Actor Growth

So today was the first day of the acting workshop and it was an interesting one. In the beginning the first hour or so was spent on the coach explaining about his views of acting as well as mindset. One point he brought up is how actors tend to think that they in some way have to prove that they are a good actor in the audition room when really the casting people already have that thought before they call you in.

He is very animated which made the workshop kind of entertaining. There were some people in the group that have already attended his sessions before too. In the day we all basically had to cold read a certain scene in an audition style process. We would first get critiqued on it and would do it again afterwards with more direction.

One interesting point for me was the stereotype comment came up except in this situation it was kind of different. I heard a comment in the class where some scenes the character just had one line. Andrew Mcilroy then made a comment on how those one liners are actually very hard to pull off in an audition. Therefore, I decided to go with that.

Now I actually chose a scene that had a one liner and was simply a part where a computer technician is unable to fix a computer and gets slapped. In my first run trough I had a blotch where I jumped out of the camera frame but in general he commented on how I was a very funny guy he thought.

He also made a comment which he found was funny as out of all the scenes I chose that one in particular kind of added to the stereotype of me being Asian and being a tech guy. Although, my main reason for choosing that was that I was trying to be realistic as a look type. There were scenes such as doctors and shop keepers which I didn’t think my young look was exactly suitable for.

It wasn’t until the second run through where while giving me a possible direction that he suggested that I pretend that I was going to block the slap in like a fighting type of way. From there I was just thinking “whoa, now that is stereotypical”. We ended up scratching it though as it wasn’t working for me. I personally felt that I didn’t do very well in the second run though.

One cool thing was that we all got a DVD copy of our sessions that I have yet to review fully. An interesting note which may have been a bad sign is that he was handing out audition scenes to some people in the class for a real production. Some people got it and some people didn’t. So I was thinking either he just trusted/respected those people more professionally to give them the opportunity or maybe it was for certain looks. Guess I’ll find out as the workshop goes on.

At this point I do feel like a number though where I am simply a guy that enrolled into the workshop and will go through various curriculum work. I say this feeling has stuck on me as in the beginning there were no real introductions of any sort and I don’t think he knew everyone’s name. Although, he said that he did things like that intentionally. Here’s hoping that he will take a more personally interest in one’s unique growth and challenges. Then again, this is the first time he has seen many of us.

On a different note my agent booked me for an audition tomorrow. So, let’s see how that goes.