Tag: Actor Wisdom

Ryan Gosling – Gen Z Slang – Dialogue

@jeremylynch If Hollywood movies used Gen Z slang 😂 #ProjectHailMary ♬ original sound – JeremyLynch

Google AI:

“No cap” is a popular slang phrase meaning “no lie,” “for real,” or “truthfully,” used to emphasize that a statement is genuine or serious. Originating in Atlanta-based hip-hop and African American Vernacular English (AAVE), it spread to mainstream usage in the late 2010s to denote sincerity.Key Aspects of “No Cap”:Definition: “Cap” means a lie or exaggeration; therefore, “no cap” means the opposite—telling the truth.Usage: It is frequently added to the end of a statement for emphasis, e.g., “That food was great, no cap”.Origins: Rooted in early 2010s Southern hip-hop, often associated with rapper “NoCap” (Kobe Vidal Crawford Jr.), who is an American rapper known for his emotional style.

Acting and the Sense of Personal Identity

The outside world tends to celebrate the most trivial superficial aspects of an actor’s life, lifting their personality to a plastic God-like status, but the actual joy of acting lies in the absence of personality. In taking on and inhabiting the accoutrements of another’s being—where they are from, their accent, their clothes, their background—you realize that every element of your own personality is malleable. You can do it, you can wear the skin of another human being—and yet still you are you. This, in its own small way, feels profound because it illustrates that none of the things you point to as identity are intrinsic. You are something far more mysterious than a person who is funny, who is angry, who is hurt, who likes Marlboro cigarettes, who is Presbyterian, who is a playboy, who is Nigerian, who is a Real Madrid fan—all of that is dressing.

A Bright Ray of Darkness
Ethan Hawke

The Scent of Decaying Fish and Playing King Henry VIII – Jude Law Anecdote

MOSLEY: It’s, yeah, your 2023 film where you played King Henry VIII. I read that you hired a perfumer.

LAW: I work with her quite often, actually.

MOSLEY: Really? Yes.

LAW: Yeah. First of all, she’s an absolute genius, Azzi. And she runs an amazing perfumery called The Perfumer’s Story. She makes incredible scents. And, you know, scents is a really quick way to accumulate sort of feelings and emotions. You know, if you walk into your grandma’s house, it smells a certain way, and you feel a certain way. If you go out and someone’s been cutting the grass – (sniffing) right? – it evokes all sorts of memories. Or the smell of gasoline, you know?

MOSLEY: Yeah.

LAW: I mean, things like that that are very pungent are very quick to make you feel and think, you know? And my job is an odd job. You know, whether you want to or not, you turn up. You put on someone else’s clothes, and you have to embody someone pretty damn quick. And sometimes it’s like, hey, it’s 7. The sun’s coming up. We’ve got to go do this.

MOSLEY: We got to get this done.

LAW: Get in it, right?

MOSLEY: But let’s talk about what she did for you, OK? She…

LAW: So she built this. She made a perfume for me. And I’d read this piece about Henry. He basically had these ulcers on his leg that were rotting, and it was a miracle he lived the 10 years he did with them. But you could smell him, apparently, three rooms away. He’d stank, like, fetid.

MOSLEY: Yes.

LAW: And what I realized, I’m playing him at the very end of his life when eventually he died of these things from a fever. And I just thought it would be very helpful to everyone else and to me if I stank. So she made me this incredible, noxious odor that I kind of sprayed on myself.

MOSLEY: It was made, a concoction of pig sweat.

LAW: Yeah.

MOSLEY: Fecal matter.

LAW: (Laughter) You’re going, does this say this?

MOSLEY: To mimic the smell of decaying fish.

LAW: Yeah.

MOSLEY: So it was really bad.

LAW: It was really, really, really, really rancid. Yeah. But it really helped. To me, it was very interesting playing someone who is incredibly powerful, all-dominant, expects everyone to bow to their every need and thought and want, and yet is sitting in a body that is immobile because of the weight he’s put on and because of the wounds he has, kind of in his own rotting flesh, and having to kind of face himself. And he can’t escape what he’s done to himself and who he’s become. You know, he’s a mass murderer.

MOSLEY: Yes.

LAW: And deluded to the extreme of believing that he’s second only to God. Well, he’s about to face God. And it’s like, OK, what’s going on? What’s going on in that man?

MOSLEY: You’re pretty unrecognizable in that role. And I’m just wondering, there had to be some pretty interesting conversations around the rank smell on that set. It helped you. It also helped your colleagues, your costars.

LAW: Well, I mean, it wasn’t like I, you know, wanted to shock them or warn them, you know, but we discussed it. And Alicia Vikander, who plays my wife, the queen, Queen Katherine Parr, was very game for it because she sort of loved this idea that she had to have this intimacy and this devotion amidst this sort of wall of stink, (laughter) you know? And the guys who play my Privy Council were old friends of mine from the theater. And again, it was this sort of – this conflict between observing their devotion and putting up with this appalling physical decay.

https://www.npr.org/2025/09/18/nx-s1-5545540/jude-law-takes-a-dark-turn-in-the-psychological-drama-black-rabbit

A protest is an invitation to a better world – Peter Coyote on Effective Demonstration

I’m watching the Los Angeles reaction to ICE raids with trepidation and regret. Three years ago I taught a class at Harvard on the “theater of protest”— designed to help people understand why so many protests turn out to be Republican campaign videos working directly against the interests of the original protest.

A protest is an invitation to a better world. It’s a ceremony. No one accepts a ceremonial invitation when they’re being screamed at. More important you have to know who the real audience Of the protestis. The audience is NEVER the police, the politicians, the Board of supervisors, The Congress,etc. The audience is always the American people, who are trying to decide who they can trust; who will not embarrass them. If you win them, you win power at the box office And power to make positive change.Everything else is a waste. There are a few ways to get there.

Number 1 let women organize the event. They’re more collaborative. They’re more inclusive, and they don’t generally bring the undertones of violence men do. 2 appoint monitors, give them yellow, vests and whistles. At the first sign of violence, they blow the whistles and the real protester sit down. Let the police take out their aggression on the anarchists and the provocateurs trying to discredit the movement. Number 3 dress like you’re going to church. It’s hard to be painted as a hoodlum When you’re dressed in clean Presentable clothes. They don’t have to be fancy they just signal the respect for the occasion that you want to transmit to the audience.Number 4, make your protest silent. Demonstrate your discipline to the American people.Let signs do the talking. Number 5 go home at night. In the dark, you can’t tell the cops from the killers. Come back at Dawn fresh and rested. I have great fear that Trump’s staging with the National Guard and maybe the Marines is designed to clash with anarchists who are playing into his hands and offering him the opportunity to declare an insurrection. It’s such a waste and it’s only because we haven’t thought things through strategically. Nothing I thought of is particularly original. It was all learned by watching the early civil rights protests in the 50s and 60s. And it was the discipline and courage of African-Americans that drew such a clear line in the American sand that people were forced to take sides and that produced the civil rights act. .The American people are watching and once again if we behave in ways that can be misinterpreted, we’ll see this explained to the public in Republican campaign videos benefiting the very people who started this. Wake up. Vent at home. In public practice discipline and self control. It takes much more courage.

https://substack.com/@petercoyote1

see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Coyote

Stanley Kauffmann on Marlon Brando

The Young Lions, 1958

I have had a chance to watch Brando’s career from its beginning because he made his professional debut in a children’s play of mine at the Adelphi Theater in New York in 1944. His role consisted of being hit on the head and falling down; but he managed to find a way of falling down that, without being obtrusive, was individual.

Brando has evolved a personal style which relies largely on understatement and the liberal use of pauses. Often the effect is heart-breaking; remember the poignancy he gave the vapid monosyllable “Wow” in On the Waterfront when he learned that his brother was threatening his life. Occasionally the style lapses out of meaning into mannerism; some of Sayonara could have used compression. But in essence he reflects in his style—as actors often do—a prevalent artistic vein of his day. Kemble exemplified the classic, elegant eighteenth century, Kean the wild, torrential romantics of the early nineteenth century, Irving the elaborate majesty of the late Victorians. I compare Brando with these luminaries only to draw a parallel. He is a taciturn realist: an epitome not of that joyous realistic revolution which swept away the humbug that obscured the contours of the world but of that generation born into realism which has seen its world with harsh clarity, whose work is to reconcile itself to that world’s revealed boundaries and to find its triumphs inwardly.

https://newrepublic.com/article/115297/excerpts-reviews-stanley-kauffmann

Acting and Presentness – Emma Stone

GROSS: Where does acting fit into this? Like, when you are acting – when you started acting as a kid – you were 11, I think, when you started performing – do you feel like you were escaping yourself and therefore out of your anxiety and escaping your body ’cause your body became controlled by the character?

STONE: No. If anything, the opposite. I felt like I – and I’ve understood it more over the years because I think – I’ve heard a lot of actors talk about – and maybe that’s because they’re doing these big, dramatic, kind of cathartic roles. And I’m drawn much more to comedy, or now, dark comedy. I felt like every reaction in my body is permitted. All of my big feelings are productive. And presence is required, so it’s like a meditation because anxiety lives solely in the past or the future – you know, either future tripping or past tripping – you know, things you can’t control on either side. And acting requires you to be so present, to listen, to be looking at the other person, to be living in the experience and living in your body. And that was the huge gift of it to me and remains the huge gift of it to me to this day.

GROSS: But that’s the thing. Because it’s, like, your job…

STONE: Yeah.

GROSS: …It gives you permission. It makes it obligatory to be in the moment.

STONE: Yes. Yes.

GROSS: It’s like, you can’t say, well, I can’t control it ’cause I’m worried about the past. It’s like, your job is to focus on now.

STONE: Exactly.

https://www.npr.org/2024/03/08/1236564681/how-poor-things-actor-emma-stone-turns-her-anxiety-into-a-superpower

Status Interactions in Everyday Conversation – Keith Johnstone on

Normally we are ‘forbidden’ to see status transactions except when there’s a conflict. In reality status transactions continue all the time. In the park we’ll notice the ducks squabbling, but not how carefully they keep their distances when they are not.

Here’s a conversation quoted by W. R. Bion (Experience in Groups, Tavistock Publications, 1968) which he gives as an example of a group not getting anywhere while apparently being friendly. The remarks on the status interactions are mine.

MRS X: I had a nasty turn last week. I was standing in a queue waiting for my turn to go into the cinema when I felt ever so queer. Really, I thought I should faint or something.

[Mrs X is attempting to raise her status by having an interesting medical problem. Mrs Y immediately outdoes her.]

MRS Y: You’re lucky to have been going to a cinema. If I thought I could go to a cinema I should think I had nothing to complain of at all.

[Mrs Z now blocks Mrs Y.]

MRS Z: I know what Mrs X means. I feel just like that myself, only I should have had to leave the queue.

[Mrs Z is very talented in that she supports Mrs X against Mrs Y while at the same time claiming to be more worthy of interest, her condition more severe. Mr A now intervenes to lower them all by making their condition seem very ordinary.]

MR A: Have you tried stooping down? That makes the blood come back to your head. I expect you were feeling faint.

[Mrs X defends herself.]

MRS X: It’s not really faint.

MRS Y: I always find it does a lot of good to try exercises. I don’t know if that’s what Mr A means.

[She seems to be joining forces with Mr A, but implies that he was unable to say what he meant. She doesn’t say ‘Is that what you mean?’ but protects herself by her typically high-status circumlocution. Mrs Z now lowers everybody, and immediately lowers herself to avoid counterattack.]

MRS Z: I think you have to use your will-power. That’s what worries me—I haven’t got any.

[Mr B then intervenes, I suspect in a low-status way, or rather trying to be high-status but failing. It’s impossible to be sure from just the words.]

MR B: I had something similar happen to me last week, only I wasn’t standing in a queue. I was just sitting at home quietly when …

[Mr C demolishes him.]

MR C: You were lucky to be sitting at home quietly. If I was able to do that I shouldn’t think I had anything to grumble about. If you can’t sit at home why don’t you go to the cinema or something?

Bion says that the prevailing atmosphere was of good temper and helpfulness. He adds that ‘A suspicion grows in my mind, that there is no hope whatever of expecting co-operation from this group.’ Fair enough. What he has is a group where everyone attacks the status of everyone else while pretending to be friendly. If he taught them to play status transactions as games then the feeling within the group would improve. A lot of laughter would have been released, and the group might have flipped over from acting as a competitive group into acting as a co-operative one. It’s worth noting how much talent is locked away inside these apparently banal people.

Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre
Keith Johnstone

Overacting and the Audience Experience

“Richard Ayoade, who’s like my favourite director of all time,” says Eisenberg, who worked with Ayoade on The Double, and may or may not have used him as considerable inspiration for the character of James, “would always tell me that when the characters are experiencing a lot of emotions explicitly, it can take away from the experience because it unburdens the audience from sitting with something. He explained that to me many, many times when I was overacting in his movie.”

Every day is 24 hours of panic to just get out the door’: Jesse Eisenberg on self-indulgence, candid aunts and his Oscar-tipped Holocaust comedy
The writer-director of A Real Pain and co-stars Kieran Culkin, Jennifer Grey and Will Sharpe talk about being overcome by generational trauma while making Oscar season’s funniest film

Daniel Day Lewis as Hamlet, Acting as a Two Track Activity – David Burke on

The idea of a hoax had first come to me during a performance of the play. If anyone is shocked by this, all I can say is that I know of no actor who is so pure onstage that he thinks only what his character thinks. If he did, he would presumably become the character: a form of madness. This may of course be what happens to Hamlet—he puts on an antic disposition, and gets stuck in it. Something rather like this seems to have happened once to an actor who was playing the Prince. Daniel Day-Lewis, as was widely reported in the press at the time, suffered a breakdown in the middle of the performance, and the explanation most commonly offered was that he came to believe that the actor playing opposite him as the Ghost of his father was his own father, who had been dead many years; whereupon he abruptly left the stage, never to return, and never to play the role again.

This was not a warning that I am ever likely to forget; I was the Ghost.

Acting is mostly a twin-track mental activity. In one track runs the role, requiring thoughts ranging from, say, gentle amusement to towering rage. Then there is the second track, which monitors the performance: executing the right moves, body language, and voice level; taking note of audience reaction and keeping an eye on fellow actors; coping with emergencies such as a missing prop or a faulty lighting cue. These two tracks run parallel, night by night. If one should go wrong, then it is likely that the other will misbehave too.

I had a painful illustration of this just before we finished our run in the West End. After nearly three hundred performances I was tired, and I suppose that the sight of the finishing tape made me relax. At some point I failed to make one of my moves. Sara told me later that a mobile phone had just gone off in the audience. A second or two later I was standing on the stage not knowing where I was or what I had to say. A black hole had opened up around me. Niels Bohr had vanished from Track One, and an alarmed David Burke on Track Two had to take a prompt from the equally alarmed prompter. The move I had failed to make was tied to the thought and the words; when one went, they all three went.

The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue
Michael Frayn, David Burke

Just Say What’s on the Page – Acting Advice, Josh Brolin Anecdote

Josh Brolin was 16 years old when he landed a role in “The Goonies.” He played Brandon “Brand” Walsh, a high-school jock and the older brother of Sean Astin’s Mikey. Speaking to People magazine ahead of the release of his memoir, “From Under the Truck,” Brolin remembered Steven Spielberg shutting down his super-intellectual approach for the teenage character.

“I think [my character] Brandon is freaking out, and the tunnels represent the inside of his mother’s womb, and he’s trying to cut that umbilical cord,” Brolin remembered pitching to Spielberg, who promptly disregarded such a take.

“He looked at me, and he goes, ‘Yeah, just act. Just say what’s on the page,’” Brolin said. “He wasn’t being an asshole, he was right.”

16-Year-Old Josh Brolin Tried to Make His ‘Goonies’ Character Super Deep; Then Steven Spielberg Told Him: ‘Just Act. Just Say What’s on the Page’

A Tip About Shakespearen Soliloquies – Roger Michell to Simon Russell Beale

While I was rehearsing for Richard III, another director, Roger Michell, gave me a tip about soliloquies. ‘When you have to speak directly to the audience,’ he said, ‘always give them a role.’ It’s a simple and brilliant idea. As an example: I said earlier that Iago lies to his audience. If that is true, then he would, presumably, think of them as a pack of gullible idiots. For Hamlet, the only people he can really trust are his friends in the audience; he believes that, whatever happens and whatever he chooses to do, they will understand him. In Richard’s case, he behaves like the leader of the gang. Any challenge that the audience might throw down – seducing a woman over the corpse of a man that he’s just killed, let’s say, or seizing the crown – he will accept. And he will triumph – to his and the gang’s delight.

A Piece of Work: Playing Shakespeare and Other Stories
Simon Russell Beale

Laurence Olivier on Oedipus


So at dinner in the Worsley Arms, over the sole and white Burgundy, we discussed the terrible scream that blinded Oedipus gave at the New Theatre just after the Second World War.
‘It wasn’t an “ah”, or an “ugh” — more an “err”,’ he said.
‘What was wonderful,’ I remembered, ‘was the endless pause, before you felt the pain.’
‘Hardly new. It’s exactly the same as timing a double-take in comedy. You know what I had to do to make that pain sound real? I had to think of animals. I thought of foxes screaming. With their paws caught in the teeth of a trap.’ He held out his wrists, stiff and helpless. ‘And then I heard about how they catch ermine. It was a great help to me when I heard about that.’
‘How do they catch ermine?’
‘You don’t know?’ Lord Olivier looked at me in amazement. ‘In the Arctic they put down salt and the ermine comes to lick it.’ He became a small, thirsty animal. ‘And his tongue freezes to the ice. I thought about that when I screamed as Oedipus.’

In Character: Interviews w/ Some Most Influential Remarkable Men Women Our Time
John Mortimer

Photos from: Confessions of an Actor: An Autobiography
Laurence Olivier

See also: Olivier – Richard III, Jed Harris inspiration