How I Imagined My Way Into a Movie Role

I have been an actor for almost 30 years and although I grew up with a lot of seeming advantages in terms of the Hollywood prototype – blond hair, blue eyes, I, like too many others discovered upon my arrival to Tinseltown that what worked back in my home town did not necessarily apply in the “Entertainment Capital of the World.”

After a lot of auditions the pattern became clear – I was what casting directors called “interesting.”

I used to think of this as a bad word – it meant I wasn’t “normal” or of the popular variety, and instead I was destined to play character roles and odd ones out.  But I soon recognized another pattern – it was my creativity in the room that was making it this way; I just had a lot of unusual ideas about how to play the roles I was seeing on the sides I was being sent by my agents.  In hindsight, I can see that a vastr majority of the roles I have landed happened as a result of me taking the character in directions the casting director, producer or writer hadn’t yet imagined.  So this article is for those of you who want to try things a little differently.  Maybe it will work for you too.

You have to play up your weaknesses. I walked into an audition where I was smaller than anybody else going into the role to play a villain. Me against the big Samoan body guards. I told the director, in the audition that he’d have to shoot to shoot “screamers” (extreme closeups) of me in the movie so that what was going on in my face and eyes was more important than my actual stature.

I also told him that I felt the dialogue for my character in the script was cliche.  Sure, I took the risk but when I saw everybody else in that waiting room, I realized that they were all wearing flip-flops and gold chains so I went against that type, and told them I take the character in the direction of Hannibal Lector doing the Lord of the Flies.

You have to do these things because if you don’t the amount of competition puts you in a very long line.   If you try to play it safe then you are just like everybody else. If you go against the grain, you might freak some people out, but if you do it right, you can spark the imagination.  Let me state that again – the object isn’t to be weird for its own sake, but to find a new way of looking at the character and sharing that with the filmmakers.  They want to feel like they are in collaboration with you, not standing in judgment.

So there I was, in the room with the producer and the director/screenwriter and perhaps they saw there was indeed an opportunity to elevate this otherwise stereotypical villain above the page.

I’m a screenwriter myself and I know that a lot of the dialogue I write is provisional. I hope that the actor will take it to a new level, a third dimension.   This is precisely what I wanted to show them I intended to do with the character – I quickly gave them a whole invented back story I had created and why he was in the predicament he was in.  I created ideas for them in the room that showed them possibilities that they hadn’t thought of before.

Of course my reading of the dialogue had to back this up somewhat.  They brought me back in the next day to see it again.  This time they wanted to see more, something different, so I gave it to them a whole new way – much wackier and wild – just to prove that there was space to move around.  You see, if I had simply memorized the WAY of reading, then I couldn’t have had the flexibility to grow and change and adapt with the project and the job.

Acting is about freedom, and yet too often people make it feel like a prison cell.  Yes, there is a lot on the line, but really, what have you got to lose?  Use the imagination that made you love the idea of acting in the first place, and then you can really create something memorable that people will want to see more and more of all the time.  Create that sense of wonder, and come at it like you are there to serve the story.  You can’t go wrong, because if you are having fun with it, you are already succeeding.