Keep it Interesting

Actor story #1: Early in the filming of Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror classic The Shining, Kubrick stops star Jack Nicholson in the middle of a scene, saying "No, this isn't working."

"What do you mean?" says Nicholson. "You said you wanted it to be realistic."

"Well...yes. But it isn't interesting."

Nicholson made it interesting!

Actor story #2: From Alan Arkin's wonderful autobiography An Improvised Life. Arkin relates how early his acting career he hit a wall. Nothing was working. He gets an offer out of the blue to join Second City in Chicago and decides to go, feeling he'd failed as an actor. Two years later he's back in New York and again submitting for roles. Only this time he thinks to himself, To heck with this! I'm tired of trying to figure out what casting wants. I'm just going to give them the most interesting version of me. Take it or leave it.

And he starts booking roles.

I've been thinking about these two stories this week because of a discussion I had in my drama class. I had re-taped a scene everyone in class had done weeks ago and the instructor wanted to know what I thought was working for me this time. Well, I said, what is really working is that this version is 100 percent more interesting than my initial take on it. And it was. I had taken a woman described in the script simply as "very frightened" and instead made her "unnerved" - a calculating woman whose criminal plans have gone off the rails and is now trying to avoid getting caught - and suddenly she was different from all of the other class interpretations. Suddenly she was...well...interesting!

As actors we often get into long discussions about being present, being specific, being believable and natural. We can parse a scene and say this is what my character is feeling and this is my relationship to the other characters and this is my objective and this is what the writer means to convey.  These are all important considerations. But while all of our thoughts can be reasonably reasonable, our performance can still be ho-hum. Standard-issue.

It all comes back to that old question: what is meant by a "bold" choice?  I think what it means is to find some small part of yourself in every character you play, and then to expand that small part into someone really interesting. Someone that elicits a visceral response from the audience.

If the script says your character is "(fill in the blank)" look the word up at Thesaurus.com.  Here's what I found for "frightened."

There is no one way of interpreting the word "frightened." In fact, there is a huge range of characters here! Find yourself somewhere in your list and run with it.