Referring to his role of Brick in the Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (directed by Debbie Allen),” Terrence Howard says, “I always tell directors, ‘The role I want is the role I can’t accomplish, the thing that’s going to make me fail.’ Every warrior is looking for that fight [...]
Melissa George plays Laura in the HBO series In Treatment: “An attractive young anesthesiologist in the midst of a relationship crisis” seeking the help of a psychoanalyst, played by Gabriel Byrne. HBO: Did you have any personal experience with therapy or was this a completely new world to you? Melissa George: A completely new world, [...]
Liev Schreiber on emotional isolation “Acting kind of insulates you from the world. Ironically you go into this job that you think is going to allow you to be expressive to people and to connect to the world.” Liev Schreiber continued, “And the more successful you are in a strange way, the less emotionally connected [...]
Comfortable being alone In an interview about “Tristan and Isolde,” James Franco commented about how acting relates to being someone who is more comfortable being alone. Question: You talked about being a loner when you were at school. How hard is it going from being a loner to putting that aside an being an actor [...]
“I’ve always felt more comfortable [with comedy] because I was scared of drama. I didn’t really know how to access my emotional side without wounding my own person. “Once I learned how to do that it opened up all these doors to me and I realized, You know what? Real life contains moments of laughter [...]
High drug use in Hollywood “It’s so obvious that this is a population that has a huge appetite for drugs.” Drew Pinsky, MD The death of Heath Ledger – considered an accidental overdose of prescription medications – is another indication of how much drug use there is in the entertainment community. He also reportedly had [...]
Jurnee Smollett plays Samantha Booke in the film “The Great Debaters” (set at Wiley College in Texas during the Great Depression), who becomes the first woman selected by debate coach Melvin B. Tolson (played by Denzel Washington) to compete on the debate team, which defeats the University of Southern California’s team (changed to Harvard in [...]
Ellen Page and Diablo Cody on taking risks Ellen Page, to “Juno” screenwriter Diablo Cody: You have to take risks and go against conventional wisdom and structure. What was that like. Diablo Cody: I guess I didn’t see the point of adding another conventional story to the pile; there are so many. I guess I [...]
A flawed, messy character In her new film “The Savages,” written and directed by Tamara Jenkins, Laura Linney [imdb] plays Wendy Savage, an aspiring playwright and temp office worker. “She’s not a typical protagonist,” Linney says [in the article Anything but typical, by Mark Olsen, Los Angeles Times, Nov 29, 2007]. “She lies, she cheats, [...]
“It’s all been a big sham.” “Sometimes I wake up in the morning before going off to a shoot, and I think, I can’t do this; I’m a fraud. They’re going to fire me — all these things. I’m fat; I’m ugly…” Those admissions by Kate Winslet [Interview mag. Nov 2000] were made after her [...]
Kept in a box “Too many people want to get rich and famous and do it quick,” Jaime Pressly said in a recent interview article. “To get anywhere you have to be focused, ambitious, headstrong and really, really want it. It won’t come on a silver platter, and it won’t last long… “I started [acting] [...]
In his article The Art of Making Meaning [a summary of his podcast], creativity coach and author Eric Maisel speaks about a client of his: “Jack, an actor, had excellent verbal skills but a poor physical presence on stage. “With my help, he decided that he had to take responsibility for that aspect of his [...]
“Celebrity hits like a bomb. So you have to find what makes you stable in the storm.” Jimmy Smits adds, “Then, no matter what’s happening around you, no matter what the hype or the publicity, you can still manage to make leaps in your work as an artist.” [imdb.com] In my article The Dark Side [...]
“I always have a deep-seated fear that it can all go away, and it can. You can not get work very easily,” Rose Byrne says, recounting how she’d recently read an interview with Julianne Moore, who admitted to panicking about never working again at the end of each film. “I mean, it’s Julianne Moore,” Byrne [...]
It’s a compulsion Toni Collette ["Little Miss Sunshine" and many other films] just wants to be “turned on” as an actor. “I’ve been doing it [acting] for half my life now and life’s too short to put your energy into something that you don’t believe in, that you don’t find entertaining yourself or doesn’t speak [...]
Being told who you are “You can’t be yourself because you’re always being judged.” That is a line from “Ellie Parker” about an actress trying to get a start in Los Angeles, played by Naomi Watts, who also produced the film. That sort of uncertainty of identity and insecurity affects many artists on the way [...]
Nervous excitement “With any film and even theater, you never get over being scared and overwhelmed, because it’s a new character and that brings on a whole new set of circumstances.” Alison Lohman is talking about one form of anxiety that actors experience, and may try to avoid or stifle. But there can be value [...]
Jenna Gavigan’s role in the William Inge play “Come Back, Little Sheba” is the “vixen” Marie. Gavigan is on academic leave from Columbia University to pursue acting. A recent newspaper interview [Shedding the wings, by Amy Kaufman, Los Angeles Times, July 9, 2007; photo: Myung J. Chun] notes that “she wants to major in something [...]
Actor Vera Farmiga currently stars in “Joshua.” In addition to her perspectives below (from a new Los Angeles Times interview), she has also been quoted: “I really don’t feel a need to be famous. But I do feel a need to make a difference, to shed light on human emotion through acting.” [LATimes: Anthony Minghella [...]
Escape into comedy Amanda Bynes began professionally acting at the age of seven, and at age thirteen became the star of her own tv series The Amanda Show. Bynes says she understands the feeling of being an outsider, one of the themes of the film “Hairspray” – in which she plays Penny [photo]. “I grew [...]