The Great Acting Blog: “Alec Baldwin’s Island”

The Great Acting Blog: “Alec Baldwin’s Island”

Alec Baldwin, we might remember, is the actor who, in the mid 1990s, could have been one of the biggest movie stars in the world, but passed on that particular opportunity in order to play Stanley Kowalski on Broadway. I was struck when in a recent interview he offered the following on actors’ independence:

“In today’s entertainment world, Baldwin argues, you have to adapt or die. “When you get shipwrecked on an island and you’re writhing on the beach, saying, ‘Help me’, if you wait for Hollywood and independent film financiers to rescue your career, eventually you think, ‘I’m going to make my choice, I’m going to live on the island and learn to be happy’. So even if a boat came to pick you up, there’s a chance you’ll say, ‘No, I’m going to stay, I like it here.”

I think all actors will identify with the waiting around for Hollywood or independent filmmakers. It may not have been Hollywood or independent filmmakers precisely, but certainly waiting around for somebody to do us a favour. That is where so many end up, waiting while their lives and careers quietly pass them by.

Instead of waiting, Baldwin infers that we should build something for ourselves on “the island”. Whatever we build, it will be something that we can control, something that we can take action on without needing permission. In Baldwin’s case, he created a weekly current affairs and culture talk show. But we could build our own theatre, or our own film company or whatever it might be that fires us up. The point is, we create it  in our own image, and it becomes something which rewards us endlessly, and from which we can draw confidence and self-respect. When we reach this point, we don’t need to flail around in hope, quite the reverse in fact: whenever we are approached by someone else (perhaps by those people we were waiting for in the beginning) we are more than likely going to decline  their polite offer, preferring to remain within the house we built. Quite a turn-a-around.

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