In a Los Angeles Times article, Bialik comments, “The first episode I did for them, the executive producer said, ‘Do you really have a PhD?’ I hadn’t told him, because, well, where do you list that on your theatrical resume exactly?. So he tweaked the character’s profession.

“But having an understanding of both mental illness and neurosis has been tremendously helpful to me in my acting career.”

{There are many posts on my various TalentDevelop sites about acting and psychology, mental health, the psychology of creativity etc – see the list of posts on The Inner Actor by clicking on ‘Archives’ in the menu at the top – and see Mental Health posts on the main site.}

The article also notes, “James Franco…has been perhaps the most active actor-scholar of late: He is enrolled in Yale University’s English PhD program and North Carolina’s Warren Wilson College for poetry. In May, he earned a master’s degree from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and Columbia University’s MFA writing program, after already graduating from Brooklyn College for fiction writing last year.

From article Picking their next role: Joe College or hot young star?, by Amy Kaufman, Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2011 – which also mentions Emma Watson, Blake Lively, Brad Pitt, Jodie Foster, Natalie Portman, James Franco, Shia LaBeouf and others.

{Photos of Mayim Bialik from her official website.}

Speaking of his role in the television series ‘Freaks and Geeks,’ Franco said it echoed his own high school experience.

“I was a little freak, a little geek. High school was a big party the first couple of years, but that gets old, so I broke away and just was a loner.

“I did a lot of painting, and I was a member of a local art league.”

From post James Franco on being a loner.

Creative polymathy

In his post “That’s DR. Winnie to you: A New Child Star Stereotype”, creativity researcher James C. Kaufman, Ph.D. writes about a number of people well-known as child stars, now grown, who have explored talents outside of acting.

He writes: “One of the research topics in creativity that has always fascinated me has been creative polymathy – the ability to be creative in more than one domain.”

One example he cites: “Danica McKellar (‘Winnie’ on The Wonder Years) earned her Ph.D. from UCLA in mathematics, currently writes books promoting math.”

From my post Developing multiple talents – the pleasures of creative polymathy.

Is Amy Farrah Fowler a positive image of high ability?

In her article How Pop Culture Stereotypes Impact the Self-Concept of Highly Gifted People, Sarah Williams declares, “Pop culture perpetuates two stereotypes of highly gifted people: the wisecracking whiz kid or the tortured genius. There is no grey area.

“On the more light-hearted side, we have characters like Doogie Howser…a 16-year old resident surgeon and bona fide genius…On the other side you have the troubled John Nash of A Beautiful Mind or Will Hunting of Good Will Hunting.”

Personally, I don’t think it is that simple: that there are only two stereotypes.

Amy Farrah Fowler and other characters on “The Big Bang Theory” are certainly extreme for the sake of comedy – but they are a lot of fun (despite the often extremely annoying laugh track).

John Nash as portrayed in the movie, and the character Will Hunting are also extreme and uncommon.

But all of them can point to some of the ‘uncommon’ personality qualities and giftedness traits that help distinguish high ability people – but which can also make it hard for many of us ‘outsider’ people to be relatable or even understood by those who are not so exceptional.

For more, see

High Ability site
High Ability / Facebook

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Hudgens chose to act in “Sucker Punch” – and wear risqué costumes for the role – because she found the movie’s underlying message empowering.

She said the outfits represent a kind of female empowerment fantasy: “If you imagine yourself going into these action situations, she’s not gonna show up in sweatpants.

“You want to be the best that you can be and be the most ferocious. I mean, the costumes gave us a sense of confidence and power.

“The way that I carried myself was different.” [Los Angeles Times 3.23.11]

~ ~ ~

Hudgens sometimes visits Venice Beach: “I love going to the drum circle down there. Every now and then someone will let me join in and bang on their drums, and I just love people who are completely free. Even if they’re drug addicts, who sometimes freak me out.

“I’m figuring out how to be a better person while observing other people.”

She is striving to be more aware and “present-oriented” – and strong – and has been studying the book The Four Agreements, by don Miguel Ruiz.

“It has honestly changed me, almost. You really have to stay strong, because times get tough. Especially in this business. It’s a dog-eat-dog world. There’s so many amazing actresses who got taken advantage of.

“Someone like Natalie Wood, one of my idols — who knows what happened to her? She was on a boat that was mysteriously in the water, and now she’s dead.

“A lot of women get walked all over on by not standing up for themselves, and that’s just not what I’m about. I’m figuring myself out now as a young adult more than I ever have. It’s like my eyes are opening and I’m awakening to controlling my future.”

[From The Actor's Craft: Vanessa Hudgens has left 'High School' behind, by Amy Kaufman, Los Angeles Times, April 10, 2011.]

According to an Amazon summary, The Four Agreements “reveals the source of self-limiting beliefs that rob us of joy and create needless suffering.”

The Lefkoe Method also provides an approach to dealing with limiting beliefs, and is acclaimed by many people, including personal growth and success author Jack Canfield.

You can try it for free at ReCreate Your Life.

Also see articles by Morty Lefkoe, including ones about dealing with stage fright.

~ ~ ~

Video: Shy actors: Vanessa Hudgens, Sigourney Weaver, Taye Diggs

Hudgens says “When I was young, I would not talk to anybody if I didn’t know them. I’d hide behind my mom if she tried to introduce me to anyone.” In middle school, she got into fashion, “which tends to make you a little more popular,” she notes, and acting. She said, “When I was on the stage, I felt like I was hiding behind a person, and I adored it.”

Visit my TalentDevelop Channel on YouTube for other videos on personal development topics for actors and other creative people.

Here are some excerpts :

I may do some theater next summer, but this college experience is really important to me, and I won’t give it up for anything. I’m not going to school just for the academics–I wanted to share ideas, to be around people who are passionate about learning.

Being at Brown has totally taken me out of my comfort zone. I’m so proud that I went to a different country to study and really spread my wings.  …

My days as a student are structured so differently from being on a movie set, where I had people constantly telling me what to do. When you’re filming, someone needs to know where you are every second of the day; here no one tells me what time I can have lunch, when I can go to the bathroom.

It’s incredibly empowering and liberating. My friends think I’m crazy because I get so much joy out of really simple pleasures like staying up late talking or deciding to go for a walk. And bagels–they’re the best thing ever! …

Fun is something I’ve undervalued in the last 10 years [when she made 10 films, including eight Harry Potters]. I never made time for it, yet it’s so important to your health and general happiness. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I have to learn to be good at having fun. …

It’s taken me a year to figure out that I should trust people and let them in a bit more.

At the beginning I felt slightly like I was living two lives, as if I was schizophrenic.

Slowly but surely, I’m letting the people I trust and love see more of me as a complete person.

They’ve been surprisingly understanding and respectful. I’ve been lucky–really lucky.

Source: Parade.com

Top photo from Celebuzz.com: Emma Watson at Brown University Providence, Rhode Island

From article: Child actors: Sofia Vassilieva, ‘Medium’, By Lisa Rosen, Los Angeles Times

NBC’S “Medium” centers on Allison Dubois (Patricia Arquette) and her psychic abilities — in her dreams, she sees how people were killed. A great part of the show’s charm comes from the fact that Allison is also a wife and mother, and the realities of family life constantly butt up against her more surreal gifts.

Sofia Vassilieva plays her oldest daughter, Ariel, who struggles with the realization that she has inherited her mother’s talents.

Vassilieva, who gives her age as 15 1/2, has been acting since she was 8, and has played Ariel for four seasons. “Every episode, Ariel’s been developing more and more, and coming into her role as a girl in society, an older sister and somebody who has psychic abilities. So it’s always been very interesting for me to develop that balance,” Vassilieva says.

Growing as the character grows

“For Ariel, it’s a constant battle between being normal and being like her friends — caring about the little things, the dance or clothes or hair — and constantly trying to figure out what this [ability] is and how to respond to it.”

In preparing for a scene, Vassilieva takes a step back, looking at where Ariel has been in the previous moments as well as the previous episode.

And she knows never to play just one idea; “in reality the way we may react to something one day can be entirely different than the way we react another day.” Most of her scenes are played opposite Arquette, who she says makes the process very easy by virtue of both her talent and her compassion.

“She comes in with so much love and energy, she’s so unbelievably great to be around,” Vassilieva says. The young actress can’t wait to see where her character will go next. “I continue to be really, really eager to go in and do more and have more story lines, and I think that’s the beauty of it — as the character is growing, you’re growing as a person.”

Los Angeles Times / The Envelope, June 4, 2008.
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Sofia Vassilieva, “Medium” tv series, young adult talent, personal development acting

Maggie Gyllenhaal: We shot Sherrybaby in 25 days. I was never in my own clothes. I would get into her clothes, be her all day, come home, fall asleep, wake up, go back to work. I do better in that kind of work. What I found with Sherry was that she was in such a rough place that she didn’t have the luxury to feel any kind of self-pity or to fall apart at all, or she would not have been able to survive.

So I shot all these fucked-up scenes that were really horrible, but I didn’t experience them that way. Obviously, I understood that all the things that happened in the movie were painful for her, but I didn’t let that into the work.

Then all the terrible things I’ve had to go through surfaced after we’d finished shooting. And I got over it. I don’t think I could play that part now. I don’t know that I could be okay with the things I had to be okay with in order to play her.

Interview mag.: Were you in therapy when you did that film?

Maggie Gyllenhaal: Mm-hmm.

Interview mag.: So was it exorcism? Catharsis?

Maggie Gyllenhaal: Well, that stuff is private, but every role I choose – whether consciously or unconsciously – there’s something in it that I have to think about and work through. . .

For a while, I got into taking someone really fucked-up and showing the audience how they were beautiful and lovable. That’s a way of practicing compassion. But now I want to play a queen! I want to play someone who’s thinking and elegant and not so wayward. I feel like a big change has happened.

Interview mag.: Here’s another observation from your press clippings: “Gyllenhaal clearly relishes taking a wrecking ball to anything perfect or beautiful in her own cinematic creations.” But I always suspected that you were happy to be beautiful in real life.

Maggie Gyllenhaal: That is not wrong about my work. It was also true in my life. What I thought was most beautiful was something a little fucked up, a little off. I think that’s a way of hiding.

As an actress and a person. I feel different now. I’m not as interested in finding what is unattractive as I am in finding what is attractive. It’s much riskier to say, “I’m going to try and express what’s beautiful in me.”

[From interview by Tim Blanks, Interview magazine, May 2008.]

A number of other actors have also expressed perspectives on the mental health aspects of acting on the page Nurturing mental health: acting.
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Maggie Gyllenhaal, entertainment psychology, personal development acting, creative risks

Mare Winningham and Tennessee Williams

Mare Winningham is playing Amanda in a stage production of Tennessee Williams’ classic ‘The Glass Menagerie’ at the Old Globe in San Diego. In an interview, she commented about how rare it has been to find such deep, complex roles.

“Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but so often during the last 30 years, you’re trying to make something better than it is. You’re trying to find richness where there isn’t any. You’re trying to find complexity where there is none. You’re trying to make something more than it is.

“Here, you don’t have to do that. It actually makes it easier that Amanda is so multifaceted. It’s a welcome relief.”

The article also notes, “While Tennessee Williams was writing the play, his first success, he also struggled to free himself from less significant — though better-paid — Hollywood work.

“Living across from Muscle Beach in Venice, he confided to his journal that he was working ‘on something abominable — a script for Lana Turner.’ That same June day in 1943, he wrote to his agent, Audrey Wood: ‘I feel like an obstetrician required to successfully deliver a mastodon from a beaver,’ further deriding the MGM project as an attempt to make ‘a celluloid brassiere’ for the buxom star.”

[From Mare Winningham explores Tennessee, by Anne Marie Welsh, Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2008]

Meaning and depression

Finding meaningful work – or making your own – is deeply important for actors and other artists.

In his counseling and books, therapist and creativity coach Eric Maisel, Ph.D. emphasizes the need for creative people to nurture meaning to stay on top of depression.

In his book The Van Gogh Blues: The Creative Person’s Path Through Depression, Dr. Maisel writes that “Most creators feel miserable if few or none of their creative efforts succeed.”

In our interview, I asked him: “Many screenwriters never see their hard work produced as a movie, and many actors never get to perform to the level they aspire and train to reach. How do you counsel artists like these to make meaning, when they seem to depend so much on public awareness and acceptance of their creative work?”

Dr. Maisel replied: “A lack of success and a lack of recognition are profound meaning crises that must be addressed just as any meaning crisis must be addressed, with all of our heart and all of our energy.”

From our interview: Investing meaning in our art.

Also see Eric Maisel articles.

More to life than acting

Gabriel Byrne comments about meaning: “So many actors feel that their work is themselves, and if they’re not working, they’re somehow kind of worthless… then life doesn’t have any meaning because they’re not doing the thing that they love. But the lesson I’ve learned is that life comes first and acting comes second.”

[From the article Filling your time with meaning.]

If the quality of acting roles is not providing enough meaning, perhaps other forms of creativity will. Winningham, for example, also expresses her creative talents through singing and songwriting.
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creative meaning, artists and depression, Eric Maisel, creative potential

A recent LA Times article notes that he “expresses a certain discomfort with the flash of the paparazzi bulbs and red carpet.”

“I feel like I’ve slipped into a moral quagmire,” Howard says with his characteristic blunt honesty. “I’m being pulled into some shadowy places, discovering some very dark things in my nature on this road. I’d do anything I could to sprout wings and rise above.. just go back to being a contractor, laying some stones somewhere — the time before Terrence Howard ever existed. I feel like I’m strangling the real Terrence on a daily basis.”

At one point, he notes that he takes on roles “to discover more truths about myself.”

Continued in article Terrence Howard is ready for a new fight, by Patrick Pacheco.
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Terrence Howard, compromising yourself, celebrity and personal growth, acting self esteem

HBO: Did you have any personal experience with therapy or was this a completely new world to you?

Melissa George: A completely new world, but I highly recommend it. If you can get a therapist like Paul, you’re set. [laughs]

I mean, to be honest, ‘In Treatment’ brought out a lot of internal angst and brought back certain memories. There’s a scene where I was talking about my family, and when we were shooting, I was no longer aware who was Laura and who was Melissa.

Because I was so in love with playing this character — and that sounds like “Oh actors get so invested,” but it really was like I fell in love with playing her — that all of a sudden words would come out of my mouth and I would react as Melissa or as Laura combined with Melissa.

So there are some scenes, some moments where it looks really real, I think, because I was feeling it for real. I was really going through therapy.

By the end, playing such a highly emotional character, it took it out of me. But I also felt very relaxed when I came home after shooting the series. I felt like I learned a lot about myself.

Text and photo from the HBO / In Treatment site.

Related Talent Development Resources pages:
Counseling / therapy
The Shadow Self
Nurturing mental health : acting
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Melissa George, personal development acting, acting and therapy

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 cause it seems that acting is not a profession for someone who likes to be alone I mean there is so much of yourself that you have to give.

James Franco: Yeah well I think there are a lot of examples of people like that. I think it was Duval who said he wasn’t use to talking to a lot of people but you know became an actor anyway and De Niro seemed very much the same way.

For me it was…by acting and inhabiting a different part and pretending to be in a different world there is something about it that frees up whatever isn’t free in the real world. So it is not such a contradiction really.

Question: Is it why you became an actor?

James Franco: I guess so. When I first did it, it was kind of a relief it was a voice that I didn’t have before and then you know I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be an actor or a painter or a writer or something else…

[From darkhorizons.com interview by Paul Fischer, January 10 2006.]

A multitalented freak

In another interview, speaking of his role in the television series ‘Freaks and Geeks,’ Franco said it echoed his own high school experience. “I was a little freak, a little geek. High school was a big party the first couple of years, but that gets old, so I broke away and just was a loner. I did a lot of painting, and I was a member of a local art league.” [cyberteens.com interview]

Being a loner – or shy / introverted, ‘not good at small talk’ etc – is something many actors share, including Mischa Barton, Kristin Kreuk, Kim Basinger, Taye Diggs, Nicole Kidman, Sigourney Weaver and others. See the pages on Introversion / shyness.

For many people, this may be based on being highly sensitive, which can help fuel excellence as an actor or other artist.
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James Franco, high sensitivity personality, personal development acting, acting self esteem

“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 followed by uncontrollable sobbing.”

“I think tackling certain characters has definitely helped me in my life because I can’t come to the truth about a character when I’m lying to myself. As a result it forces you to look at things and sometimes it is painful and you don’t want to deal with it.”

[Interview mag., Feb 2008; photo from 'Enchanted']

Some related Talent Development Resources pages:
Comedy
Nurturing mental health
Nurturing mental health : acting
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Amy Adams, creative risks, finding courage, personal development acting