Actor Growth

So technically after today the next class would be my seventh making this the longest workshop program I have taken so far apart from the full time film acting program I took in the past. I guess that is a good sign thus far if I am continuing to stay this long.

Today I did a scene from the movie “He’s Just Not That Into You”. I never seen it myself, so in that sense it was good as I was able to try and interpret everything on my own first without bias. For those who have seen the movie, it was a bar scene between a character named Alex and Gigi where Alex was talking about how men don’t call women back.

My initial interpretation was that these two only knew each other from the bar where Alex works and Gigi was like a customer. My decision was to play the character as a blunt tough love type of approach where everything was extremely directly when he was giving out his secrets about men in general as if he was talking to a friend.

As I anticipated, this got a lot of laughs since it was so blunt and direct as it is something that you wouldn’t really expect. The coach then wanted me to go in a different direction where instead the Alex character actually liked the character in a potential relationship way which in hence would turn the whole thing to be more sympathetic.

Now what caught my attention was that he mentioned the first way that I chose to go with doesn’t make the audience fall in love with me whereas that would. That was kind of interesting in the sense that in film in general it’s always about connecting with the audience where they care about the character to want to listen to what they have to say or to be rooting for them.

I guess the conflicting thing in my mind was that this was an audition style and so it should have been more about doing it with my interpretation to stand out. However, I took the direction and did it the way the coach suggested. At the end he seemed very happy about it and started to say how that is indeed the type of character people would fall for.

He then made a comment too that anyone could do the scene the way I did it in the first take, but this second approach isn’t the same story and it would definitely stand out. It was all interesting to think about. The funny thing for me I thought afterwards was that serious and dramatic style roles are a lot easier for me than comedy I think.

As well, I guess the new thing that comes to my head is once again that balance. Example, when to use a comedic approach and when to use a serious approach in terms of increasing your chances for success at an audition? Like in this example, I could easily see two different directors having two completely different perspectives/opinions.