acting [Theme] Page 2

Acting is primarily the ability to keep a full audience from coughing.

- Would you like Anya to become an actress, to follow in your footsteps?
- Personally, I don't. Because, as a rule, acting destinies, especially the fate of actresses, are unhappy in life.

Every day at least six people come up to me and say, "Your Kung Fu series has changed my life."

Why should I refuse the proposed roles? This is the job in the first place. And I must admit, I like her.

I can even play a Russian. Why not? I would look good in some Siberian village.

I rarely play villains – it's hard for me to portray so much malice. Cloud Atlas worked out - but it took a ton of makeup.

My first serious role was as Yasha's servants in Chekhov's Cherry Orchard at the California Amateur Theater. I was hired as a third-year student, and at the same time I was a theater carpenter - they needed cheap labor.

Shakespeare is real, but his characters live in a world of extremes. They are thrown from ecstasy to suffering, from love to hate, from surprise to horror. But this is not melodrama, they are not exaggerating. Every moment is critical to them. A good actor playing in a Shakespearean play - no ... any good actor in principle - he not only utters lines, he feels them. We felt all of our characters' passions as our own. But the emotions of this or that hero do not cancel the emotions of the artist: you simply experience them all at once. Imagine that your thoughts and feelings are mixed up with the thoughts and feelings of another person. Sometimes it can be difficult to figure out who is who. We all felt very keenly. And it became an overwhelming burden for us, we bent under it, like Atlas, who supported the whole world on his shoulders.

- Why don't you just tell me what happened? No performances. No poetry.
I smile.
- For us, everything was a spectacle and poetry.

How do they know that standing on stage and saying other people's words as their own is not so much an act of courage as a desperate leap towards mutual understanding? Trying to create a subtle connection between the speaker and the listener and convey something – essentially anything.

Actors are inherently changeable: alchemical creatures made up of flammable elements: emotion, ego, and envy. Heat them, mix them, and sometimes you get gold, and sometimes - a catastrophe.

The actor must take the comedy deadly seriously, otherwise it will not be funny to the viewer.

When we are on stage, we play a character, but only for fifty percent. The rest is ourselves, but we are afraid to show people what we really are. When I worked with Patsy Rodenberg, she taught us that Shakespeare's world is a world in which "passions are attractive." How often are we afraid of looking ridiculous and not showing the power of our emotions? But you cannot work well if you are afraid or in hiding.

Actors are like geodes. You have to break them to see what they are made of.