Are you still playing adult roles like a kid?
There’s a transition that happens for many actors as they grow out of the age range where they can comfortably play adolescents. It’s exciting—new opportunities to play the strong lead—but it can also be uncomfortable and bring up old stuff.
On top of that, you may get feedback from your agents that you’re reading “too mature” — as if that’s a negative thing — and actors sometimes internalize that subconsciously.
I can’t tell you how often I work with adult actors well into their thirties, forties and beyond that still play roles with their voice and body as the little kid they grew up as.
In this Class Clip I talk about making that important shift into adult roles, and the self-awareness that will help you do it with authenticity and confidence.
CLASS CLIP TRANSCRIPTION
There’s an actress I was working with and she was starting to work on…Well, there’s this transition that happens for a lot of actors where they’re starting to go out of the “I can still play adolescence” and going into playing, like strong young male lead, strong female lead. There’s an actress I work with who’s in that place right now and feels like, almost like you’re going to be punished if you can’t sound young still and you can’t sound like a little girl still. And not getting roles, you know actually getting feedback for being too mature. If you’re not careful, something like that can be really damaging.
I found it fascinating as we started to work on the kind of action palette words that are very “strong young woman” roles, that playing some of those verbs was uncomfortable–what would happen to her voice and where it would sit in her body–her voice would change. But once she was able to find–when she was able to embody, to really practice some of those in her life, and starting to get a little bit more comfortable with physicalizing that–how this enormous shift happened with just having that awareness. You know, just having that awareness in the work you’re doing (is helpful because sometimes) you could not even know that’s operating. But it’s been really cool to see some of those things coming up.
