Category: ‘A Screen Acting Workshop + DVD’ pub. Nick Hern Books

Hollywood – the Brits have arrived. In fact they’ve always been there.

  ** Oscar nominations update for Brits:) Leading Actress: Felicity Jones, Rosamund Pike Leading Actor: Benedict Cumberbatch, Eddie Redmayne Supporting Actress: Keira Knightly Colin Welland won the Oscar for the screenplay of Chariots of Fire in 1981. He was mocked for the line in his acceptance speech: ‘The British are Coming’. I dedicate this post […]

You or the Character?

This point comes up every time I work with an actor. I spent 20 years of my life as an actor trying to sort this out. And another 20 years as a director and coach. Let’s start with the question – ‘What is a character?’ – a character is a person from real-life or fiction […]

The Slippery Business of Fishing for Acting Advice

The business of acting doesn’t lend itself comfortably to words or explanations. Acting is doing. I worked with a very famous, very cruel director once when I was an actor. But he did have one saying of great wisdom. ‘Don’t talk about it. Do it,’ he’d  snarl. But of course, us actors love talking – […]

Why do Actors Frown? (And why they shouldn’t!)

Yes – we all get frown lines eventually. And it is normal to frown. But frowning is a solo activity – by that I mean that it is when we engage with ourselves and not with other people. We frown when we are thinking, remembering in order to be precise, concentrating, squinting to see clearly, […]

Text – the Unnatural Act:

Words are enormous!  In life, we dig into our storehouse of memory, choose our words carefully, censor them, find new ones, then add another.  We weigh our thoughts up against a visual, kinaesthetic or auditory memory, remember how we felt about it, and finally invest the words to describe it with enough vigour for the […]

Laser-Speak for Directors

Directors and Actors Sharing a Language Directors are busy, harassed, stressed-out people. The buck stops here. This is true for all directors, but especially so for screen directors. They may have to get 30 minutes of screen time in the day. Or maybe only a minute and a half, but it involves a helicopter shot […]