The Actor Within: Intimate Conversations with Great Actors

Bill Pullman

70 i Bill Pullman Bill arrived at my studio on an early Thursday morning, a Starbucks co√ee cup in his hand, looking as if he could have used a couple more hours of sleep. Nearing the end of a seven-week run (eight performances a week) of David Mamet’s Oleanna at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, the popular stage and screen actor woke up early for our session at my studio. I began our conversation by asking him what surprised him most about becoming a professional actor. ‘‘The first thing I learned was that the odds of making it are really against you.’’ ‘‘There is no amount of research or data that will make you secure about what your chances are on the slippery slope of this profession . This is a tough business of ‘he’s good, he’s not good.’ To succeed, you have to believe that acting is an investigation of who you are as a person. And if this excites you, gives you a high about what you’re learning and experiencing, then it’s worth your while to pursue it.’’ ‘‘What sets actors apart from other performing artists?’’ ‘‘Actors tend to have a solitary nature. They spend a great deal of time among people, particularly if they work on the stage, but it is matched by an interior journey that’s fed by being alone. Many years ago, I went with a friend to the Kennedy Center to see a production of Old Times, starring John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. I was with this brassy graduate student who, after the performance, said, ‘Let’s go backstage and say hello.’ In those days, no one did that. It seemed almost perverse. Yet, we walked right up to Gielgud and Richardson and introduced ourselves. We had a nice conversation with them, told them how much we enjoyed their performance, and left. Excited about having met these two brilliant actors , we hung around the parking lot talking long after most people had gone. Then, suddenly, I saw John Gielgud emerge from the stage door all alone, a solitary figure. He stood there for a moment quietly unaware that he was being watched and then walked very slowly down the long ramp. I watched him until he was gone from view. That image stayed with me. I knew that acting was about being in the presence of people. I was yet to learn of the need and the desire for time spent alone.’’ ‘‘Why is being alone so important?’’ 72 The Actor Within ‘‘I live a lot of di√erent lives just within my own. I have a family; homes in Los Angeles, New York, and Montana; and I have a habit of committing to a number of things all at once. So, alone time is when I gather myself. This is one of the reasons I like to do plays. When I’m in a play, I start my preparation around three in the afternoon, and that’s when I slip away from the world. For the next five hours leading up to the performance at eight, I’m not obligated to do anything. This is when I enter the zone and begin this thing that puts me in my body and in my mind.’’ ‘‘What drives you to act?’’ ‘‘I think, when you’re performing, you become a vessel toward bigger things, bigger than your ego, bigger than your insecurities. It’s about tapping into a kind of humanity that can be pure and resonant enough to be recognizable to others, to an audience. You experience a sense of engagement with this community inside the theater. The reason a performance really moves you is because it’s articulating life—real feelings, real expressions, and real perceptions. It’s a way of making sense out of the chaos of living, or sometimes the meaninglessness of it. You become part of a collective where everyone around you is focusing on the same thing and moving into awareness about their own lives. Like a shaman, the actor is channeling an energy or awareness and trying to make it connect for everyone in the room. It’s very exciting to be inside something brilliantly crafted by a playwright, inhabited by fellow actors, and witnessed by an audience. There is comfort in this place of consistency and orderliness and where one feels what it is to be...