Actors are a lot like professors on dissertation committees - it's a lot of ego, a lot of rallying for position, there is a lot at stake in every single interaction.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
There's something important, as an actor, about allowing yourself to be approached by people to do roles. People see different things in you.
I think a lot of actors feel like outsiders or miscreants. This profession provides an opportunity to play out all the different parts of ourselves.
Sometimes I think being an actor is like being a dog for a director; it's like they throw a stick, and you want to fetch it and bring it back to them. You want a pat on the head for it.
Actors are people who are doing a job they want to do, which isn't the case for many of the people who watch what we do.
If you write interesting roles, you get interesting people to play them. If you write roles that are full of nuance and contradiction and have interesting dialog, actors are drawn to that.
The problem with being an actor is that you have to be reactive to what other people want.
As an actor, acting is like playing a sport. You do this thing that's intangible, and while it's happening, it's great. But then when it's done, there's really no tangible product. Someone else is capturing it and turning it into something tangible.
The whole business of being an actor is to explore, from research to shooting to why you do it. You're trying to see why people do what they do and how it feels to do what they do.
Actors, their greatest tool, their greatest resource is imagination. You can take things, power objects, you can recruit your dreams, you can access your memories and get there. So the idea is not to act but to just be.
Actors are like magicians. They'll sit there and do all their tricks to each other. It's very competitive, and the goal is to get them bonding, to get them to know the real person as quickly as possible.