The One I Love

The weekend before last, my husband and I found ourselves in the rare position of having an evening to ourselves (the kiddo was asleep early) and enough time to watch an entire movie in one sitting.  Hot Damn!  

Some quick googling of "best date movies" led us to The One I Love staring Elisabeth Moss and Mark Duplass plus Ted Danson in a small supporting role.  It's currently streaming on Netflix which describes the movie this way:

Confronted with the potential end of their marriage, Ethan and Sophie take off for a weekend together, hoping to negotiate their future. When they reach their idyllic destination, however, the couple strolls into a bizarre new brand of trouble.

We really enjoyed it.  I wrote before about another Mark Duplass movie, Safety Not Guaranteed, and what both of these movies have is a kind of eerie magical realism that works really beautifully. 

Also, as a recent producer of video content (aka Gemma & The Bear) it was hard not to be impressed with how the movie really only has two actors in it - such a smart way to have room to focus on excellent acting (which The One I Love has in abundance) and great production values. 

If you watch it - or if you've seen it - leave a comment and let me know what you thought!

Mickey, Gillian and Me

I worked with Mickey Rooney, who died this past week, when I was a little girl.  I remember doing not-much-at-all in one scene of something-or-other and being totally confused about which guy Mickey Rooney even was for most of the time, but I remember that it was a BIG deal to the adults in my family.  Mickey Rooney was a big deal and rightly so.  He was also the rare individual who managed to start acting as a kid and sustain that career into (and, in his case, through) his adulthood.

 

A couple of months ago, Gillian Jacobs (who you probably know from the TV show Community) was interviewed in Backstage and had this to say about her own transition from being a child actor to an adult one:

“I had a very difficult time at school. I think when you have some success as a kid, your notion of being a good actor is pleasing the director, doing exactly what they tell you to do,” she says. “Juilliard wanted me to realize I had agency in my role as an actor: It was important for me to make decisions and have opinions and not just do what they told me to do to the best of my ability. I think that’s a big paradigm shift.”

I've been thinking about this passage ever since I read it because it is such an excellent and succinct articulation of one of (THE?) biggest difference between going to auditions as a kid and going as an adult and why it can be so hard to find success as an adult after a childhood career.  I remember when I was re-embarking on an acting career after college, the adults around me - my parents, my childhood manager and agent - all said "you know what you're doing."  And, in retrospect, I'm not at all convinced that I did.  I've spent the intervening years trying to make sure I do know what I'm doing and discovering that I not only can but SHOULD have my own point of view as an artist - even as an actor saying someone else's words - is a more exciting opportunity on any given day than pleasing someone else.

Still, going in with that need to please - equating pleasing others with "success" - is a difficult habit to break, particularly when one has received so many positive strokes for that very thing growing up.  It's something I continue to work against - with mindfulness and practice - in the interest of being a truly excellent artist.  Even more, though, I don't think that this people-pleasing as an undermining factor in living a fully self-actualized life is limited to former young performers.  It seems to me that we get stuck in lots of roles we played as people growing up and that determining who we really are (and who we really want to be) is a huge part of becoming an adult and finding personal success for all of us.

Mickey Rooney had his share of ups and downs.  In his NY Times obit, Aljean Harmetz writes:

Although his career was one of the longest in show business history — almost 90 years separated his first movie from his last — it was crammed with detours and dead ends. (“There have been crevices, fissures, pits, and I’ve fallen into a lot of them,” he told The Times in 1979.)

It would be facile (not to mention presumptuous) to assume that those ups and downs all stemmed from a people-pleasing need, but hard not to suspect that that impulse wasn't at least one of the challenges in Mr. Rooney's mix.

What outdated aspect of your identity are you still carrying around or wrestling with?  How have you moved beyond that limitation and what has that meant for you?  Tell us all in the comments!

Work

Today I spent all day on set, being an actor. It was awesome.

Awesome Class

I can't believe it has taken me so long to share this!

I took this AWESOME Commercial class with Brooke and Mary.

You can go to the link and learn about the ladies' resumes and credentials.  What you can't tell just from the website is that these women have the most amazing, positive energy - it was a pleasure to be in class each week.  They taught us a bunch of really valuable and helpful things by, you know, talking to us BUT I really feel like their attitudes - their way of being - was equally instructive especially with respect to commercial casting.  Bonus:  now that I've taken the class, I'm invited to other one-night classes which provide the opportunity to meet commercial agents and casting directors.  Fantastic.

Off you go, commercial actors.  You can thank me later.