It’s that time of year again! The time when the entirety of the industry gathers to witness who will take home the top honors in our profession.
The Golden Globes took place a few days ago. For some actors, their careers have changed for the better, forever.
For others, it was a much more humbling experience but they still woke up the next day, ready to continue building their acting career.
However, for most actors things remained exactly the same.
They looked on at The Golden Globes as spectators and nothing more. If you have been around Boost My Star for any length of time, you know that awards season is when you should start to really pay attention to what’s going on in the industry.
There is no other time when the industry shares its consensus on what’s working right now.
See, even if you took no part in it and you were purely a spectator, The Golden Globes can fundamentally change the direction of your acting career.
Here’s how...
Most actors view The Golden Globes as a celebration and look on passively. Professional actors, however, look on at the awards shows as an opportunity to study what’s working.
They use the awards shows to generate a list of actors whose performances they want to reverse engineer.
I do want to be clear about something...
Reverse engineering does not mean that you simply copy what someone else does. It’s much more involved and much more effective than that.
When you reverse engineer another actor’s performance you want to go below the surface and try to uncover why they made the character choices they made.
You don’t want to simply raise your voice when they do, or frown when they frown. You want to uncover the layers of their performance and get to the core of what drives their choices.
When I talk about this with other actors, two distinct groups typically emerge. One group of actors understands the idea and they realize how effective doing something like this can be.
The other group is the exact opposite. They get too caught up in their own creative process to the extent that they don’t want to “copy” someone else’s performance.
Rest assured, when you reverse engineer another actor’s performance you will still have to run their choices through your own character development model to come up with an effective character.
Otherwise, it simply does not work... So how do you do this effectively?
Start by picking an actor and a particular performance of theirs. That’s where The Golden Globes come in. It gives you a complete list of both to choose from.
After you have settled on this, watch their performance intently. Study it and take notes as you watch.
This should be an active process. You should be pausing and rewinding often to decipher the nuances of the actor’s performance.
After you have done that, pick a scene from the same genre of the performance. Build a character based on the choices the actor made during the performance you were studying.
For example, if during that piece the actor chose to refrain from raising their voice when angry, the character in your piece should do the same.
If they made a particular facial expression when they were confused, you should do the same.
This will help you build a baseline for your character. Once you have done that, perform the piece and record yourself.
Watch it back and make adjustments wherever you feel like things don’t quite feel right. This is the point where you will be running the character through your own model and adding your own style to the performance.
Perform the scene and record yourself again, watching it back and making adjustments just as you did before.
After you do this a few times, you will end up with a character that is built on similar choices to those made by an award winning actor in an award winning performance but that is still unique to you and the way you build a character.
When you build characters by reversing engineering this way, you remove the guesswork and you end up with characters that are incredibly effective.
It will also make directors love working with you, because you will show up on set many steps ahead of everyone else.
That makes their job a lot easier, and when you shine on screen they get a lot of the credit for that too.
This should make The Golden Globes and the entirety of awards season something you look forward to every year but for a different reason than your industry friends.
It can help you take your career to the next level by helping you deliver powerful performances on set.
However, you can’t neglect the other side of the industry. You also need to focus on getting to a place where you have plenty of opportunities to get in the room with Casting Directors and get on set.
Before you can wow them with your talent, they first have to know who you are.
Most actors only interact with CDs during auditions but that’s not nearly enough time or frequency to build your familiarity with them.
That’s only one of several ways that you can become more visible to the industry. We’ll go over some of the others over the coming weeks.
Something that they all have in common is that they depend on having a stellar industry reputation.
So do you have dreams about one day walking across the stage to collect your own Golden Globe?
Let me know in the comments below or shoot me an email. I would love to be a part of that journey with you and I truly want to...
See you at the top,
Scott