Nicco Annan
P-Valley (Starz)
P-Valley tells the story of The Pynk, a strip club in the Mississippi Delta owned by nonbinary character Uncle Clifford (Annan). In episode seven of the Starz series’ second season, Clifford is in jeopardy of losing the club, and reflects in a montage on all the years that The Pynk flourished and became an integral part of her family, while her grandmother Ernestine (Loretta Devine) grows ever sicker with COVID.
“It was really difficult tapping back into this thing that we were all just coming out of, in terms of the pandemic, and the COVID of it all,” says Annan. “This is a way of life for us now, we’re all cool with it. But I remember, in the height of the pandemic, before we had started filming season two, I had so many friends that had lost parents, and grandparents, and [I] could not be with them in their time of transition. I was stuck in New York in the pandemic — then my father went into the hospital back in Detroit. He had COVID, and it was really bad. I remember when they released him from the hospital after, like, 13 days, they said, ‘You are well enough to go home.’ He still needed [machines] to breathe.”
These memories became particularly triggering as Uncle Clifford witnesses her grandmother incredibly ill with COVID, ultimately being rushed to the hospital. “I remember in doing those scenes with Loretta, where Clifford is really possibly losing everything that she knows to be her stable ground,” Annan says. “Thematically, it was a great point to be able to really dig in and carve out room for the audience to get to know Uncle Clifford in a much more intimate way. But those scenes were really hard because they touched on something that was still so fresh.”
Ismael Cruz Córdova
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (Prime Video)
As the ancient elf Arondir on Prime Video’s The Rings of Power, Córdova was asked to juggle scenes of extreme, fast-paced action with moments of incredible emotional heft. “Often you see actors doing one or the other,” he explains. “I’m having to merge these two lanes of acting. My humanity wants to come up, and I want to weep.”
Playing an elf, though, means displaying emotion in a completely different way from humans, even when the circumstances could not be more dire — as they are for Arondir in episodes three and four, when he’s been taken prisoner, stripped of his armor, chained up alongside humans, thinks he may have lost the love of his life and witnesses the murder of his best friend. “There is this elven way of being,” explains Córdova. “You seldom see an elf cry. [They] contain millennia within their behavior, their wisdom, their physicality. How do you put yourself in the mental and psychological position of being eternal?”
Elves value trees as sacred, so when Arondir is forced to cut one down, Córdova’s task was to portray the complicated grief of this sacrifice antithetical to his character’s beliefs. “I looked a lot at native peoples of the world, and their spirituality,” he says. “There are these portraits of Native American chiefs, taken at the turn of the last century, and you see the ‘thousand-year stare,’ and there’s so much within. That [was] a visual anchor for me.”
Córdova also incorporated the criticisms of the show’s color-blind casting as a tool to harness his character’s emotional power. “There is an allegorical aspect of being a first elf of color, chained and imprisoned,” he says, noting that he asked himself: “What is my own responsibility in the show, my own relationship with this backlash that I was already experiencing?”
Domhnall Gleeson
The Patient (FX/Hulu)
In FX/Hulu’s The Patient, Gleeson plays Sam Fortner, a patient of therapist Alan Strauss (Steve Carell), whom Fortner is holding hostage in a basement where he reveals himself to be a serial killer. On his most challenging scene, Gleeson muses: “There was a scene at the end of episode five that I remember being a bit chunky. It ended up taking about 10 minutes of the episode, and it was sort of a culmination of the first half of the series.”
By this time in the show, Fortner has taken another captive, Elias (Alex Rich), and is fighting the urge to kill him by engaging in therapy with Strauss. “At the end of episode five, I go to do it,” says Gleeson. “Alan wakes up and stops me on my way. At the very beginning of the scene, we have a long discussion. He tells me stuff I don’t want to hear about why he thinks I kill people, and then suggests that we have therapy with Elias, and I bring him out. That builds to me killing him, eventually. It turns out to be a horrible idea by Alan Strauss.” The heightened moment still required Gleeson to ground himself and find patience in character. “It was just chunky,” he continues. “He just wants to kill him at every moment. And yet the scene can’t just be that for 10 minutes. Otherwise, it’ll be boring. The writing was superb, but just finding all the waves of it was tricky.”
Balancing the different sides of Fortner proved difficult, as well. “Part of him is deeply traumatized, and expresses himself through extreme physical violence,” explains Gleeson. “There’s this aspect of him which is totally animal, totally stunted and teenage and childish in almost a funny way. And then he’s also a complicated grown up who has gone through a divorce, and is, a lot of times, subduing an aspect of himself which he hates and trying to be a better person.”
Sharon Horgan
Bad Sisters (Apple TV+)
Horgan is not only the star of the Apple TV+ Irish series Bad Sisters, she’s one of the show’s creators and writers and its showrunner. But writing for herself doesn’t necessarily take the pressure off her when it comes to acting in those scenes. “The big part of the problem is that when you write stuff, the last thing you think about is, usually, your own performance,” she says.
The show follows the Garveys, a family of five sisters, in the aftermath of the sudden and somewhat mysterious death of one of their husbands, the abusive John Paul (played by Claes Bang). In the first season’s final episode (spoilers ahead), Horgan’s character reveals that she was raped by her now-deceased brother-in-law, while one of her sisters confesses to the murder. “It was a big ensemble scene, and you’re doing this thing where you’ve got to pull something from deep within you, when you’re trying to live and feel the trauma of what that character is living and feeling,” says Horgan. “You need to find a bit of space for yourself and then walk out onto set and do it. There were like 500 people on set that day, and it’s not like you stop being a showrunner, because you’re still thinking about everything.”
Still, despite the overwhelming nature of the task at hand, Horgan relished the chance to work alongside so many actors she admires. “I’m learning from the actors about their characters,” she says. “I’m not trained [as an actor], and after a lot of time, I do feel a bit like, ‘What am I doing here?’ Sometimes when I’ve written a project, I feel even less like an actor. But with Bad Sisters, it’s all about the ensemble. I really felt like they were my girls, like they were my sisters.”
Melia Kreiling
Mammals (Prime Video)
Kreiling plays Amandine, the wife of James Corden’s Jamie, on Prime Video’s Mammals. At the start of the series, the couple deals with a tragic miscarriage, and during the course of the show, Jamie goes on a quest to figure out if Amandine might be carrying on an affair — or how many men she may be seeing. In the final scene of the show’s first season, however, it’s revealed that Amandine is not the only party guilty of infidelity.
Kreiling recalls: “Essentially, there’s a very big final confrontation where everything we’ve seen for five and a half episodes is completely turned on its head. It’s a brutally honest scene. And I emphasize the word ‘brutal.’ It’s the type of honesty where in my own life, I only know a handful of people — and an even smaller number of women — who give themselves permission to be that honest.”
Aside from the grueling subject matter, the length and format of the conversation presented its own set of challenges. “We’re living in a society where our attention spans are much shorter,” Kreiling explains. “This is a 10-minute scene with two characters, just talking. It’s more set up like two monologues, in a sense. It’s uncommon in TV to have such long scenes.” The heavy lifting was daunting but not unmanageable — Kreiling simply had to approach it differently than she was used to. “You have to abandon all the habits that you’ve acquired over the years working in television where scenes are fast and you’re trying to grasp an audience quickly with one-liners,” she says. “We did it right at the beginning of filming. I remember thinking, ‘I wonder if the crew is going to stay focused for this long. I wonder if I’m going to notice people scratching their nose.’ ”
Kayvan Novak
What We Do in the Shadows (FX)
Novak stars as the vampire Nandor the Relentless on FX’s acclaimed dark comedy What We Do in the Shadows, which just wrapped its fourth season. While Novak has found his comfort zone in the fast-paced, often-improvised ensemble scenes, the latest season featured a much larger sequence in which Nandor spars with his familiar, the lovably loyal Guillermo (Harvey Guillén), who has grown increasingly frustrated that his master has not yet turned him into an immortal bloodsucker despite his years of thankless service.
“It was quite a lengthy fight scene that required a lot of fight choreography with the stunt team, and swordplay,” says Novak. “We’d had a fight scene before, but this one was very much on a much larger scale, in a much larger environment, with tons of extras and quite complicated stunts and wires. [It] was very exciting to do that.”
Though Nandor is meant to be a formidable warrior, Novak finds embracing the comedic side of his mannerisms to be much more accessible.
“When I know I have to be physically funny in a scene, I can kind of revert to just the physicality that comes naturally to me,” he explains. “If you’re trying to convince someone that [you] know your way around a broadsword, you have to look menacing. For me, [the challenge] was not being able to fall back on the comic physicality that comes much more naturally to me and learn to move in a way that looked convincing.”
But the new experience of learning how to battle with a co-star onscreen also came with a newfound respect for the craft of stunt performance. “I’ve watched how many fight scenes?” says Novak. “In hundreds of movies. I have a new appreciation for action sequences, the intricacy of how they’re choreographed and the ability of the actor to really convince the audience that he or she is a badass.”
Aubrey Plaza
The White Lotus (HBO)
Mike White’s sophomore season of The White Lotus shifts its focus from class to gender dynamics, with Plaza leading the ensemble cast as the shrewd, cynical Harper opposite her more affable husband, Ethan (Will Sharpe). “Harper and Ethan have some pretty gnarly scenes,” she confesses, noting that the conversations they often have behind the closed doors of their hotel suite were some of the most grueling of her career.
“It’s emotionally and physically draining, to argue with your husband for hours,” Plaza adds. “When you have a really hard discussion with your partner, it’ll last a couple of hours, but when you’re shooting a really hard discussion with your partner, it lasts all day, so you have to be in that state for a really long time. It’s just a bummer.”
When the cameras weren’t rolling, Plaza tried to maintain peace and quiet — exactly what Harper would herself avoid. “I generally go back to my dressing room and play Solfeggio frequencies and try to calm myself down,” explains Plaza, referring to the numerology-based sound tones believed to alleviate anxiety and balance chakras. “I meditate in between takes.”
White wrote the part specifically with Plaza in mind. “I think there’s a lot of Harper’s personality that cross[es over] with my personality,” she says. “It’s a side of me that is more intimate, vulnerable, that I haven’t explored onscreen so much. I’ve been in a long-term relationship, so I understand the feeling of the peaks and valleys of long-term relationships. It’s hard. It’s fucking work. The challenge for me was to track every little moment that’s going on for her.”
Plaza notes that capturing Harper’s sensitivity was the toughest part of her job. “It’s very easy for me to play someone who is sarcastic and has a wall up,” she says. “But that was a fun challenge for me: to kind of get to go crazy with that side of myself, but also have this underlying sadness.”
Zoe Saldaña
From Scratch (Netflix)
Netflix’s limited series From Scratch, based on the memoir by executive producer Tembi Locke, follows an American woman, Amy (Saldaña), as she studies abroad in Florence. While in Italy, she falls in love with Lino (Eugenio Mastrandrea), a chef, who returns to the U.S. with Amy to start a family — only for their happiness to be sidelined by Lino’s cancer diagnosis.
For Saldaña, handling such delicate material required visiting emotional parts of herself. “We had to open up ourselves a lot, to allow the pain that this family endured with this loss [to] enter us, so that we [could] be vessels for it,” she explains. “By doing that, it would open up portals that we thought we had shut in our own personal lives.”
One emotional scene was amplified by the specificity of what Locke wrote in her memoir. “After the loss of her husband, [Amy] needed help with just doing simple things like eating or taking a bath,” Saldaña explains. “Tembi and her sister [showrunner Attica Locke] really wanted it to resemble as closely as possible how it [really] happened. I was in a bathtub, and Judith [Scott], who plays my stepmother, and Kellita [Smith], who plays my mother … were just mothering this child that’s in pain, and it became a very emotional moment.”
Even after the cameras stopped rolling, Saldaña says, the intensity of the moment continued with her scene partners. “We allowed ourselves to surrender to whatever pain resurfaced within us from our own personal lives,” she says. “It was just so special to know that I was being protected and nurtured in a moment when I just couldn’t control myself. That became a very difficult day, but it was the most rewarding day of that shoot because of Kellita and Judith.”
Rebecca Wisocky
Ghosts (CBS)
On CBS’ supernatural sitcom Ghosts, Wisocky plays Hetty Woodstone, a long-dead Victorian woman with a penchant for affronted monologues about propriety and class. In season two’s second episode, Hetty embarks on a surprising journey: discovering her sexuality via a particularly bumpy washing machine. “It’s so fun,” admits Wisocky, who adds that it was a break from the kind of moments Hetty typically has in the comedy series. “But it was challenging in that my character is often given these very long, musical aria-type speeches and is very verbal. Having a scene that’s virtually silent, in which the scene partner is an inanimate object, felt challenging for me [and] for this character.”
The scene itself also required some physical skills and light foley work: “Just practically, there were some fun challenges that you don’t think about in that, for sound, I had to simulate the actual bumping and rocking of the machine for many of the takes,” Wisocky recalls. “It was a good core workout. To be asked to do something that’s fairly intimate, something that’s funny and that you also find plausible — that this character really doesn’t understand what is happening to her own body. For all those reasons, I thought it was a fun scene.”
In season one, Hetty possesses a living character on the show — one of the first moments Wisocky began to enjoy the physical hilarity of her otherwise straitlaced character. “When she actually gets her hands in a real human body that can touch things, and interact with things, and consume food and alcohol and go places, she’s voracious and out of control,” says Wisocky. “That’s been a joyful thing to get to explore with his character.”
This story first appeared in a December stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
Source: Hollywood
