Films

A lovely meeting with an old friend and collaborator at The Curzon Victoria, although I hadn’t checked my maps and just assumed it would be accessible by car without going into the congestion charge, so I had to turn around and go home when I got to the red C and get a Lime bike instead. Still, she’s written a feature. There’s a bit of tell not show still left in it, so she’s aiming to get it read by actors so she can hear when it is slightly overwritten. Like when my character says “You’re drunk. smell of whisky”. All you need is “you’re drunk”. We know he smells of whisky, we’ve seen him drink it. We also can see how my character determines he’s drunk, by getting in his face and owning a nose. My character wouldn’t, in that instant, be particularly concerned about showing his workings. Even “you’re drunk” needs a target, a reason. That’s fine. But “smell of whisky”… it can be sold, sure. You can make my character a particular hater of whisky – maybe his dad was a whisky drinker and beat him. There are many ways of selling the line as an actor, because our job is to sell these lines as truth. Eat the lines until you don’t have to try and remember them anymore, then pretend to be someone else. Technically it’s you under a different set of circumstances. But you under a different set of circumstances is basically someone else. It’s all about terminology. There have been some right plonking alpha males who have tried to mystify the whole process of acting over the years, just as with improv. Given it a whole load of language and rules, governed massive self-referential cults, disapproved of anyone using other language idioms. It’s kinda weird. In the end we are just telling stories. People love to be in charge of chaos, to have sets of rules and if other people don’t know the secret rules they are wrong and you feel clever. It’s bollocks but it keeps people happy.

I got an audition for someone really exciting. A self tape. I have to do it tomorrow, it’s very short notice, and tomorrow I’ll have to wake up and shave off the beard, pick clothes, make myself ready. It’s pretty much a year to the day since the Deep Cover audition so I’m fucking thrilled about it and even though it is not a long turnaround I am gonna do my best to make sense of it and turn in something good. Thankfully I’ve got all day.

Lou had her first day of work today so I’ll be picking her up from the station shortly. A long day for her. I’m ready to turn in, even if largely I’ve been winding out the ceremony and coming back into the world. I’m hoping to get to bed pretty quickly once she’s back, just as I want to activate tomorrow properly. This is not an audition to trifle with. I’m tentatively going to thank the medicine for aligning the stars so well. I was dreading an audition coming in on Friday night for Monday morning, God knows what I might have turned in with grandmother rolling through my veins. Tomorrow I can slowly and thoughtfully shear myself like a sheep and then set up a wall somewhere and bang out a bit of energy that might snag into a really bright slice of life.

Corners. Post RSC, post medicine, and things look different.

Onwards.