“What I love about theater is that you are constantly a student, for the rest of your life. You are handed a script and you are placed in a certain time in history with its own politics and culture, and you have to know where you are, so you get to constantly study history, music, politics, entertainment, culture, society … and I love that. I always ask ‘why’. I think it’s my own curiosity. I think that being a daughter of a playwright certainly influences that. But I also believe, or I hope, that I approach everything differently. I’ll sort of read the play, and read the play, and read the play, until the play will tell me how to approach it. But text work, when a play is really well written, text work is just a dream. And there are so many hints in there that playwrights will give actors; there is just a wealth of information. But, you do have to be patient, and you have to be detective-like in mining what’s there for you and figure out what is actable and what’s not actable. You know, you can’t act themes. I love when people make you figure out the theme of a play (which can be helpful in some cases) but it doesn’t help me as an actress really. The theme of a play is sort of the result of all the other stuff that comes before it, a theme is a result of things that have been layered, and layered, and layered, and then you get the theme. So, I like to work the opposite way. I think for a director that’s very, very helpful, and certainly can help an actor in some form. But, if you get too academic in your approach to things, you can’t act that stuff. Hopefully, you lead an audience there, but you can’t actually act it. Film acting is all about relaxation. So I learned how to ‘simmer’ all day, to save my energy. I learned how to surrender. Not feeling prepared makes me nervous. I do a lot of work before I get there, which puts my own self-doubt to rest. Steer away from skipping steps. There is an enormous amount of work that happens to get to that point where an eyebrow will lift. You would be surprised at what it takes to get there, so that when the eyebrow lifts, it is connected to the face that it is on, and then that is connected to the thought that makes the eyebrow rise, and that [thought] is connected to whatever the character is seeing that causes the thought that makes the eyebrow rise. If you skip steps, that is when I become either uninterested in what I am watching or uninterested in what I am doing. I am a believer that you have to be very careful in exploiting your own pain. [My pain] is not the character’s pain. And [my pain] is going to bleed through anyway. But if I rely on it—if I substitute it, if I cut and paste my pain, my experience into a character, it will not fit. It will not organically knit to the material, to the situation, to that character. You’ve done all that work on the story—now the story is working on you. My loyalty is not to a director or producer but to the story. Don’t rush. I think more than anything, it’s don’t rush. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Don’t feel like you’re missing something that’s not here. It will be there, and this is precious time. It will only help you. But don’t rush. If you’re relaxed, you can be precise. If you’re precise, you can be fierce.”- #LauraLinney
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