March 2, 2009
Loading…loading…talk about acting…NOW.
Filed by Bil at 3:22 pm under Shameless Plugs, The Arts
The polite thing to do after our delightfully successful Ale House night would have been to give a shout-out the very next day to all who attended right here on this blog. Unfortunately, circumstances have been very unusual: Trevor is being hunted by both the French police and a secret society of violent priests called Opus Dei; Lance has been quantum leaping through the twentieth century, fixing history one hour at a time; and as for me…well, I’ve been in rehearsals for a play. But we really would like to thank everyone who showed up to the Ale House a week and a day ago. Sorry for the delayed props, but just because it’s late doesn’t mean we don’t really, really like you. Thanks for coming! Hope to see you at the next one…
Speaking of my play: Sequestered opens at the Dream Theatre on March 12. If you’re interested in feeling claustrophobic and being confused by the machinations of a strange universe, come see it…
I don’t normally like to blog about acting ~ I don’t really have that much to say, and especially with Dream Theatre, the process is so eclectic and fast and yet so long and so particular that I can’t really track my progress as an actor with any clarity.
However.
This weekend I was reminded of a few things that I needed to be reminded of, one of them being why I enjoy acting at all. Our director broke down this absurd play beat by beat and we sat there, in the middle of the rehearsal process, and did some serious table work. Rather than work on blocking or intentions or even lines, we all talked about the play at great length. And when we were done talking, we got up and ran the play and it was much stronger and much clearer than it had ever been before. Not to say it’s ready…far from it…but we sort of solidified our foundations, and now I’m even more excited for this play than I was when I first took the role.
One of the things we talked about is the fact that my character is a straight-up bad guy. There’s no real argument there; he’s a killer, a sinner…he’s sadistic, competitive, and ruthlessly efficient. I had heard over and over from actors I admire and respect that when you take the role of a villain, you can’t just think of the character as “a villain,” but rather think of the character as a human being with real emotions and intentions and so on and so forth. So that’s what I had been doing.
And what I took away from this in-depth discussion we had over the weekend was this: my character is a villain.
And this excited me, because that’s why I took the role, and I had sort of forgotten that in all my efforts to humanize a contract killer. And it’s not that the humanizing has to go away…if anything, it can be stronger still…but how I feel now is that what I’ve been working on can be considered the innards of the character, and now what I want to do is put on the villain shell. And that is what will make him exciting, entertaining, interesting to watch. The innards don’t even really matter to the audience; they are there to make the shell take shape…what I want to remember, though, is that the shell can shape the innards just as well.
I think what actors mean when they tell you not to treat your villain character like a villain is that you can’t feel the same way about him as the audience will. You don’t want to perform your actions with a sense that what you’re doing is wrong or reprehensible, because that weakens the performance. You want to do what you do because it’s the right thing to do for that character at that time. But I realize now that I never felt like Nametag was someone to dismiss as just a villain; I mean, what he does is absolutely despicable, but (without sounding like a bad person in real life) this is the kind of behavior I fantasize about. And here is my chance to do it. So I’m going to play this bad guy as mean and taunting and disrespectful as I damn well want to.
Playing the villian… I have played more “bad guys” then I can even count. I have even taken the villian role over the role that I really wanted to play because I still don’t know how to convince other actors that the best way to play bad is to play good.
The closest I ever came to teaching an actor about the good side of evil. I was working with an actor was playing a serial killer. He was a hardcore method actor and was trying and trying to get his head so deep in the darkness that he could channel the evil into himself. (Or something like that. It was painful.) He even decided (without telling me) to stop taking his antidepressant medication because he liked the way that his anxiety attacks felt so “close to the role.” I remember throwing him into the backseat of my car and rushing him to the hospital to get his medication after I found that out.
I wasn’t surprised that he did that. As a hardcore method actor myself, at the time, I most likely would’ve done the same thing… But… I decided that I had to come up with a way to teach him how to play bad… Step one: a villian has an opinion about villiany. His serial killer attacked women. His serial killer hated himself for killing them. His serial killer believed that no woman would ever love him… His serial killer felt that villany was evil and was terrified to acknowledge that he himself might be evil. Through deconstruction we learned that the pieces of this man were all approachable (actable) and that no amount of beating your head into a wall or skipping on antidepressant medication would help… BUT! He was a hardcore method actor so he also needed to know how to pull his character out of “reality.” He needed to brood… So I thought about how to help him approach this fictional “reality.” I wasn’t going to show him that all men are evil and have him stalking women in the dark and drink his own blood just to get the flavor. (These are things he really tried, by the way…) So I asked him about love. Have you ever sat in the mall (this was Boca, so that’s what we did… We sat in the mall.) and saw a girl out of the corner of your eyes that you thought was beautiful? Yes. What about her was beautiful? What about her is different from the hundreds of other people walking past you? Do you wish you could talk to her? Are you shy about even trying? Do you feel that if she’s beautiful then she must already have a boyfriend? Are you confident to go up to talk to her? Blah blah blah blah… That is the girl that your serial killer kills. You don’t sit in the mall (BOCA!) and think about cutting a girl’s head off. You just look at who stands out. That’s who your character would kill. Make it a love story.
I’ve always enjoyed the villian because I’ve always enjoyed their love story. The freedom of acting inside a character that is so filled with emotion that he seems almost emotionless, is an incredible experience. Playing a character who is flawed to the point that he has to rewrite the rules of happiness in his head in order to justify his existence, is an incredible experience. You play Nametag very well, Bil.
It wasn’t about you being directed away from what you thought the role should be and then having to trust that everyone on the outside must know better than you becasue they have an outside persepective that you don’t… (See how wrong that sounds when you even type that?)
You had to find his love. Once you knew what his loves were, you could play him… Period. Us on the outside could never know your role better than you. We could only tell you what we saw. And when we see something that you don’t see. (A moment that you had no idea was even there or a false moment that you were trying because you wanted it to be right.) Ask yourself where that moment came from… What were you doing that lead the director to his next note? Actors are in control of their roles. The only thing that I have ever asked from an actor (well… Demand.) is that they back up all of their character choices. They must show us how much the know they role.
And you know damn well what happens once you truly know the role, Bil. Freedom. That’s why I hate full on blocking. You should be free to express the character that you know…