RE: The Crisis in American Acting.

After recently penning a measured if at times snarky response to this laughable Buzzfeed article about why British actors are so much better, I'm finished being polite, and have to reiterate the following:

We're fucking trained. Stop fucking telling us we're not.

Recently Entertainment Weekly's Jeff Labrecque wrote a hit-piece article asking What Does the Latest British Invasion Say about the State of American Acting?

Let's see if we can't come up with some answers:

Of course, no one’s entitled to a role because of their accent or where they’re born. That’s always been true, even before Vivien Leigh won the role of Scarlett O’Hara. But recently, there’s been a visible surge in the number of British—and the occasional Aussie—actors and actresses winning plum roles in many of Hollywood’s most prestigious films (as well as many of the biggest franchise blockbusters). In 2011, British director Stephen Frears (The Queen) told an interviewer, “There is some sort of crisis in American acting“—and suggested this could be due to a lack of proper training, specifically theater training.

I guess conservatories like Juilliard, Yale, the American Conservatory Theatre, and New York University's Graduate Acting Program should do a better job—they've been around for decades and introduced us to a lot of fine actors, but I guess they fucked it up.

Calling it a ”crisis” might be a bit drastic, but with an English Superman, a British-bred Spider-Man, an English Daisy Buchanan, a British Mad Max, a German-Irish Steve Jobs—to say nothing of the current British invasion that’s raised the quality of American television...

Citation needed. I guess American-born shows like The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Sopranos, and others (I just started watching The West Wing via Netflix...yet another fine American drama) don't fucking matter. Got it.

...it seems like a good time to at least contemplate whether the roots of this recent trend can be found in how both sides of the Atlantic are prepping its talent for Hollywood casting calls.

I haven't made it through the rest of this article yet, but I have a feeling that this particular statement will be contradicted somewhere down the line, so I'm bookmarking it for now. All I'll say is that there are many American actors who don't make being a movie star their top priority.

For decades, there were two major schools of thought when it came to acting: the Classical, which was best epitomized by Laurence Olivier, and the Method, which revolutionized the art form in America once James Dean and Marlon Brando brought it to the big screen. Classical was more of an outside-in approach, which emphasized a more presentational style associated with the stage. Method, rooted in Constantin Stanislavski’s theories, was more naturalistic, more inside-out. “For many years, there was a schism,” says James Lipton, a pupil of Stella Adler’s teachings and the longtime host of Inside the Actors Studio. “The British stressed training in voice and posture and the physical attributes, whereas the American training is deep rooted in the actor’s emotions."

I understand that for the sake of brevity, you have to simplify and narrow things down to their essentials. But while Sir Larry was very much an “outside-in” actor, he was as praised as he was criticized for “mangling” Shakespeare's verse—in fact, his approach was to make Shakespeare as realistic as he could, directly opposing other fine actors such as Sir John Gielgud, who was ALSO praised and criticized for his more musical delivery. It should be noted that both actors, later in their careers, gave wonderfully naturalistic performances on film. Furthermore, we can love Brando all we want (and I do), but a quick YouTube search reveals that he could also crush it as Marc Antony in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

Could it be that a fine actor is a fine actor, and that whatever methods they use to produce affecting work don't matter?

But in 2015, what was once a contentious rivalry is no longer an either/or proposition, as both schools implement elements of the other’s philosophies into their own training. Why then, do the Brits seem to have an edge? ”There is a lot of stage work in a lot of British drama school training, but I think it’s more to do with how we ask them to think about characters, how we ask them to be imaginative, and to change themselves,” says Joanna Read, describing the dramatic skills that current students are taught at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, which counts Cumberbatch, Ejiofor, and Oyelowo among its scores of famous alums and where she has been principal since 2010.

While at New York University's Graduate Acting Program, I used Stanislavski's techniques; I did theatre games; I did animal work; I did object work; I did Commedia; I did clown work; I did Michael Chekhov work with none other than Joanna Merlin; and there's a teacher there named Scott Miller who has a number of unconventional ways of approaching character work.

But, like I said before, I guess NYU's just been fucking it up all this time. Maybe if I had trained in London I would have been able to play all those different characters in David Henry Hwang's Kung Fu...

...oh wait, that's right, I fucking crushed it.  Even Mr. Lebrecque's own Entertainment Weekly said so.

“Our training will ask an actor to really play against type at times, to play a role that they wouldn’t necessarily be cast in in the profession, in order to work out and transform how they move towards that character. It’s almost like putting on a second skin." That academic challenge of portraying characters that aren’t obviously suited to an actor might be an essential building block that pays off down the road.”

In my second year of Grad School I played the title character in a play called Hobson's Choice. This is remarkable because Henry Hobson is a late-middle aged alcoholic that lives in Manchester, England in the 19^th century. Right before that I played a 61-year-old former slave named Eli in August Wilson's Gemof the Ocean, and was so unrecognizable that people didn't even know I was IN the fucking show. The year after that I got to play Vershinin in Chekhov's Three Sisters, Paul in Six Degrees of Separation, and one of the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night's Dream (this is after I spent the summer playing Oberon and Theseus in the same play).

But clearly, based on this article, I must be the ONLY American actor that underwent this type of stretching during my training. Why am I not a movie star?

“If you look at these English actors—David Oyelowo, Tom Wilkinson, Tim Roth—they’re accustomed to playing character-actor roles,” says Lipton. “Which is to say, they are very good at playing roles that are quite distant from themselves, physically, even emotionally. They are able to find, in those strangers, a core that resonated with themselves, so they are just as truthful playing that as they would be playing someone just like themselves on screen.”

And here I have to thank directors like Leigh Silverman and Ethan McSweeny, and casting directors such as Tara Rubin, because they know what most other people don't: I'm not just a “romantic leading man”. Maybe if more folks on the other side of the table gave myself and my conservatory-trained colleagues a wider berth, instead of pigeon-holing us, they'd figure that out.

But what do I know? I'm just a shitty American actor.

"Avy Kaufman, the casting director who discovered Andrew Garfield for Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs and recruited Oyelowo to play the eloquent Union soldier who recites the Gettysburg Address to Daniel Day-Lewis in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, thinks a shrinking world has opened the doors for all sorts of international talent. “It’s not that all these actors are better than the American actors, but I think we’re just opening up to more—and we’re all excited to find something new and different,” she says. “Lincoln was a very American story, but I just felt like I should say, ‘This guy’s the best for this.’ It doesn’t matter that he’s not American. He’s got the accent down. May the best man win.”

This is the sanest thing that anyone has said in any of these (hit-pieces) articles. These are statements I can sympathize with: the world is smaller now than it's ever been, actors can tape their auditions and send them across the globe within minutes, so the talent pool is deeper. Cool.

Too bad that Brits have been getting jobs in Hollywood for decades and decades now; I don't know what's so “new” about that.

But again, I'm just a dumb American actor.

“Nowadays, the best man doesn’t even have to be in Los Angeles to audition. “Instead of meeting an actor or having to see the actor audition in the room, I can audition them via Skype and have nearly the same experience,” says Hicks. “Quality acting is quality acting, and you can recognize that even when you’re thousands of miles away.””

...He forgot to add "unless they're American.  Then fuck 'em."

“Lipton believes, however, that the Brits do enjoy at least one built-in advantage—one that’s also a product of geography. While American actors generally have to chose between going to New York to work in the theater or settling in Los Angeles to find fame on television and the movies, the British dramatic community—film/TV/theater—is mostly centrally located around London. “The English have the advantage of being able to go back and forth, from Downton Abbeyto a stage production,” he says.”

Lipton may have a point about the centralization of English television, film, and theatre, but he seems ignorant about the extensive regional theatre circuit here in the United States. I personally have worked at many of the best theatres around the country—in fact, it's been a necessity, since quality work that pays a livable salary is scarce in New York City.

“But perhaps the biggest factor leading to the perception that American actors are falling behind is that the path to Hollywood fame in this country doesn’t necessarily go through the Actors Studio or Juilliard or the Yale School of Drama. Though Hollywood has its share of Jessica Chastains and Mark Ruffalos, well-trained professionals who studied at revered dramatic institutions, the difference might lie in the other cases, in which actors get a break in Hollywood with limited training or acting background. “I think our culture, in which we take reality-show fame as a measure of success, means that we feel like, ‘Oh, it just happens to you and then you’re famous,” says Hicks.”

What you have here is the author of this piece proposing that American actors may not be as well-trained as their British counterparts, while simultaneously highlighting the fact that many times people without the proper foundational training are given huge breaks in Hollywood. Basically, people that aren't as qualified are given jobs, but it's still our fault for not being good enough.
Seems legit.

This is especially pertinent, given that a colleague of mine was met with disappointment recently, because a role she tested for went to someone else because...

...they were a reality TV “star”.  In a final dose of irony, not only does she have extensive theatrical credits, but she also studied Shakespeare...in London.

“It might be even more subtle and widespread than the reality-show mentality Hicks mentions. In a Hollywood that feeds on young stars—many of which are groomed as kids on television—early success can stunt artistic growth. “The kids that start out as stars when they’re 19 or 20, they never had a chance to learn their craft, and because they become stars, there’s never a chance to catch up,” says Lipton. “They’re not going to knock off for a year and study. They’re going to keep on making movies, as many as they can, as fast as they can. Some learn on the job. Some are geniuses, so they figure it out.”

But for every Jennifer Lawrence or Leonardo DiCaprio—instinctual wunderkinds whose talent and work ethic keep them at the top—there is a huge middle class of popular American actors who reach the age of 30 and suddenly find themselves overmatched by more disciplined foreign-educated artists. Actors who spent three years in their early twenties, for example, just learning how to properly speak and move while their American counterparts were auditioning for a Coke commercial and the new fall pilot. Cumberbatch was 30 before anyone in America knew who he was. Tom Hiddleston, a 2005 graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, was about the same age when he landed the role of Loki. “The demand for what we’re offering is something that is universally wanted,” says Read. “Their skills are very good technically, so that whether they’re on set, on location, or stage, they’re ready and able to hit the ground running.”In other words, the British are coming… because Hollywood needs them.”

BULLSHIT.

First off, it's unfair to Ms. Lawrence and Mr. DiCaprio to dismiss them as wunderkinds—both of these actors are artists, who work their asses off, and clearly CARE about the work that they do. They took the ball, and they're running with it. Let's stop elevating this nebulous thing called “talent” and start teaching people that what REALLY matters is work ethic and discipline.

Second, I'm 32 years old. As I recounted in a previous blog, I ALSO spent three years learning how to breathe, doing endless speech drills, taking classes such as Shane Ann Younts' “Techniques of Voice and Speech” (which she tells you right upfront is about as “technical” a class as you're ever going to take...and it has helped me immensely), taking voice, speech, and dialect classes from women such as Beverly Wideman and Deborah Hecht, as well as men like Scott Miller. I, and my well-trained colleagues, we DO know how to speak (in fact, on the TV show I worked on last year, one of the sound guys exclaimed "Now THAT guy knows how to talk!" at me as I walked by). We DO know how to move. We put ourselves foolishly into extreme debt just in order to learn how to do so.  And that's before we each beat out thousands of other applicants from around the country just to get offered a spot in the first fucking place.

I was lucky enough to do a shit ton of varied work in 2014. I wouldn't have had the tools to do so had I not spent those several years scratching the surface of my potential. I find it highly, grossly offensive that, in a country where several high-quality conservatories each produce an average of 16-18 new actors every year, and have been doing so for decades, this author acts like there is a shortage of American actors who are completely incompetent in these arenas.

Maybe if people stopped putting Brits and Aussies on a pedestal, and recognized the immense wealth of artistry right under their noses, we would stop seeing ridiculous articles like this one. As it stands, it seems that Americans are in the grip of one of the most horrendous inferiority complexes the world has ever known.

Also read: We're Trained, Stop Telling Us We're Not.