Actor Growth

So this week all of the guys were given a pretty crazy scene where the character was literally mad and yelling pretty much through the whole piece. Basically, he was a guy that was going to do a C section on a lady to get a baby out and has a lot of complicated issues personally.

Beforehand I made a choice where I was going to play this guy with a very angry and annoyed direction where during the scene near the end I would stand up as he was being confrontational with a couple of medics. Now keep in mind in the scene there was a dying lady who he cared about right in-front of him and my choice was to start off by kneeling on the ground as the character was contemplating how to get the baby out.

From I read, he needed a knife and the medic was spending way too long going through this kit which aggravates the character. Therefore, my decision was to stand up that time. Now I brought that up as usually in the audition you have to warn the camera person on your movement intents so that they can prepare for it.

Right when I said that the coach told me not to do that. He was basically saying how in real life if you were trying to get a baby out of a women like that there is no way you would leave her side. Regardless of how angry you are you will want to stay there and it would be more powerful for the scene.

That was kind of a throw off for me as I know in a normal audition a casting director wouldn’t give you that benefit of providing direction. So, that was kind of odd. But, I went with the direction and did everything kneeling down and never got up. It was kind of funny as last week’s advice was counter productive for this week’s scene.

Essentially, last week the takeaway note was to face the camera more and not staring at the object. So, for this scene a subconsciously decided to look up at the reader as I knew if I looked down to much you would only see the top of my head. But, funny enough that is what I should have done for this scene where I would be more focused on staring at the dying lady.

The coach did mention though that he should have informed us ahead of time about the camera. At the same time he said that in an audition you can request the camera guy to say lower the camera if that was the direction you chose to do your piece. That was an interesting note I thought. Was a crazy scene though.