All language subtitles for 19. Acting for Screen

I sometimes feel sorry for actors who

make movies or do television who've

never done theater because if you've

never done theater, then you've never

known what it is to give a performance

in two hours or three hours

and tell a story.

And not only that, tell the arc of a

character. And understand how that arc

flows.

And understand that when you're on stage

and you're constantly shifting and

moving and things are not

linear in the sense that they don't move

and shift like a if you could look at an

earthquake, you know that

that's what you get. That's what you

experience in theater. And and

sometimes, you know, I'll watch work

of actors on film who've never been in

the theater. And you know, I'll bet when

they came on that day and they shot that

scene, it was pretty intense. You know,

I'll bet everyone was like, "That was

intense." And then they came the next

day and they shot another scene and it

it was intense.

Then they kept shooting and degrees of

intensity.

But when you cut the whole movie

together, it's like a flat line.

There is no

understanding

of the arc

of a character. So when I'm shooting

House of Cards or any kind of film

where I know I'm going to shoot because

you know you get a schedule. So you see

what the schedule is. You see what days

you're shooting what scenes. And in the

case of House of Cards, we shoot quite

often two episodes at once. So you have

to go through your script and you have

to go through all the scenes you're

shooting in the course of those 20 days

that we're going to shoot these two

episodes because it takes us 10 days to

shoot an episode.

And you have to start to try to

as best you can

understand what is happening with the

character

in this scene and what the character

knows in this scene and what the

character doesn't know in this scene.

What the character finds out in that

scene that you're filming first before

you film the scene where he finds out

that information. So there's a a whole

series of I would I would even say lines

that you can draw

of

understanding where you need to be

so that when they put it all together

the arc will appear that you played it

in two hours.

The audience will watch as if they were

watching a play. That's the way I put it

together. I think in terms of the arc

and the movement of keeping an audience

constantly

interested and engaged. Um,

and then on top of all that, you have to

stay incredibly open to what will happen

on set when suddenly you're in front of

your fellow actors and they're doing

something that you hadn't thought of or

planned or now h that's interesting. Is

that going to work with what I did?

Yeah, actually I think it will. And

sometimes you're simply

guessing

and you hope that you're guessing right.

And then you hope that your director or

editor will use the stuff that's really

good and the rest of it they'll cut

away.

I I will do a uh

a journey of arrows where a line is here

and I've got to try to figure out why do

I say this? When when did this idea

happen? When did this hit me? And I will

find it's three pages back

that I'm now finally responding to that.

Oh, that's where that happened. It's not

that I just heard it. It's that I heard

it back then. And in some cases, you

heard it two scenes ago.

It's always about that trying to

identify

why do I respond? I'm responding to

something. And if it's words, I heard

words. Sometimes you're responding to

the way someone looks at you, the

expression on their face. It's much more

difficult in in most films or in

television when if you don't have a

chance to set the tone

then you're either trying to figure out

what the tone is or you're suddenly

shooting on another day with a different

actor and they seem to be in a different

movie than the one you've been shooting

over the last couple of days and you

have to constantly sort of try to figure

out well okay what's the situation?

you're always sort of being tested

to try to maintain the integrity of the

tone.

I mean, sometimes we go to movies and

it's like the movie doesn't know what it

wants to be because there seems to be

nine different tones going on because

quite often actors end up acting in

bubbles. Sometimes I I write down uh

questions uh about the characters that

I'm playing um to to prod myself.

Questions are so valuable even if you

don't answer them. I mean, very often a

series of questions will lead to nothing

more than a series of more questions or

make you walk down a blind alley that

will lead to another blind alley that

will lead to a culde-sac,

you know, where we're always in this

sort of struggle to answer the

questions. But actually,

sometimes the answer is in the doing.

Sometimes the answers are in the playing

are in the

the discovery of what it could be rather

than making a definitive deci decision

about what it is. Um,

keeping things sometimes ambiguous is

much more interesting to watch uh for an

audience than things that are just black

and white. And I think it's one of the

reasons why audiences have have always

embraced complexity,

um, duality, characters that seem

contradictory.

Um, because I think all of us recognize

that we are all like this. Um, you know,

audiences love that. Um,

things that aren't simple. Um, I think

that's that's true in great writing. I

think it's true in great acting.

I hope people have high expectations

for the work I want to do and try to do.

I I I absolutely I can live with that

because I want to play at the best. I

want to be at my best. I want to be

challenged again and again.

And I can tell you that um

I know

that if I had not gone to London 12

years ago, if I had not spent the last

12 years

doing a play or two plays every single

year

for eight weeks or 10 weeks or 14 weeks

or 16 weeks,

working with Trevor Nun, working with

Sam Mendes,

working with Matthew Worches,

the challenges, the

complexities of those characters,

the work night after night after night

after night. I would have never been

ready for House of Cards.

That experience, that character, that

complexity,

the foundation for that was laid at the

old Vic. I know that.