Actors reflecting on acting

Ever wondered what it’s like for actors as they hone their craft? Hear from some of your favourite actors, including Tom Hanks and Kate Winslet, as they reflect on their careers, divulge their top pieces of acting advice and share how to get started in the film industry…

When embarking on a new project, BAFTA-winning actor Jake Gyllenhaal describes “some sense of honesty and truth between characters” as what draws him to a role. He shares that his decision is “not about a genre or even sometimes a specific character, it’s if I feel if there’s a sort of honesty and a beating heart that exists underneath material.” Expanding on this, he shares he was drawn to End of Watch, in which he plays a Los Angeles Police Department Officer, because of “the relationship and the heart in the middle of this film.”

Gyllenhaal also explains he had to learn about film to know how to spot honesty and heart within its story. The Brokeback Mountain and Prisoners actor describes “education” as “so essential because there’s no way of knowing what good material is, or knowing that the story is original, or knowing what makes a story original, or how to interpret a story” without learning. While he says you don’t necessarily need a formal education, he believes that educating “yourself is the most important thing, otherwise you’ll be making blind choices that you’re not sure about.”

And the most important lesson that Gyllenhaal says he has learned over the course of his career? “ultimately, your life, your family are the priority.” He explains it’s easy to get “side tracked” by all of the “light and the stuff and the all-consuming business of making movies”, but he learned from Paul Newman that prioritising “your life is everything.”

BAFTA-winning actress Kate Winslet has “learned a lot about preparation over the years”. She shares: “actually it’s so important to let the preparation go because you can get stuck in this little tunnel all of your own beetling away at home preparing who you think the character is.” So, it’s important to leave “blank spaces for other people to fill”, such as the director and cast mates, who bring their ideas to the project too.

However, she does advise actors working on book adaptations to read the book in advance. Something she always does, “unless I had been specifically asked not to by the director.” Referring to how the original source material “becomes my armour, my friend”, she reveals that “particularly in the case of Revolutionary Road and The Reader, both of those films I remember really I just would scour the book for pieces of information that surely the writer hadn’t found or surely the director hadn’t seen and I always really enjoy that.”

Winslet also believes it’s important to be open-minded on a film set. She says; “one thing that’s really helped me is really never judging other people.” And she encourages budding actors to be “very accepting of everyone, really, because actors can be quite weird!”. The actress adds that her wish is “to always be finding new ways of being able to collaborate” so watching different actors’ processes and learning from them is an important part of filming.

The star of Titanic and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind also shares that acting “is difficult. Saying: “it is definitely a hard job to do and you have to keep working at it.” Despite the challenges of certain role though, Winslet shares: “if it is the thing that you really believe you want to do with your life, you will get there. You just have to keep going, and keep going, and keep going.” She also encourages young actors to “Keep yourself busy” because “the more you enrich your life, the more enriched you’ll be as an actor and as a person. And you’ll be able to bring much more to each role that you’ll hopefully get the chance to be able to play.”

For Daniel Radcliffe, preparing for roles can often involve learning different skills each time but he breaks down every script in a similar way. His important questions to consider are: “what does your character want? In this scene, what affect is he trying to have on the person he’s talking to when he says that line? And what is his overall objective?”. He says: “if you have a fairly clear idea of what those three things are, that’s what works for me.”

The Kill Your Darlings actor finds inspiration on every job by watching and learning from his cast mates. He shares: “I’m always looking around to try and learn from everyone. If I could give one piece of advice it would be that, learn as much as you can about the type of actor you want to be, the type of person you want to be on set… I was very lucky to have an amazing group of people around me to watch and learn from when I was growing up, so be a sponge.”

Learning acting skills from the seasoned actors on the Harry Potter set, Radcliffe says he noticed the professionalism of the likes of Gary Oldman, David Thewlis and Imelda Staunton. He remembers: “as well as being great actors and professionals, they were great people as well and lovely with the crew. I definitely saw that as the way I wanted to be.”

Radcliffe also advises emerging actors to stay grateful once they achieve their break on a film set. He encourages them to “remember how lucky you are to be in that position and that there’s a ton of people that would cut their arm off to be where you are. Let that inform how you go about your job. Most actors treat every job like it’s going to be their last because that’s the sort of permanent fear we all live in. But I think that’s a good attitude to have because it means you’ll always work hard and work for the right reasons.”

For BAFTA-nominated actor Daniel Mays, an ideal role in a film or TV programme would be a complex and nuanced character. He says: “ultimately when you’re looking for a character in a script you want them to be as layered and complicated and contradictory as possible.” Adding that this is something he considers his Line of Duty character Danny Waldron to be a prime example.

When preparing for a role, Mays says he enjoys “the endeavour of looking into a character’s past history and childhood and background because you’ve got to always play the character in the round.” Cast in Mike Leigh’s All or Nothing early in his career, he learned to approach characters by “leaving no stone unturned to play it as truthfully as possible.”

Mays also believes research should be applied to “the audition” process. He says: “If you’ve got a week to prepare for a casting, of course you’ve got to learn the script but it’s always an idea to fully think about the character as a whole as well.” He says casting directors don’t want “to see you read, they want to see you act” so having “a clear and precise take” on the character is important.

His top advice to actors starting out is “to keep pushing yourself and growing as a performer”. Admitting, acting is often not as glamorous as it can look and takes “hard graft”, so it’s important “try and be as resilient as possible and try not to shy away from hard work.” Your dream role won’t appear overnight, so he says it’s important to work hard: “people’s perception is you have to be at the right place at the right time but I honestly think that you have to create your own luck. Whenever that opportunity comes along, you have to be ready.”

For actor Adeel Akhtar, being able to collaborate with the director and other actors on set is an important skill. He recalls that when working on a comedy, “it was very important for me to collaborate in that particular environment because the comedy was set up in a way where you’re only as funny as the other person. So you have to draw the best out of that person in the comedic setting.” Starring in television series including Utopia and Murdered by My Father, he’s experienced a range of different roles and directors, so he says “with each job you just want to be emotionally available to whatever the director has given you and you just run with it. Sometimes it’s super collaborative, and sometimes you get the feeling the director has hired you for a particular job and it’s up to you to fill the space as much as you can.”

Akhtar shares how knowing that even acting legends like Judi Dench still get nervous eases his own anxieties on set. Hearing her talk “about those nerves as something that’s good, a good thing that fuels you,” inspires him to embrace his own nerves and use them positively on set.

The actor also shares, sometimes “the loudest voice inside your head”, isn’t always the right one. Instead of listening to your doubts, “you’ve got to listen very carefully to your instincts and your reason for doing stuff. But that takes a bit of patience, quietening yourself and being inside your own skin a bit.”

Tom Hanks describes himself at the very beginning of his illustrious acting career as “loud,” “fast,” and “just thrilled enough that someone was asking me to be in a movie.” He recalls that by the time he was 29, he had “a different wisdom” than when he was 24 and says: “I think about every five years I went through some sort of process of re-examining where I was in life.” The impact of this was that it made him reconsider the roles he was choosing to compliment his own life experiences. He says he learned to “operate at a slower pace” and take his time to break down the script before going on set. As well as revealing that at the start of his career, “I would learn the text and then do it, as opposed to really planning out a mode of attack,” which is different to how he now tackles roles.

With credits ranging from comedies to biographical dramas, Hanks has experienced many different directorial styles, and would encourage emerging directors to “cast well.” He stresses that directors “have to trust the cast you hired, don’t give them the job if you’re not going to have faith in what they deliver unto you.” He also advises not to be afraid of giving actors clear and concise notes, saying “some of the best direction I’ve ever got was ‘can you try something different?’ You know that’s a completely legitimate direction to receive and sometimes that’s all that is required.”

For actor Liam Neeson, his interest in film and its ability to transport audiences started young. The Silence and A Monster Calls actor “loved movies as a kid. You know, Saturday matinees at the local flea pit. Cowboy westerns, those were a big influence because it just took you into another world and it was very special, those memories.”

Neeson also shares how he has experienced lots of different preparation for his major film roles. “For Silence, Martin [Scorsese] had told his cast, Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver and myself, to look more gaunt so we kind of went on diets.” He admits the extreme physical preparation for the film was “great to do, really cleared the heads, focused you very much in order to play these 17th century Jesuits in a very hostile environment in Japan.” Whereas his preparation for motion capture filming in A Monster Calls took place on set, being dressed “in a very tight fitting sort of onesie with ping pong balls attached to your extremities and sensors that go into these computers…” Reflecting on this he describes the process of motion capture as “interesting” and “great, a very intimate little process.”

Routes into acting can often be unpredictable and unplanned, just ask BAFTA-winning actress Emma Thompson. She says that growing up, “I didn’t think that I was going to be an actor” and explains that she was initially interested in “character-based” comedy. While at university, she did “sketch shows, I did musical theatre, I did mime,” and didn’t act until she was 27 years old, and admits that “even then it was by accident.”

Thompson says that her preparation process “depends on the part.” Getting ready for the role of P.L. Travers in Saving Mr Banks, Thompson “ingested as much information as I could over the period of sixth months” Because lots of information about the Mary Poppins author was readily available, Thompson “listened to everything, watched everything, read everything.” However, she shares that “then the trick is to get go of all that information because you’ve got to trick your psyche into pretending that it’s someone else.” And you can’t do that by being conscious of being that person. It’s a very odd magic trick, you know it’s more like a magician’s trick than anything else, I think.”

Thinking about the lessons she’s learnt throughout her career, she encourages budding actors to “never let yourself be defined by how you look.” She stresses how important it is to “know who you are and what you are because you’re not a model.” She also warns against being driven by fame, saying: “Don’t ever desire to be a star, fame is a by-product of what you do, it’s just an accident. What you do you must do because you love it, because you enjoy it, because you’re good at it, because people enjoy watching you. Anything else is by the by, really.”