The Great Acting Blog

The Great Acting Blog: “Dedication Means Independence”

15.08.2013 , The Great Acting Blog , 23 Comments

Whether your career will be brilliant or not is not under your control. Whether you will be rich and famous isn't either. But being dedicated to craft is. If you come to acting just to take, this dedication will seem incomprehensible to you. You will...

The Great Acting Blog: “See Problems As Invitations To Learn”

14.08.2013 , The Great Acting Blog , 0 Comments

Whenever undertaking some new objective, we try to assess the liklihood that we will accomplish it, we try to pre-empt pitfalls, we try to give ourselves the best chance of accomplishing it. The trouble is, the difficulties can be interpreted as no-go signs, we may...

The Great Acting Blog: “Stick It To Them”

13.08.2013 , The Great Acting Blog , 0 Comments

Xan Brooks has written a piece in The Guardian praising non-professional actors, noteworthy because it demonstrates once again, the breath-taking ignorance of mainstream media. He does though make some reasonable points, when watching a star such as George Clooney he says he often finds it...

The Great Acting Blog: “Wannabe”

12.08.2013 , The Great Acting Blog , 0 Comments

A wannabe is someone who moans about not having something but does absolutely nothing to get it. In acting terms, this generally amounts to not getting work but doing nothing to actually get work. This persons "career" is little more than a pose. They pretend...

The Great Acting Blog: “Which Road Should I Take?”

11.08.2013 , The Great Acting Blog , 0 Comments

When one set of objectives has been accomplished (or not as the case may be), another set must be decided upon. This is always tricky because we are effectively signing-off the next few months or years of our life. The view however, is very different...

The Great Acting Blog: “Disappointment Is Self-Fulfilling”

10.08.2013 , The Great Acting Blog , 0 Comments

Actors learn not to expect anything in order to buffet themselves from the disappointments which are part of their daily life. They don’t hear about that audition they knocked out of the park, or the phone doesn’t ring, another rejection letter arrives in the post,...

The Great Acting Blog: “Create The Culture You Want To Be A Part Of”

09.08.2013 , The Great Acting Blog , 0 Comments

When Jacques Rivette arrived in Paris, he stayed with the only friend he had. A local bookshop owner told him Robert Bresson's Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne was playing at a film club and Rivette went along. There he met Eric Rohmer who was a...

The Great Acting Blog: “Into The Storm”

08.08.2013 , The Great Acting Blog , 0 Comments

If you're put off doing something because there is some aspect of it that is unpleasant to you or difficult or something that will upset your feeling of complacency, know this: accomplishing anything worthwhile is rarely nice and clean and easy. If it's worth doing,...

The Great Acting Blog: “Do Your Own Thing”

07.08.2013 , The Great Acting Blog , 0 Comments

I've often written on this blog that actors should take full responsibility for their work and not wait around for directors to give them instructions. The lack of responsibility has grown up precisely because of the directorial dominance of the actor which has emerged in...

The Great Acting Blog: “Pick The Right Goals”

06.08.2013 , The Great Acting Blog , 0 Comments

What are your goals? When you accomplished one of your goals, how did it feel? Was it worth the trade-offs we have to make as actors? And if it wasn't worth it, why not? If it wasn't worth the trade-offs then the goal didn't fulfil you, it wasn't what...

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