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Sutton Foster on the Importance of Being Prepared

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Sutton Foster: “Sometimes I won’t even find a character until I put on the costume”

Foster went on to win the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical, and she’s especially proud that she seized the opportunity when it was presented to her. She says, “One of the things that I’m most proud of is that the opportunity came, and I was ready, meaning I was prepared, I knew my stuff, I worked really hard, and I stepped in.”

Of all the skills that Foster displays on Broadway, she points as acting as the most important. She explains, “A lot of people say, ‘What’s more important: acting, singing or dancing?’ And I say, always acting. ‘Cause singing without acting is just noise. Dancing without acting is just arm movement. I don’t feel like I’m just moving around and doing, like, fancy footwork. Same thing can go with singing; someone can sing super-high notes, but if it’s not based in any reality or any purpose, then it’s just showboating.”

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The “Subtleties, Complexities and Paradoxes” of Playing Villains

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One unique way Hardy approaches his characters is by drawing them to figure out how they should visually look, particularly characters that are fictional. He says:

One has to have a silhouette, you know? Say I’m playing Elton John. You know what he looks like. Playing Al Capone. You know what he looks like. But what about characters we’re making up from scratch, who you don’t know what they look like? You have to create a memorable silhouette for them, too.

 When I was at school I was told, “Tom, when you play the prince or the king, I want to fucking see a king walk onstage before you even open your mouth. What does that look like?” Do you do it literally, with a costume, or through physicality? How do you immediately see the king? Crown? Robes? I have to find an identifier, a silhouette which immediately radiates something for me. Remember, you won’t necessarily know by their clothes that they’re the king. You can walk on in a disheveled homeless man’s outfit, but there’s something about them that radiates a nobility, something that makes you go, “This person’s a king.”
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Dev Patel: “I never went to acting school.”

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Patel, who is best known for playing a much-thinner character in 2008’s Slumdog Millionaire, had to bulk up considerably to play the Westernized adult Saroo. He explains, “I’m 26 and, like most actors my age, hungry to show emotional range. This role enabled me to play a character suffering real pain, a change from the scripts that want you as a funny sidekick. It took eight months to prepare. I wanted to commit every fibre of my being to getting it right. I had to bulk up, grow my hair, learn the accent. At my last audition, where I met the director Garth Davis, I’d been in The Man Who Knew Infinity and was skinny, with a buzzcut. I had to get myself a personal trainer and started eating like a glutton – downing the protein shakes.”

When asked what he has learned about the great actors he’s worked with like Judi Dench, Patel points out, “They have a curiosity about life, a sense of humour and emotional reserve. I never went to acting school. Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned from great directors and my co-stars. Acting is about honesty. When I began, I was trying to squeeze as much emotion out of roles as I could and get big laughs. Now it’s about doing less, cutting away the fat.”

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‘Manchester by the Sea’ Star Lucas Hedges on Capitalizing on Early Success

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Hedges admits he’s taken aback by the success of Manchester by the Sea, pointing out, “It’s really interesting to be 20 years old and to have your wildest dreams come true. It’s sort of like, where do you go from here?”

He adds that it’s far more likely for his career to go south than to continue succeeding. He explains, “I listened to Ethan Hawke in an interview recently. He did Dead Poets Society at my age, and he was saying that after that movie came out, his career was perfectly set up to just be one long tumble after that film, and not in a good way.”

One of his acting roles — a seventh grade production of Nicholas Nickleby — nearly ended Hedges’ career before it even started because of stage fright. He recalls, “I ran outside and into my Mom’s arms and burst into tears. She walked me around the block and said: ‘You don’t have to do it. But just take a day to think about it.’” While he changed his mind and ended up doing the play, he was still nervous. He explains, “Sure enough, every single day in the wings before I went on, my face turned bright red. But I persevered.”

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Michael Keaton on Playing Ray Kroc in ‘The Founder’

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Keaton’s latest film sees him starring as Ray Kroc, the controversial mastermind behind McDonald’s national (and later global) expansion. Keaton spoke to Variety about how he got into the character of a man whose corporation has fed billions of people over the last several decades.

Keaton highlights that one of the most important aspects of playing a real-life individual is to “lock in” on that person’s essence. He says, “Really, from what John [Lee Hancock, director] started to tell me and what the writer had given me. I watched a documentary on Ray and I wasn’t into it long — seven or eight minutes — and I went, ‘I got it.’ It’s not like, ‘Oh, I got it, I understand everything.’ It was that I locked into what I thought the essence of the guy was. It immediately put me on the general highway. Then I had to narrow it down, and narrow it down and winnow it down, and get into the details. You never do an impression, and yet I felt somewhat obligated to kind of simulate his attitude and his sound. You know, that Illinois-ish, not quite Chicago-ish Midwest kind of thing. Then once you start looking in his wardrobe and then you start to put on the wardrobe.”

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Viggo Mortensen on His First Movie Role

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The part as actually written to be just a day’s work: It was the funeral scene at the beginning of the movie where there are some Amish men and boys walking through a cornfield, down to the farm where Kelly McGillis’s character’ family lives. It was a funeral for her husband. I think I had one word in German and that was it. It’s funny, the same day that I was offered the Witness job in Pennsylvania — I was living in New York at the time — I was also offered a part in a production of Shakespeare in the Park for that summer. That was the thing to do obviously, I thought, but my rep, Bill Treusch, said, “Not so fast. It’s not often that you have someone like Peter Weir coming through town and casting a movie. You can do a play anytime. Trust me, just go down and do this thing.”

So I took the train down to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, did the day’s work and at lunch Peter Weir came over to the table where I was sitting with some of the other actors and asked, “Can I talk to you for a minute?” I felt like maybe I said the thing in German wrong! He looked very serious. He says, “What are you doing the next six weeks?” I said, “I don’t know, nothing?” He said, “I was looking at [co-star] Alexander Godunov and I think I will make you be his brother if you are willing to hang around. Wherever he is, especially when he’s interacting with Kelly McGillis and Harrison Ford, you are sort of the audience’s eyes watching and seeing their relationship develop, and your brother get jealous. I can’t tell you what you will be doing, but we will figure it out as we go along.” I worked once or twice a week at most, mostly just background. That movie gave me the absolute wrong idea of what filmmaking is like because the director was polite and there was no yelling, and everything ran smoothly and professionally.. [Laughs.] Work always finished on time or a little before. It was like, “Wow, what a great business!” Then it took me another 20 years to have another experience like that.

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Greta Gerwig’s Advice to New Actors: “Make your own things”

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Greta Gerwig

Greta Gerwig on Theater Acting: “There’s no equivalent in film. It’s so addicting”

Though she’s primarily known as an actress, Gerwig also works behind the camera. She has co-written the screenplays for films like Frances Ha and Mistress America, and she co-wrote and co-directed Nights and Weekends and wrote and directed the upcoming Lady Bird. One of her pieces of advice to actors is to follow that path by creating one’s own content. She says, “Make your own things. Even if it’s just a short play with friends or a movie you put up on YouTube, it helps you figure out how to make things and what you’re good at, and it gives you community quickly. I think you’ll get more from it than it takes from you.”

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