I really love the process, with stage, of rehearsal, you get to create a character, and you have a beginning, a middle, and an end of story. And in television, you don't.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I love the stage - the fact that you only have one take to get it right, the interaction with the audience, and how every show is different even though you're doing the same thing.
In a play, you know where you start and end and all the stops you have to do, but in television, you can't construct this carefully planned out arc for your character. You often get a script and you're shooting it two days later, and you don't know what's going to happen next. It's one of the harder things that I've done.
As a writer, it's fun to create. And once you get into a long-running show with very established characters and a very established tone and format, after a while it's a really great job, but that's what it is - a job.
I go through a whole process with the actors first, building and creating characters, then I encourage them to sort of live in that character when they're in the screen.
The stage gives you more control over your own work; in television, there's a distressing amount of communal writing. Unless it's your show, you have no control over that. You're at the mercy of whoever's running the show.
The stage is that immediate rush of energy you get from the audience. Also, doing something in chronology - something that starts and finishes the same night. In television, you work toward the one scene, you shoot it, and then you have to forget about it because you have to worry about the next scene.
One of the things I really love about TV is this symbiotic relationship you can get between the writers and the actors, and the characters start to come to life because you start to collaborate.
Well, television is grueling. The hours are grueling, it's hard work, and there's a lot of pressure to get it done without a lot of rehearsal time.
When you're starting out as an actor, you keep raising the stakes. First, you just want to be a character who comes on stage and gets a laugh or two and exits. Just five minutes on a stage, not even Broadway. But every time you say your little prayer at night, you place more demands.
I love the creative process, of getting to create your own show or your own movie, whatever it is you want to do, and have the resources to try and make that happen.