Fill in the Gaps

This is my first post on the craft of acting, which is wild considering it’s this thing I love and have spent well over 10,000 hours doing, so I’m pretty good at it per Malcolm Gladwell. To whit I spent a hefty amount of the past two weeks on a showcase panel using my talents to give actors feedback for their auditions. I’m also celebrating, from the sidelines, the positive reception to a movie I filmed last summer. Because of the SAG-AFTRA strike I am literally sidelined from promoting it.

One thing the strike illuminates is the many misperceptions there are about actors, as opposed to movie stars. Perhaps the main one is the reality of the average actor’s income. The earnings of an actor who manages to qualify for the Union’s health coverage, is still a galaxy far far away from the bloated salaries of movie stars. I am an actor. For most of my 25+ year career I’d say ‘I’m a middle class working actor’, but it’s become increasingly difficult to claim that without supplementing here and there. Alas, filling in gaps has always been part of the gig. It’s definitely part of the auditioning process.

NDAs are so ubiquitous at auditions today, I assume everyone has experience with nondisclosure agreements. For the majority of my auditions, access to scripts is increasingly privileged and often only a few redacted pages are given. It’s a privilege to have a script to comb through for clues about my character, I find insights in scenes my character doesn’t even appear – maybe another character says something revealing about them. Like any skill, the longer you do it the better you get; whether I’m combing through 98 pages or 3, I’m pretty good at detecting clues. The life of a character is not limited to the lines; it’s in the spaces in between the lines, the things unsaid as much as the things said.

For the Adult Lauren audition I had three pages. The first time I read the scene I was literally ‘wtf is going on?’; I have a gun? I was late to meet her? I’m talking about time travel seriously? Seriously? There were a lot of gaps to fill in, and no script. The first question is always, who am I talking to… and why? The answer to the first part of the question informs the second part. Once I figure out the Jamie character is connected to my younger self from thirty years ago I have the key to unlock the scenario. I’m invested in her safety and wellbeing; I want to take care of her, she’s my daughter’s best friend. All of a sudden pieces start falling into place, needs become clear. This is just one ingredient of many used to create a character and play a scene. But if it’s missing, everything is ruined. Seriously, order in pizza.

Acting is so much more than ‘memorizing all those lines’, and not sounding like I’m reciting them.
—Say it with feeling!
–But where does the feeling come from?
–The relationship!
It can be a relationship to an inanimate object, it can be a character we never meet onscreen but it’s a connection the actor has an opinion about. My number one tip to any actor, aspiring or otherwise, is to invest in the relationships.

If I’m making a shopping list of ingredients for a scene, relationships are a staple. Environment would be another one. Oh and history is the necessary binding agent. All the fun spicy things like physical characteristics and accents are, well, accents. But first, what is the foundation of this stew I’m concocting? What does it need? What is it missing? The process is peppered with questions that fill in the flavor gaps.
It’s a pretty decent recipe for life as well. Always be seeking answers, with the emphasis on seeking.