Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Indians mock their corrupt politicians relentlessly, but they regard their honest politicians with silent suspicion. The first thing they do when they hear of a supposedly 'clean' politician is to grin. It is a cliche that honest politicians in India tend to have dishonest sons, who collect money from people seeking an audience with Dad.
Well, I'm half Australian, half English and I live in London. That is the only reason I came upon this story. My Australian mother, Meredith Hooper, was invited in late 2007 by some Australian friends to make up a token Australian audience in a tiny fringe theater play reading of an unproduced, unrehearsed play called 'The King's Speech.'
I've never been very comfortable as an actor looking out into the audience; I always like to keep my focus on the other person. When you start playing out to the audience, it takes me out of it, because people don't do that when you're in life behaving with another person - you don't often look out, around you, in a presentational manner.
Starring Russell Crowe as the Patron of the First Ark, 'Noah' had affronted some Christian literalists with its giant rock men, its weird visions, and the occasionally dark motives of its protagonist. But the film corralled enough religious leaders, including Pope Francis (with whom Crowe snagged an audience), to salve canonical objections.
The whole idea of being mesmerized and not in control of your own actions is fascinating and a little spooky. I remember hearing about someone who'd gone to a magic act, and a person in the audience had become hypnotized by observing too closely what magician was doing on stage, and thought it was spooky to lose your consciousness that way.
The nice thing about 'Miranda' especially is that the audience that we had was school kids right through to pensioners. It seems to be a show that people watch as a family, so it was the first job I've been involved in that certainly my oldest daughter and my middle daughter are big fans of, and proud that I'm in it, which is a nice feeling.
Playing live is much more natural for me. The instant reaction and the feedback from the audience is great for me. I really relish it. And if you play blues-based music, it's not really academic music or recital music. It really needs a bit of atmosphere and a bit of interplay and a bit of roughness, and you really get that with an audience.
Remember, science fiction's always been the kind of first level alert to think about things to come. It's easier for an audience to take warnings from sci-fi without feeling that we're preaching to them. Every science fiction movie I have ever seen, any one that's worth its weight in celluloid, warns us about things that ultimately come true.
The first series of 'McMafia' is very Alex Godman-centric and could continue to be, but we haven't even begun to explore the Middle East or Africa or even South America in detail. One of our ambitions would be to drop into some of these other places and, by doing so, bring the audience into a world that they wouldn't necessarily have been in.
The first important role was a Broadway lead I did called 'The Royal Hunt Of The Sun' by Peter Shaffer, the guy who did 'Equus' and 'Amadeus.' Many of the important roles that I got later on were because the guy who was going to hire me was in that audience and had his mind blown. I tend to do that. I blow people's minds with my performances.
When I speak at my local church, which I try to do 35 to 40 times a year, I try in every lesson to take the Old Testament text or New Testament text and apply them to what is happening to me or how that applies to the audience that I'm teaching in a modern, fast-changing, technological world. I use headlines, interfaith and that sort of thing.
If I can get the audience to connect with the characters emotionally - and they love who they are, they love the larger-than-life situation that they're in, but most of all get the audience invested in the characters - then I always feel like I can sort of put them in the most outrageous circumstances, and the audience is okay to go with that.
I think the genre of musical theatre, when it started, the pop songwriters of the time were writing the music. I think sometimes when we write musicals now, we keep writing in that same style, as though that's the musical theatre genre... We have to figure out how to tell stories with the music that we listen to now, or we'll lose our audience.
If you're playing a good guy, you show some darkness. If you're playing a dark guy, you show something different, like humor, that will mix it up and hopefully surpass the audience's expectations. What I'm battling all the time is complacency in the audience. I try to bring a little mystery to what might happen because that engages people more.
In the case of the Web, each of us has slightly more access to a mass audience - a few more people slide through the door - but Facebook is finally a crude, personal multimedia conglomerate machine, personal nation-state machine, reality-show machine. New gadgets alter social patterns, new media eclipse old ones, but the pyramid never goes away.
I'm watching the show and I'm watching the audience watch the show. Because once you leave the rehearsal room, you have space and you can see it. You can watch them watch it. You can't see your work, really, until you're in the theater. You have no perspective. That's not part of my job, to go, "Oh my God, they're so brilliant." I'm not required to swoon.
It's basically how I choose movie roles. Would I like to see this movie? Is this movie important? Why would I do this? And Headhunters is a movie that I would like to see in the cinema. And when it's sold to 50 countries or whatever, for me it's a great deal. I make movies for an audience so if that audience grows, I feel really honoured and thankful for it.
When I play that music live nowadays, there's a lot of things I feel I'd like to do - even things I don't think the audience is aware of, like layering subs underneath the kicks, and layering crisp hats underneath the muddy, trashy hats of the '90s. If I tried to play the music as it was next to my contemporary music, it just sounds like you're closing up half of the sonic spectrum.
When you're watching yourself work, you're not really an audience member for yourself. Even being confronted by your own image can be jarring sometimes. The experience of making a movie or a television show is this really full one, and sometimes you see it and even if it's a great piece of work, it's not the experience - i t's almost sad because it reminds you of something that isn't anymore.
Before my commercial career, I never played for more than an audience of 99 seats somewhere in downtown New York, but occasionally someone would recognize me in the subway and say, "Oh, I saw you in that play, you were really great in that," or "the director was really something." It becomes a conversation. When people spot me on the street from my work in commercials, there's nowhere for the conversation to go. Obviously I'm an actor and I can't.
I've always been such a fan of short films - in fact, I never considered that I would actually make a feature. I just thought I wanted to make shorts for the rest of my life. They are a lot harder to have shown and a lot harder to find and see as an audience, but I don't know. It's just a form that I really love. I was just making them for the process, but ultimately, I did get them into festivals, and they did end up on television, and they had as much of a life as short films can.
One of the things on a very practical level as an actor or actress is that when you do a play, you do the entire story every time you do it. You have eight shows a week. You have a rehearsal process of four to five to six weeks. And then once you're in performance, everybody else goes away and you're there with your fellow actors and the audience and the material and your life becomes about that. And you go through the story from the beginning to the end every time you do it and depending on how long you do it, that's where the craft comes in.