Thirteen years after its cinema release, Scott Pilgrim Vs the World is having a moment. The cast are back for an animated adaptation. As is the way of these things, journalists would very much like to know what making the film was like from one Michael Cera.
By the end of the movie I felt like: ‘This is my world. This is my group of friends.’ […]
I was a little depressed when we were done because it all just goes away and you’re like:
‘Where did everybody go?’
GQ
He’s so relatable.
Where did everybody go?
Acting does not happen in a vacuum. We have chosen a social career. The profession is about relationships at, as I count them, three levels.
Character Relationships
This is the relationship between the character you are playing and that of your scene partner(s) and the one is the most ephemeral, lasting as long as the scene. It is the context for your actions. Lord and Lady Macbeth are not primarily conspirators to murder: they are a married couple. That is their context in which they choose to murder. Bertie Wooster and Jeeves are not just engines for extravagant cow creamer plots: they are employer and employee. Orestes and Electra are regular siblings before they are vengeance siblings.
Audience Relationship
The relationship with the audience lasts a bit longer, perhaps until the end of the play or filming. It is how we present our work to its intended, for lack of a better word, user. Side note: I believe that the best way to understand the actor-audience relationship is by regularly returning to stage work; something about having them there live in the moment trains us to invite them into the story even when they’re watching us or listening to us later. It reminds us who we’re doing this for.
Colleague Relationship
Here’s the one Michael Cera’s talking about. Whether it’s cast or crew, the likelihood is that you’ve been flung into work with a heap of people you didn’t previously know. Or maybe you did and it’s a joy to be back together! Or maybe you did and it’s a chore to be back together! You may wish to experience the feeling of having known somebody for twenty years but if the person portraying that character is someone you met 48 hours ago, there will be dissonance. How long that lasts could be until the project is over or until either you or your new friend goes under a bus. But usually something between those extremes, as your graveyard of WhatsApp groups can witness to.
People people people. We are surrounded by people… until we’re not. Because one day the run or the shoot or the recording is over. And you go home. And the WhatsApp memes dry up. And, as an actor at least, you’re alone.
Enter:
the rust.
HeadOx Reaction
Our relationships are very different outside of the creative bubble. Perhaps you live in a flatshare. Perhaps you have a survival job. Perhaps you’re a Victorian hermit. Whatever your circumstances when not actively making work with others, by taking yourself out of the creative environment you change some or all of your everyday relationships to be with people who are not professional creatives. And that is very good and healthy and great material to pull from and all that but can also, sometimes, whisper it, be bloody difficult.
Actors are, by necessity, a very visible profession. The job is to take somebody else’s text and say it in a way that looks natural. And if we do it right, it looks easy. Even though it isn’t. The narrative which popularly surrounds acting seems to run perpendicular to the reality of it. This visibility gives many non-actors a sense of ownership over us, perhaps in a similar way to politicians or athletes. And with a sense of ownership comes uneducated opinions, and with uneducated opinions in other people’s teeth come uneducated opinions in your head, whether you asked for them or not.
The longer you do this, the more time you have for these opinions to take root. Little niggling phrases bumping around in there. It might be ‘prep does nothing, really good actors are just naturally talented’ or ‘nobody benefits from this except your ego’ or the recent favourite:
The corrosive opinions feed on our instincts, filling us with doubt and fear. AKA rust.
Yes, it is absolutely crucial that we spend time out of the creative bubble in other spaces but like dropping an old fork in an aquarium, we do so laying ourselves open to the effects of the elements.
And that is why every morning I fill my ear canal with WD-40.
No I don’t. Please don’t spray WD-40 in your ear. It won’t work. Instead, try these much better anti-rusts.
One, we need to be conscious of this process. The Rest and Rust Cycle. And then once your conscious of it, be even more conscious! It is very easy to know about it in theory yet still not notice when it’s happening. The corrosion is slow and sneaky. I expect a regular check-in on how much you trust yourself in the job is a good idea. Actually, this all sounds exhaustingly self-flagellating. I prefer Two.
Two, coffee with an actor friend. I’m using coffee with and actor friend as an umbrella to mean any kind of returning to the creative fold because it’s my favourite. I don’t know anything quite so quick and effective to clean up that rust. Finding the time and space to talk to creative peers is our trademarked penetrating oil. I don’t know about you but all those little phrases that clutter up my head always seem to apply so much more to me than any of my colleagues. Having them around is a useful reminder that the same thing is going on in their heads. And if we’re each amazed at the rubbish piling up in each other’s heads, it’s much easier to clean it out. For a relationships profession, we spend prodigious amounts of it on our own getting myopically preoccupied with our navels. Having a coffee with another actor is like putting on a pair of glasses.
The Shrinking Circle
And this is all very well and good but with time the ease of it all diminishes.
On the one hand, some people do eventually move on to other things. They change, move, discover new passions, can’t make the job work anymore, are taking a break, pivot… and as you get older, you might find that your circle of actor friends begins to shrink.
On the other, our lives just get busier. Our weeks seem to be fuller of non-creative pursuits. We find ourselves scheduling those catch-ups further and further in advance and then forgetting them altogether.
It is on us, therefore, to start pushing the edges of that circle back out again. As the black hole of LIFE drags it in, it is on us to fight back. There is an understanding between actors. A complicity. Even if you haven’t met before. There are overlapping bodies of experience and knowledge which help shake off the rust. I’ve lived in a few countries and have always been struck by, regional differences aside, how similar the actors are.
So drop an actor another line and tell them you’d like to hang out, or sign up for an ongoing education class, or go to the theatre, or read a theory book, or watch a seminar, or shoot a scene, or eat a play, or whatever. It is through our peers that we keep the rust at bay.
News
I’ve been working with the brilliant team over at The Amelia Project podcast recently. If you’re new, it’s a fiction show about a death-faking agency. I wrote and performed in an episode for them which came out on 18 August (look for Poquelin on the feed), and I’ll be performing again with them for a crossover episode with the podcast Greater Boston at the London Podcast Festival on 10 September. Tickets here.
More podcast stuff! You can hear me weaselling around in the most recent episode of The Silt Verses. Creepy and fab.