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How to become a respected actor with a long-lasting career
An interview with
Wayne C. Dvorak by Terra Wellington
The mystic of Hollywood brings thousands
of would-be actors out to Los Angeles every year. They feel they’ve
“got the goods” to make it as a star, so they arm themselves with a
reproduced digital photo taken by their best friend and a few community
theatre gigs under their belt to book a series regular part on
CSI: Miami.
After a few months, their money runs dry and the only auditions they’ve
had are for one student film and a soft-porn flick. No bookings, no
series regular to hoot about, and no call back from the resume mass
mailing to agents.
Some of these actors stay longer, but
most eventually go home ... by the thousands. This is the myth of
Hollywood, that everyone wins the lottery if you just move in.
Wayne C. Dvorak is a successful acting
coach in Los Angeles area who knows what it takes to really make it as an actor and
have a long-lasting and satisfying acting career. Here are his answers
on how to overcome the myth of
Hollywood in order to create an acting career that is successful and
award worthy.
What do you say about the myth that you
don’t need training to be a successful actor?
There are several
kinds of careers in Hollywood. One successful kind is to become a
personality actor. These actors are basically playing themselves – such
as a stand-up comedian like Ray Romano or a beautiful woman like Pamela
Anderson; those people’s careers are built around their personality.
It’s a type of career, it’s part of show business, and their audience has
a difficult time accepting them as anything else. Personality actors
aren’t really focused on in-depth acting. Of course, there are
exceptions, like Rosie O’Donnell. But, if you really want to be an actor
that is known for your acting (not just your personality), then you have
to be willing to do the work it takes to actually become one. And that
takes dedication. It takes dedication to learning a craft. And I think
that with most people they just don’t take the time. Actors need to
really work. They need to sit down and do something serious.
So you don’t
need talent?
Learning how to act
most certainly does not give you the talent. The talent is already
there. But, actor training shows you how to use your talent and develop
it, which is the key. You have to do the training in order to be
considered for complex character parts. And, actors who have a real craft
stand a chance to have a long-lasting character. They have an actor
range. They are not just a one-trick pony.
But if I’ve
been in community theatre, isn’t that a good place to learn how to be an
actor?
Our U.S. community
theatre is often just bad. So even though you can be totally sincere, you
may still be learning the wrong technique and creating bad acting habits
for yourself that will have to be overcome if you eventually want to
become a television and film actor. For the most part, community theatre
productions are not cast well, and young actors play roles which they
could never play professionally so they learn tricks to get the show up.
When the emphasis is on getting the show open but not really learning how
to best use yourself as an actor, then that is how you develop those bad
acting habits.
Many people who come
to Hollywood have bought the ‘dream factory’ thing. And then, it takes
them a while -- if they do come to the realization -- that they have to
work on their acting. And I’m not saying it has to be done in a class,
but it should be some place where you’re getting guidance from a
knowledgeable professional who really knows what he or she is doing.
Because a bunch of people getting together, throwing something together
like a community play, is not necessarily going to help you to learn.
What about the
myth that there’s no such thing as technique or a method to acting – it’s
all in how you say the words and in your look?
I disagree. Although
it’s true that a lot of acting techniques will teach you flashy things or
tricks, an effective technique or method to acting will provide you with
the tools and approach necessary to be believable and consistent –
creating a real acting career.
For example, a lot of
people will teach you how to read from scripts and say “this line would be
a lot more effective if you said it this way,” but it may not be
the emotional truth of what the scene is. So finding a way to say a line
is not necessarily doing the job, unless you are doing television comedy
or sitcom work; but even in this media, the actors must be truthful in
order to deliver a believable character. This is true also in drama and
film comedy when you want to not only be able to say funny things but also
find the core of the character – who the character really is. And that’s
what an in-depth acting technique will teach you how to do.
There are so
many people giving workshops and classes in Los Angeles. Many of them
say, for example, that it only takes six weeks to get ready for pilot
season. Why would I want to spend more time than that to be a working
actor?
One of the problems
that I think exists in Los Angeles is that a lot of the current coaches
haven’t gone through any of the acting process themselves (from training
to booking and performing). This may lead them to give bad advice that
doesn’t work outside of class, or their approach might be intellectual but
it may not have a lot of practical application. For example, I once
worked on a film where a fellow actor missed lines in the script while
filming, and afterward the director wanted to know why she missed the
lines. She said it was because she didn’t feel she was “in the moment,”
so she didn’t say the lines – it was what her coach taught her. This
infuriated the director. So, coaches have to know not only how to teach
technique but also give real-world advice.
Also, a lot of the
training that is going on in Los Angeles is not taken in steps – A, B, C.
Instead, workshops and six-week programs jump all over the place with
technique, character work, and scene study. And the result is that people
often miss points of development and have serious gaps in their acting
understanding.
What actors need to
understand is that acting gets into the expression of deep feeling through
character. So while a writer gives you the narrative of the story, you
have to go to the depth of the feeling. That’s what actors are adding to
a story – the actor supplies the inner life and the subtext and depth of
the real person. Therefore, the
bottom line is that if you are a serious actor, six weeks of training
cannot give you the emotional depth and technique needed for lead and
supporting roles, series regulars, recurring characters, and guest stars –
and even a majority of co-star roles.
I’ve been told
that all I need to do is get into a class with one of the “guru coaches”
in town so that I can put that coach’s name on my resume. Then that will
get me in the door to book acting jobs. Isn’t that all I need?
No. First and
foremost, booking acting jobs takes talent and technique, not a certain
coach’s name on your resume. And, the reason you work with a coach is to
improve your skill. Also, many of these coaches
have over 30 people in a room. How could each student possibly be given
the opportunity to work and explore a technique with anything other than
superficial feedback under those circumstances? The actors should get up
in each and every class and be expected to bring in something that
has been given serious work and attention -- not once every 4-5 weeks.
In my
case, I limit the number of students I have in my classes to no more than
12 students in each class because I like to spend quality time with my
students. Because of the manageable class size, I can remember exercises
from months ago for each student and know what is the next step that needs
to take place. This is the kind of relationship you want from a coach, so that
you can ultimately book acting jobs.
From the 2007 Academy Award best actor/actress winners, what do you feel
they brought to their performances that brought them such success?
I thought both Helen
Mirren (The Queen) and Forest Whittaker (The Last King of
Scotland) were really amazing. They both captured real souls of
non-fictional characters. This is sometimes the most difficult character
work to do because we do know who these two characters are in real life,
and the actors somehow managed to get that. And these actors’ personal
personalities are not like their characters at all.
Mirren and Whittaker
have paid their dues. They’ve gone from late teens into their twenties
and thirties. And in the case of Mirren, into her sixties -- reinventing
and growing and evolving as a human being. A lot of times I think people
stop evolving, and I think that’s a mistake. |