One Night? The Times, 24 May 1994, p. 39.

3

Andrew Leigh, The Charisma Effect, Pearson Education Limited, London, 2008, p. xi.

4

President Eisenhower was reputed to have used this model. Much later it was popularized by Stephen Covey in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

5

Developed by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan in their book, The One Thing (John Murray Publishers, London, 2013).

6

Ronald S. Friedman and Jens Förster, Implicit Affective Cues and Attentional Tuning: An Integrative Review, Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 136, No. 5, September 2010, pp. 875–93.

7

Alex Bilmes, The Clooney Conundrum, Esquire, January 2014, p. 160.

Chapter 8 1

BAFTA Guru, Emma Thompson: On Acting, 24 November 2013.

2

BAFTA Guru, Meryl Streep: A Life in Pictures, 17 January 2009.

FURTHER READING

Alfreds, Mike, Different Every Night (Nick Hern Books, 2007). Bates, Brian, The Way of the Actor (Century Hutchinson, 1986). Cabane, Olivia Fox, The Charisma Myth (Portfolio Penguin, 2013). Campbell, Alastair, Winners and How They Succeed (Hutchinson, 2015). Coyle, Daniel, The Talent Code (Arrow Books, 2010). Duckworth, Angela Lee and Lauren Eskreis-Winkler, True Grit, Observer, Vol. 26, No. 4 (2013). Dweck, Carol S., Mindset (Ballantine Books, 2008). Ericsson, K. Anders, The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance, Psychological Review, Vol. 100, No. 3 (1993). Evans, Ceri, Perform under Pressure (Thorsons, 2019). Gladwell, Malcolm, Outliers (Allen Lane, 2008). Johnstone, Keith, Impro for Storytellers (Faber and Faber, 1999). Rea, Kenneth, Drama Training in Britain Surveyed, Theatre Quarterly, Vol X, Vol. 39, No. 4 (1981). Rea, Kenneth, A Better Direction (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 1989). Rea, Kenneth, What Makes an Audience Laugh? A Practice-Based Enquiry into Comedy in Theatre, The Reflective Conservatoire, ed. George Odam and Nicholas Bannam (Ashgate, 2005), pp. 65–95. Rea, Kenneth, Nurturing the Outstanding Actor, Theatre Quarterly, 119, Vol XXX, Part 3, August 2014, pp. 231–242. Syed, Matthew, Bounce (Fourth Estate, 2011).

INDEX

actresses 199–201 adrenaline 166, 205 age xxi agents xiv, 132, 181–2 aikido 123 alcohol consumption. See drinking Ali, Mohammed 149–50, 151 All Blacks 25 Allen, Paul 135 Allen, Woody xxii analytical thinking 96 angularity 86–8 animals 97–8, 103 animation 158 Anna Christie 207 anxiety 163, 167–8 Arakawa, Shizuka xix Artist, The 21 attack 101–2 Atwell, Hayley xiii, xiv, 25, 28, 69, 72, 139, 164, 189, 201, 203 audience 22, 24, 27–8, 54, 57, 63, 65–6, 69–71, 113, 157–8 auditions xviii, 6, 133–4, 136, 150–2, 164–5, 175–6, 185–8 authentic self 4–5 Ayckbourn, Alan 32 balance 119–20 Balinese theatre 24, 113 Ballmer, Steve 135 Barrault, Jean-Louis 21, 113 Bates, Alan 60 Beatles 135 Beckett, Samuel 72 Beijing Opera 113 Belbin, Meredith 59

Bend it Like Beckham xxiv Bergman, Ingmar xxii Bergman, Ingrid 71 Berliner Ensemble 26 Berrington, Emily 4 Billington, Michael xiv, 56, 71, 158, 159, 163 Bip as David and Goliath 10 Birthday Party, The 32 Blenkin, Sam 138 Bloom, Orlando xiii, 60, 69, 156, 185, 198–9 body 89–91, 98–100, 201–2, 204–5 body language 29–31, 34–5, 98–100, 164–5, 191 body scan 166–7 boldness 80–1 Bonham Carter, Helena xxii Brando, Marlon xxiii, 71, 97 Branson, Richard 61 breathing exercises 166–7 Brecht, Bertolt 26 Brook, Peter 26, 112–13, 119 Buddhist practices 121 Burton, Richard 107 Burton, Tim xxii business sector 158 business sense 182 Campbell, Alastair 155 Canfield, Jack 155 Cape Fear 97 career management 181–2 Carrey, Jim 151 casting 207–8 Casualty 208 celebrity 197

INDEX

Centre for Theatre Research 26 centres/centring 65–6, 89–92, 117–27 challenge 198 character 10–11, 16, 17, 29, 31, 32, 57–8, 76, 79, 86, 88, 90, 91–2, 95–8, 103, 122, 140 charisma xvii, 158–74 off-stage 214–15 recognizing 209–11 strengthening 211–12 Chekhov, Anton 95, 100 Cherry Orchard, The 72, 100 chi. See ki chi kung 123 child actors xxiii–iv childhood xxiii children 4–5 China 114, 123 chorus 39–42 churripu 135 class xxiv Clooney, George 176 Cobb, Lee J. 97 colours 95–6 comedy 22, 29, 32, 90 Comedy of Errors, The 32 commedia dell’arte 26, 29, 32 commitment 165, 182 Compass Collective 141 Complicité 62 concentration 8, 29, 107, 112, 113, 114–15, 119, 123, 126, 127, 136,158 confidence xvii, 31, 108, 172–4, 175, 188, 192 conscious thinking 110 Coriolanus 42 coronavirus 211 ‘corpsing’ 57 courage 74, 75, 81 courtesy 188–90 Covey, Stephen 147 Craig, Daniel xiii, 71, 133, 201, 208 crisis 168, 171, 173 Crowe, Russell xxii Cruise, Tom 197–8 Cumberbatch, Benedict xxii curiosity 55–7 cynicism 3

223

Dallas Buyers Club 201, 208 dance, Balinese 113 danger 69–105, 206–7 Day Lewis, Daniel 71 Dean, James 71 Death of a Salesman 97, 204 Decroux, Étienne 113 Deer Hunter, The 73 Dench, Judi xiv, 3, 23, 55, 60, 69, 71, 73, 107, 109, 159, 200, 207, 212 De Niro, Robert xxii, 71, 72–3, 97 Depp, Johnny xxii, xxiii DiCaprio, Leonardo xxiii directors xxiii, xxiii, 102, 132, 133, 140, 165, 186, 187, 188 Disney, Walt 76 diversity 134, 203–4 Dockery, Michelle xiii Dor, Yarit 203 Downton Abbey 77, 201 drama schools xxii, 132, 133, 140, 159, 204 dream world 75 drinking 205–6 drugs 205 Duckworth, Angela 131 Dumb Waiter, The 32 Dunst, Kirsten xxiii Dweck, Carol xviii–xix dynamics 81–2, 85–6, 102–4 ease 164–5 Edinburgh, Duke of 31 Edison, Thomas 133 effort xvii–xviii, xx–xxi efforts (Laban’s) 98 80/20 Principle 136 Einstein, Albert 104 Eliot, T. S. 119 emotion 4, 81, 83, 86, 91, 94, 102, 110, 113, 125, 150, 151 empathy 24, 74, 95 energy xvii, 12, 13, 17, 41, 49, 52, 53, 54, 58, 107, 108, 112, 113, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121–3, 131, 136, 158, 162, 163, 166, 175, 182, 188 Enfants du Paradis, Les 21 ensemble 25

224

enthusiasm 54–68, 165, 175, 182, 186, 188 entrepreneurialism 61–2 Equus xxiv Ericsson, Anders xx, 135 Essiedu, Paapa 61, 138–9, 160, 165–6, 182, 193, 204 Evans, Ceri 77–8, 165 exercises charisma 166–78 danger 81–102 enthusiasm 62–8 generosity 28–53 grit 142–54 presence 109–27 warmth 8–22 eye contact 35, 35, 38, 40, 50, 52, 64, 162, 175 failure 132, 133, 207 fame xiii, 192–3 family 200 fans 28–9 fear 73–4 Fellini, Federico xxii Fiennes, Joseph xiii, xxiii, 60 Fiennes, Ralph xxiii film 26, 27, 32, 33, 74, 76, 80, 104, 133, 137, 147, 164, 187, 189, 192, 194, 195, 197, 200, 201 pressures of 208–11 Finney, Albert 60, 159 Fluidity 86–9 focus 161–3 Four Quartets 119 Fox, Freddie 69, 189, 191 Foy, Claire 77 Frankl, Viktor 78 frogs and stones 43–7 funnel model 79–80 Game of Thrones 203 games 8, 9, 13–22, 43–7, 67–8, 103 Garland, Judy xxiii, 71 Garrick, David 157 Gates, Bill 135 Gayer, Mhairi 141 generosity 23–53 gesture 30, 31, 82, 84, 93–5, 122

INDEX

Gielgud, John 147 Gladwell, Malcolm 135 Globe Theatre 26 goals 147, 149–54 choosing 150 PPP 149–50 setting 195–204 SMART goals 149 visualizing 151–2 Godfather, The 77 Golden Eye 201 Gordon, Natasha 60, 134, 204 Grant, Hugh xxiii, 198, 208 Greek theatre 39, 63 grit 132–5 Grotowski, Jerzy 26 groups 58–60 chemistry of 59 growth mindset xviii–xix, 54, 58, 72 Guys and Dolls 24, 204 Hall, Peter xxiv, 74 Hamlet 184–5 hana 114 Hands, Terry 102 Happy as Larry 159 Harris, Richard 60 Harry Potter and the Cursed Child 138 Harry Potter films xxiii heart 7–8, 94 helicopter view 168–70 Henry V 42, 55 Hepburn, Audrey 6 Heraclitus 118 Herzog, Werner xxii Hilton, Conrad 151 Hitchcock, Alfred xxii, 76 Homeland 208 Hopkins, Anthony 71 Horse Whisperer, The xxiii humility 35 humour, sense of 10, 212 Hytner, Nicholas xiv, 56, 69, 137 imagination 7, 9, 12, 19, 22, 52, 53, 79, 85, 92, 95, 96, 103, 104, 177 visual 9 impetus 92–3 improvisation 17, 29, 33, 37, 51, 57

INDEX

individuality 80, 90, 97, 159 insecurity 24, 164, 206–7 intellect 4, 7, 8, 83, 84, 95, 104 interdependence 59 internal monologue 109 interviews 195–7 intimacy director 203 intuition 173 Jackson, Glenda 201 Jackson, Peter 174 Jacobi, Derek 27, 28 James Bond films 200–1 James, Lily ix–x, xiv, 69, 77, 160, 163, 186, 193, 194, 202–3, 209 Japan 113 classical theatre 113–14 (see also Noh) Zen garden 104 Jobs, Steve 135 Johansson, Scarlett xxiii Johnstone, Keith vii, 11, 29, 33, 35 Joker 69, 77, 201 Julius Caesar 42 Kabuki 113–14, 118, 123, 205 Kadensho 114 kalaripayattu 114 Kardashian, Kim 193 karma 55 Kasdan, Lawrence 209 Kathakali 106, 113, 134–5 Kean, Edmund 157, 206 Kelly, Grace xxiii Kendal, Felicity 5–6 ki 123–7 Killer Joe 185 King Lear 27, 138–9 Kinski, Klaus xxii Knightley, Keira xxiv kung fu 114 Kurosawa, Akira xxii Laban, Rudolf 98 Langella, Frank 163 Law, Jude xiv, 55, 73, 159–60, 188, 195, 197–8, 207 Lecoq, Jacques vii, 39, 47, 62, 81, 92, 113, 115 Leigh, Vivien 71

225

Lewis, Damian xi–xii, xiii, xiv, 60, 69, 71, 185, 198, 208, 209–10 Life Skills 142 Lord of the Rings 174, 198 lower abdomen 119–20, 121, 123–4, 126 luck 137–40 Macbeth 69 Mahabharata 62, 106 Marceau, Marcel 10, 11 martial arts 15, 114, 119–20 Mastroianni, Marcello xxii materials and character 97 McConaughey, Matthew 69, 201, 208 McGregor, Ewan xiii, xiv, 24, 69, 104, 192, 205–6 McKellen, Ian xiv, 69, 185, 209, 210–11, 212 McNulty, Anne xiv, xxi, 26, 186 McQueen, Steve 186 media 194–7 interviews 195–7 meditation 111, 113, 166 breathing 166–7 melodrama 20, 21 Men Behaving Badly 140 Mendes, Sam 139 #MeToo ix, 202, 203 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 113 Michelangelo 149 Mifune, Toshiro xxii mime 10, 21, 81 mind 109–10, 113, 132, 147, 150, 167, 178, 204, 205 mindfulness 110 mindset 80, 107, 205, 207 fixed mindset xviii growth mindset xviii–xix Minghella, Anthony 26 mirror exercises 38–9 mirroring 34, 40 mirror neurons 55, 175–6 mission statement 213 Mnouchkine, Arianne 26 Monroe, Marilyn 163 Morrissey, Neil 140 Moscow Arts Theatre 26 motivation xxi, 131, 132–3, 142–3

226

movement 17–19, 21, 45, 49, 82, 83, 98, 108–9, 112, 124, 126, 127 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 135 Mrs Brown 200 muscle memory 104 music 21, 22, 50 musicians xx–xxi My Fair Lady ix, 61 negative space 47, 49, 50–1 negative thinking 176–7 nerves 31, 65, 108, 163, 205 nervousness 165 networking 190–2 neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) 34 neuroscience 111 New York Stories xxiii New Zealand 43, 99–100 Nicholson, Jack xxiii Nighy, Bill 196 Nine Night 134, 204 NLP. See neuro-linguistic programming Noble, Adrian 140 Noh 113–14, 123. See also Japan, classical theatre Norris, Rufus xiv, 56, 136, 164, 187, 193 North xxiii nudity 202 Nunn, Trevor 26, 207 Nyong’o, Lupita 71 Oedipus 112 Oida, Yoshi xiv, 113, 115 Olivier, Laurence xiv, 28, 69, 157, 205 O’Neill, Eugene 207 One Man, Two Guv’nors 32 openness 8, 186, 188 optimism 172–4 OST 155, 211 Othello xiv O’Toole, Peter 60 Outliers 135 Pacino, Al xiv, 24–5, 56, 72, 80, 135, 193, 197, 205–6 paratext 161 Pareto Principle 136 Pareto, Vilfredo 136 passion xxi, 136, 150, 165, 214 performance 54, 104–5

INDEX

personality 157–8 personal mission statement 213 personal space 100–1 Phoenix, Joaquin 69, 77, 201 physical contact 98–100 lack of 99 physicality 95 physical tension 13 Pinter, Harold 32 Pirates of the Caribbean 198 play 5 Player, Gary 138 point of concentration (POC) 103 positive thinking 152, 172–3, 175–7, 190 positivity 152 posture 45 Pravda 71 presence xiv, xvii, 50, 92, 106–27 prioritizing 170, 171 psychology 96, 100–1, 150, 172, 191 public schools xxiii Radcliffe, Daniel xxiii–xxiv rapport 34–5, 63, 91, 191 rasa 22 readiness 204–5, 207–8 red carpet 163–4 Redgrave, Vanessa 60, 71 Redmayne, Eddy xxiii rehearsal 31, 32, 60, 79, 80, 85, 99, 102–4 rehearsal process 42, 133 rejection 131, 132, 165, 173 relaxation 13, 112, 117, 120, 123, 124, 126, 127, 145, 165, 166, 167 resilience 131, 140–1 Richard III 31 Richards, Keith 77 risk 18–19, 37, 72–3, 75, 76, 133, 206, 212 risk-taking xix, 61, 70 role play 175 Romeo and Juliet 33, 58 Romper Room xxiii roppo 118 Royal Collection xxiv Sansa, Maya xiv, 60, 187 scale of 1–10 88, 96, 98 Scorsese, Martin xxii

INDEX

Scott, Ridley xxii Seagull, The 33 self-care 205–6 self-confidence xvii, xviii, 133, 150, 159 self-consciousness 4, 89, 162, 163 self-esteem 168 self-tapes 187–8 Seneca 112 sense diary 62 Serkis, Andy 174 setbacks 155–6 sex scenes 202–3 Shakespeare in Love 200 Shakespeare, William 32, 84 Sharp, Lesley 200, 202 Sher, Antony xiv, 17, 163 silence 49 silent movies 21 Simon, Mark xiv, 190, 192 sleep 167–8 Smith, Dallas xiv, 158–9, 182, 188 Smith, Maggie xxiii, 201 social class. See class social media 193–4 Sondheim, Stephen 136 Sophie’s Choice 208 sound 14, 15, 17–19, 45, 49 space awareness 13 specificity 66 spirit 113, 147 spontaneity 51, 103, 104–5 sports coaches 77–8, 97 sportspeople 77–8, 151 stamina 133, 208, 214 Stanislavski, Konstantin 81, 113, 117, 140 status 29–38 high status 30 low status 30 status hierarchy 36 Stephens, Robert xiv, 28, 108 stillness 112–13, 118–19 story 50–2 storytelling 62–6 Strasberg, Lee 208 strategy 78 Streep, Meryl xxiii, 72, 200, 201, 208 Streetcar Named Desire, A 32, 97, 201

227

stress 110, 120, 123, 165–6, 167, 171, 214 positive 165 subtext 100 subvocalizing 111 success xx–xxi, 131, 137, 142, 146, 172, 192–3, 205, 207, 213 Sugar, Alan 61 SWOT analysis 183–4 taboos cultural 100 physical 99 tai chi 123 talent xvii–xix, 205, 214 Taxi Driver 97 Taylor, Elizabeth xxiii television 33, 90, 133, 196, 197, 201, 202, 208 pressures of 208–11 tension 13, 32, 65, 69, 71, 75, 82, 87, 99, 100, 101, 108, 112, 123, 124, 166, 167 physical 13, 107, 108, 124 Théâtre du Soleil 26 Theron, Charlize 198 Thompson, Emma 199, 201–2 Three Sisters 100 time management 170–2 Tina 56 Tohei, Koichi 123 Tolle, Eckhart 110 tongue 111 touch 99–100 training 204–5 Trainspotting 192 transformation 18–19 trial and error 212 trust 73 Tuckman, Bruce 110 Ullmann, Liv xxii unconscious 150, 151, 177 underarm energy 121–3 values 143–4, 213–14 Van Houts, Tine 195–6 vertical axis 115–16

228

INDEX

vintage years 58, 60 virtuosity 10 voice 30, 93, 175, 204 vulnerability 23, 28, 71, 74–5, 207

Wiseman, Richard 137–8 Wolfit, Donald 18 women 199–201 Wyld, Eleanor 199

Wainwright, Ben 212 Waiting for Godot 33 walk 92–3 sensory 111–12 Ware, Bronnie 146 warmth 3–22, 73, 157–8 Weinstein, Harvey 202 West, Dominic xiv, xxiii, 69, 105 Williams, Tennessee 32 Winslet, Kate 208 Wire, The 105

xi. See ki yield 101–2 zadacha 140 Zeami 114 Zen 15–16, 114 Zen garden 104 Zhangazha, Ashley xiv, 23, 56, 69, 160–1, 184–5, 204 Zuckerberg, Mark 61

229

230

231

232