Despite everything that’s happened nowadays……our views on actors remain generally the same.
Yes, we do praise celebrities and resonate with them less than we did 20 or 30 years ago….
but we still look up to them. We envy them, and not just for their money.
Plenty of have done it unprofessionally….like in school, as a side activity, or in a class that we took basically just for credit.
And we sure do know a lot about those that become superstars.
To get inside the head of a character…….that really is a beautiful thing.
But I think there’s a metaphysics to being an actor that is the primary motivation behind doing anything like that.
You feel emotions that aren’t really yours smoothly grace your own act trigger some kind of of valency. You weave them together and blossom out of them.
You try to become someone else, you mask yourself to others but in a way that does not involve deception and exploitation of the shameful sort.
Your motivation to succeed in the performance of a character becomes the whimsy and zeal of that such fictional person.
You feel the infinite lightness of your life, you also feel the boundless heaviness of what it means to connect to someone.
You feel the anxiety of not living up to expectations, you also feel the security of having something to achieve.
You taste the undulations of yourself and all that isn’t you, and all that you could be, all that you wouldn’t dare to be.
To be an actor is to be rewarded for trying to be something.
And too often, we are punished for trying to be the best version of ourselves.
Perhaps this is why actors seem to smile, even those we know are really suffering.
Because they know what it means to not be held back in your attempts at personal growth. They are people who have tried oh so very hard to feel as though they matter.
And they do not feel shame for this.
Yet even now, saying that, I seem to realize why in older times,
actors might have been seen as uncouth human beings lacking in much dignity.
They may have been seen as pathetic, making a job out of trying to relate to others, but with no actual consequences for catered social interactions.
I can see how people would love characters but see their vessels as tacky vagabonds.
Acting is an art in which the self is the creative work.
Those false selves become the rainbows stuck inside of long recordings
for us to love forever.
They inspire however they may,
like some kind of very unusually lucky plantlife may spread its seeds.
But I have even bigger dreams.
The Found Emotion (Invoke Yourself) 