Actor Growth

It was another pretty standard day in terms of what we did. There was one thing interesting though. The sides that we got dealt with some kind of thief that was orchestrating a robbery as it was his job to scout the place out for a few days. In the process he meets this girl that he kind of falls in love with. Therefore, in the midst of the robbery he decides he wants to try to change his life and to make sure this girl doesn’t get shot in the process by the other people.

Based on what I read I first interpreted it as the girl was dumbfounded about the situation and as the thief confessed about his background she just thought it was a joke and persisted that it is one. As the script indicates, it’s not until further in the conversation that she starts to fear for her life.

So my direction was to do it in a very serious way where the character is trying to tell her he is dead serious and is telling her this because he doesn’t want her to get hurt. Guess it’s like a guy saying he is in a crazy gang that is about to destroy the place where you just laugh at the idea and it’s not until he keeps talking about it with some very detailed information that you start to realize he is dead serious.

So in the first round the coach was saying the intensity level was definitely there. Except he started to say that the guy was supposed to be extremely remorseful about admitting his professions to the lady and in order to convince her to follow him to safety he needed to be more empathetic I guess you can say. So in my mind, that meant that this character was extremely weaker than what I thought.

I debated about the choices and direction for awhile as some of them seemed like it was more about a directional choice. But, as a challenge of an actor I think the key to an audition is that you need to be adaptable to take direction and so I did. I re-did the scene with all the feedbacks and direction.

Afterwards, the coach said that I nailed it and just like from a previous class where he thought my performance was amazing he said that I achieved that same level with this. I was thinking even more and it seems like at this point of my training and the feedback that I have been getting is that acting is not an issue at all when it comes to the audition process but rather trying to get the interpretation right the first time. That is such a subjective thing too.

On a side note I learned that one of my classmates landed a role in that feature film the A Team. While that is great news, even he was joking about it as before he was saying that he wanted to grow his hair as he feels that he could get more auditions that way. Wouldn’t you know it, this role that he landed requires him to shave his hair and go bald. Funny how things work in life sometimes.