The public must suffer untold pangs from the stiffness, the deliberate stifling of emotion, on the part of many British actors.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I guess every actor has certain emotions they can access easier than others.
In the theater there is often a tension, almost a contradiction, between the way real people would think and behave, and a kind of imposed dramaticness.
I have my own difficulty with movies in which the suffering of the characters is too real, and many find it difficult to watch comedies that rely too heavily on embarrassment; the vicarious reaction to this is too unpleasant.
In film, it's very important to not allow yourself to get sentimental, which, being British, I try to avoid. People sometimes regard sentimentality as emotion. It is not. Sentimentality is unearned emotion.
Even actors are human beings, so we have issues to deal with - physical, emotional, and mental.
If you get too deep into the history, what often happens to a lot of us actors is that we become stilted. We forget that we're reading about something that happened a hundred years ago. If we don't put the human emotion that would naturally be in there, we end up being stilted instead of being human beings.
No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.
Some actors need to be rattled and some need to be focused.
An actor's body should be full of emotions, whether it is happiness or sorrow, pain or joy, enraged or elated.
The life of an actor lends itself to emotion, and yet you have to be tough as old boots to stay at the table.