Actor Growth

Last week there was no class as the coach was unavailable. This week he was working on a film set and so one of the other coaches came in to teach the session. This was a new month too and everyone in there was different aside from myself today. Some of them came from the other workshop classes.

Today was the first day where everyone literally did the same scene as we auditioned it with our own interpretation and style. Like an audition, we were sent out of the room and were called in one by one. It was a really interesting experience for me as although the coach mentioned that I made very strong choices, in the end we all as a class really tried to dissect the audition side even further to see if the choices we made were the best for this scene.

It was amazing on how much information about the story you can get from every little word of the script. While I originally interpreted it with a more serious tone, there were so many elements of the character that you are speaking to which was revealed by reading the sides more thoroughly.

Many times when you get a side the production crosses out dialogue from a script that doesn’t relate to you specifically. Example, imagine on the page there is a fight scene and your character is talking to another character. However, just before that the scene is crossed off as they want to see how you handle this scene specifically.

Now what most people would do is just read the checked off portion of the script and work on that for the audition. So your mindset in reading the dialogue would be something like “Okay, these two want to tear each other apart as they are like mortal enemies”. However, reading the crossed off sections before can give you so much hint about the back story.

Example, it could be that the scene that was crossed out was a daydream sequence where these two characters were kids and were like best friends. Reading that and knowing that fact can have such a profound difference on how you present the scene. So before when you read a line that said something like “I’m here to fight you” you might think that is in a violent way. However, knowing that back story could make you play it in a resentful way instead. That is a big difference.

Interesting session this was.