The Great Acting Blog: “Their Law Trailer Shoot”

This week, I shot my scene for the trailer of Their Law, a tightly scripted crime-thriller feature film being produced by Sean J Vincent and Andre Renner, about deception and corruption within the underworld and the government. It’s a zero sum game, the stakes are high, either you win or you die, and it’s a lot of fun for actors to play. My character is Cooper Junior  who has a nervous-pleading disposition, largely because he feels his father and crime boss, Mr Cooper, keeps him in the shadow of Luke, the film’s protagonist (played by Sean).

During the course of the film, Luke becomes the enemy of the Coopers, and during the scene in question, Junior is sat in his car waiting for the return of two henchmen, who have been dispatched to Luke’s flat to whack him. Luke, however, whacks them, and it is he who slides into the back seat of Junior’s car, and points his gun at Junior’s head, before ordering him, not so politely, to tell his dad he’s coming for him.

Junior is a fiddly character to play, and especially fiddly in this scene, because he’s vulnerable and on the defensive, namely he has a gun pointed at his head and he’s being verbally threatened. Like many actors, I find it much more natural to play characters  who are on the attack, who are seeking to dominate in the scene. I think it’s much more difficult to consciously display our vulnerable side, largely due to the fact that we spend so much of our lives striving to conceal our weaknesses, and so to play a character like Junior is counter-intuitive. 

How to overcome this? Well, as always, I employ my trusty technique of giving myself something concretely doable to do, or put another way, I give myself an action. It’s a technique I love because it’s so simple, there’s no bullshit involved, and it never fails me, always holding up under pressure. The important point about the action you choose for yourself is that it is away from the fiction of the script, and something you can actually accomplish. So, in this scene, I decided I was going to try and convince Sean that he’s making a terrible mistake. And, there are different ways of executing the action; by pleading, by imploring, laying down the law, berating, and so on, and I set about doing them. Did I succeed in convincing Sean he’s making a terrible mistake? Well, if I told you that the second part of the scene involved me writhing in agony with blood splattered on my face* after Sean has shot me in the foot,  you might be able to make up your own mind.

* The blood was brilliantly squirted onto my face by Production Co-ordinator, Ian Deerlove, who was lying upside down on the passenger side of the car, and using a blood filled syringe. Remarkably, he nailed the squirt in one take.