Breaking the Fourth Wall with Isaac Butler

Isaac Butler is an author, critic, theater director, and professor known for his books The Method: How The Twentieth Century Learned to Act and The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America, co-written with Dan Kois. Butler’s writing has appeared in numerous publications such as New York magazine, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Slate magazine. For Slate, he also created and hosted the podcast “Lend Me Your Ears”, about Shakespeare and politics, and currently co-hosts “Working”, a podcast about the creative process. Butler’s work as a theater director has been seen on stages throughout the United States and he is the co-creator of “Real Enemies”, which was named one of the best live events of 2015 by the New York Times. Butler currently teaches Theater History and Performance at NYU Tisch. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:05Speaker 01

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• 0:36Speaker 02

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• 1:54Alec Baldwin?

  This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. My guest today is an author, critic, and theater director. His most recent book, The Method: How the 20th Century Learned to Act, has been named one of the best books of 2022 by The New Yorker, Time Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Vanity Fair. Isaac Butler has studied acting since childhood, performing in Washington DC's theater scene. He is now an adjunct instructor of theater history and performance at NYU Tisch.

• 2:33Alec Baldwin?

  Butler is also the author of The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America. His writing on theater and film has appeared in numerous publications such as New York Magazine, The Guardian, Slate, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. I was curious to know Butler's opinion of the three great actors he mentions in his book, Lee Strasberg, Sandy Meisner, Stella Adler, and how he came to write The Method.

• 3:03Speaker 04

  What I wanted to do with the book was, since I had never met Lee, or Stella, or Sandy, or any of those people, they were all, you know, dead before I went to college, was to really try to take as seriously as possible the opinions of those who knew them, right? Because I wasn't there, and much is like when you're an actor trying to create a role, you know, you want to understand that role as deeply as possible, even if you don't agree with 100% of that character's psychology or the choices they make in a play. I think most characters who are interesting are ones who we wouldn't necessarily make all the same choices they do, because plot comes from-

• 3:37Alec Baldwin?

  When you play Hitler, you've got to give it everything you have.

• 3:39Speaker 04

  Exactly, right? And so I wound up having, you know, very complicated and mostly positive feelings about all of them. Do you know what I mean? I mean, Lee, who I didn't know, but by all reports was an incredibly difficult person to get along with, did not ever say hello or goodbye, did not make a lot of eye contact, yelled at people when he, very, at the drop of a hat-

• 3:59Alec Baldwin?

  Unnecessarily.

• 4:00Speaker 04

  Unnecessarily.

• 4:01Alec Baldwin?

  Very imperious.

• 4:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, very- Imperious and you know, at the same time, so many actors would say, even people who hated him personally. He changed my life and maybe the actor I am today. And so you have to respect both of those things. It is certainly not the case that Lee's method is good for every actor.

• 4:21Alec Baldwin?

  No.

• 4:22Speaker 04

  And I think the big problem that Lee and to some extent Stella and some of the other people ran into is getting a little high on their own supply about that, that there was one true way to get to the truth. There's all sorts of different ways to get to the truth and Lee would give lip service to that sometimes. He'd be like, you know, Laurence Olivier gets to the truth by finding the right shirt or whatever. He didn't really accept that if his students did it, you know? And so I, I think that what actually is most important is that the student find the right teacher for them. And what's been interesting since the death of that generation, or actually it started when late in life. How many people would take classes from both Stella and Sandy? Or, you know, would go to see Lee and then go to Uta Hagen or whatever and try to kind of get the things they were missing from each

• 5:06Speaker 04

  and create their own way of doing it because ultimately after years and years and years in a career, you found your own technique. It might be based on their technique, but there's stuff that's useful to you. There's stuff that isn't and you find your own way, I think.

• 5:19Alec Baldwin?

  For me, Strasberg was somebody who, the, the number one thing, which they made the number one thing. And maybe they didn't emphasize it enough, maybe not enough of them completely grasped the necessity of relaxation.

• 5:31Speaker 04

  Right.

• 5:31Alec Baldwin?

  You gotta, you gotta turn off all the pipes and vowels of your day. You gotta go to work. You can't talk to people. You can't be on the phone with your girlfriend, breaking up with her. You gotta cut all that off and just be here now and sit in a chair. And if you want to read a book, don't go to your trailer, go, go to your trailer when the scene is over. And there's a break, but we're doing the shots of that scene, sit on the set, stay connected to the set. All these things of connection, relaxation, concentration. And then you have a shot at the other things happening. You have no shot if the other things don't happen.

• 6:01Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, Stanislavski was, was very serious about relaxation, you know? And, and Strasberg is adapting a lot of those ways that Stanislavski developed. You know, he started doing yoga. He was very interested in breathing exercises. A lot of stuff that we associate today with like mindfulness. You know, Stanislavski was doing to try to figure out how to totally relax as an actor. Because he was totally all about that, that it was only once you were relaxed that you could actually do the work. Cause otherwise it's all getting contained in your body. And it's not going anywhere, you know?

• 6:32Alec Baldwin?

  When you talk about a method acting performance, you're talking about Brando, obviously, and Clift. And I studied with Mira Rostova.

• 6:40Speaker 04

  Oh, amazing.

• 6:41Alec Baldwin?

  Was Clift's teacher. Yeah, she was in her 90s. She taught in the living room of a friend's apartment. And she would teach acting. And she changed my life because she talked to me about how actors very often are playing the scene at the expense of the other actor.

• 6:52Speaker 04

  Right.

• 6:52Alec Baldwin?

  Not listening. The old Jack Lemmon thing where you have to be really, really be very acute and you're listening and responding and so forth. And, and she really changed my life because I was doing a soap opera. And soap opera acting is defined by an actor walking and going, you know, you're not going to take over those shares of Palmer Industries, Dave. Let me tell you that right now.

• 7:10Speaker 04

  Right. And then the other person's crying.

• 7:11Alec Baldwin?

  Cut to the next scene. It's like, I love you, Mary. God damn it, I love you. You know? They play the same cadence and the same emotional register regardless of the scene.

• 7:19Speaker 04

  Right. Was she a yeller too?

• 7:21Alec Baldwin?

  Mira?

• 7:21Speaker 04

  Yeah. That's interesting because a lot of the Russians, I mean, where Strasberg and Stella yelled a lot too, right? And where they got it from was, was this student of Stanislavski's named Maria Ospinskaya.

• 7:31Alec Baldwin?

  Of course.

• 7:31Speaker 04

  Who's also a very famous, you know, film actor.

• 7:33Alec Baldwin?

  Who was in The Wolfman.

• 7:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, The Wolfman. Yes.

• 7:35Alec Baldwin?

  I know Maria Ospinskaya.

• 7:36Speaker 04

  You know, I just showed my kid The Wolfman. We're doing the Universal Horror片. And I was like, oh, my God, it's Maria Ospinskaya.

• 7:42Alec Baldwin?

  Maria Ospinskaya.

• 7:43Speaker 04

  And my, and then, you know, my kid looked at me and was like, who's that? Why do you care? And I had to explain.

• 7:47Alec Baldwin?

  She was Moscow Art Theater?

• 7:49Speaker 04

  Moscow Art Theater, yeah. And then the first studio. And then, you know, she was, when the Moscow Art Theater came to the United States in the 20s, there was a group of them who had to stay behind. They were fired from the company and exiled from the Soviet, or from Russia, you know, because the political winds were changing and she was one of them. And she and another exile, this guy, Richard Boloslawski, who, for any actors who are listening, is the guy who wrote Acting, The First Six Lessons, the very first book in English about Stanislavski technique. Love it. And he also directed Ospinskaya later in a movie. But Richard Boloslawski and Maria Ospinskaya were the two fundamental teachers at the school, the American Laboratory Theater.

• 8:25Alec Baldwin?

  Where was that?

• 8:26Speaker 04

  It had a number of different locations. It moved all around because it was here in New York. And it was this model that's actually sort of the conservatory model now, but not exactly where, you know, you, you studied very hard for like two years and then you joined, the best of them joined the rep company that was associated with the school. And so they were sort of running all of those, those different things. And You know, Harold Clerman studied there, Lee Strasberg studied there, Stella Adler studied there, you know, a lot of the key 20th century theater makers studied there. Ospina Skaya was a notorious dragon in scene study class. She, among other things, she was an alcoholic. And so she would have a bottle of what she claimed was cough medicine. It was gin. And she would drink-

• 9:09Alec Baldwin?

  That is cough medicine, don't you know that?

• 9:11Speaker 04

  But she would drink, you know, table switch would be like, oh, my cough is worse. I need that. And then eventually she subbed it out with a pitcher of water that was actually gin and would just, you know-

• 9:19Alec Baldwin?

  I like a little vermouth with my cough syrup.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly. And so, I mean, she would just devastatingly destroy people if she thought they were being lazy. I think like any art, and acting is of course an art as well as a craft and a job and all sorts of other things. There's a kind of osmosis of the world around you that you engage in. You know, like when I am writing a book, there's often like three albums of music I listen to while writing it. And even if they're not-

• 9:43Alec Baldwin?

  Can you share what they are? You'd rather not.

• 9:45Speaker 04

  A lot of the method was written to this piece of music called Canto Ostinato, which is a piece of music that it's a little difficult to explain. It's sort of a minimalist piece of music. It's about 45 minutes long. And there's a particular version on Spotify that's all cellos doing it. And so there was that. I listen to that a lot. I have a playlist. Whenever I'm on deadline, I have a playlist of the most kind of loud, percussive guitar solo heavy songs by the band Yola Tango, who are my favorite band. And so I'd listen to that and just words come flying out.

• 10:17Alec Baldwin?

  I thought you'd say it.

• 10:18Speaker 04

  And-

• 10:19Alec Baldwin?

  Not that I'm predicting Adagio for strings-

• 10:21Speaker 04

  Right, right, right, right.

• 10:22Alec Baldwin?

  But I'm predicting-

• 10:23Speaker 04

  And then there's a jazz composer who I've worked with a couple of times named Darcy James Argu, who's a very close friend whose work I love. And so I usually have one of his albums on the-

• 10:30Alec Baldwin?

  This is the stuff that carries you over the threshold.

• 10:32Speaker 04

  And part of it is just, I've written to this stuff so much, there's like a sense memory almost, you know, of like, now it's time to write. You know, it's like it just does something to my subconscious and then away we go. But, you know, if I was writing something sad, I might listen to sad music. You know, I've definitely had those like, oh, this scene has this certain emotional feeling. I'm going to listen to music that has that emotional feeling. Not words. Can never have words if you're writing, for me anyway.

• 10:56Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah, for me in acting, I play- The audio clips only of movies that make me sad.

• 11:00Speaker 04

  Oh, really?

• 11:01Alec Baldwin?

  So if there's a scene that breaks my heart, I'll play that scene in my ear.

• 11:05Speaker 04

  I knew, I interviewed one actor who told me to prep for a scene. He would watch, cause it had a similar emotionality. Totally different scene. He wasn't trying to copy what De Niro did, but it was just this, that, that feeling of total devastation. The scene where De Niro was punching the wall of the jail cell in Raging Bull, and he would just watch that.

• 11:21Alec Baldwin?

  I've got a, I've got a, not a vast, but a limited library of those scenes that I watched that trigger a certain emotion in me.

• 11:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:27Alec Baldwin?

  So like if you, like if you say the De Niro thing, it's like Brando, you know. Don't leave him lying here. I'm gonna take it out on their skulls.

• 11:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:35Alec Baldwin?

  We don't leave him here like this, Edie, when he finds Stiger's body who betrayed him.

• 11:39Speaker 04

  Right.

• 11:39Alec Baldwin?

  But I mean, that makes me cry even now, but his brother betrayed him, but he's still, it's his brother.

• 11:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:45Alec Baldwin?

  And he plays that like he just, an inescapable thing.

• 11:47Speaker 04

  You know what line, and I'm not an actor anymore, but the line that, that always like when I just even think about it, I start to get worked up is when Hamlet says, I loved Ophelia, forty thousand brothers, that line about like forty thousand brothers could not, with all their love, make up my sum or something like that. And there's just something so, first of all, it's a shitty thing to say to a guy whose sister has just died, but it's also so emotionally overpowering that if I think about it long enough, it'll trigger a similar thing for me.

• 12:12Alec Baldwin?

  The littlest things.

• 12:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:13Alec Baldwin?

  You, you, when you realize how deeply, deeply individualized this is and subjective and personal. I'll never forget when Jamie Sheridan, the great actor, he, he played Fortenbras. In the production that Pap did of Hamlet, where.

• 12:29Speaker 04

  Is that the Diane Vannora one?

• 12:31Alec Baldwin?

  Thank you. This is really a treat. We're gonna come back and do two episodes. No, seriously, because, because Diane Vannora plays the first female Hamlet. Joe puts her on.

• 12:39Speaker 04

  I wish I had been, I wish I had seen it.

• 12:40Alec Baldwin?

  I saw it. She was magical.

• 12:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:42Alec Baldwin?

  She was absolutely wonderful. She was, the fact that she didn't go on from Bird and have a great, she played his wife, right? With Forest Whitaker.

• 12:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:49Alec Baldwin?

  Now, she does this, and, and, and when everybody's dead at the end and she comes on, and Jamie Sheridan plays Fortenbras and comes in. And just the honor in his voice of a dead soldier, from soldier to soldier. He comes from the battle, he comes in, he goes, oh, proud death. And he's kind of eulogizing in his ordinary statement of this guy. And I started sobbing when he said this. And whenever I think about it, like, it could have pushed me over the edge because it was so rich in that. There was a context. I got it.

• 13:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, one of the weird things, and people said this happened at the Actors Studio. Maybe you witnessed it as well, that there could be a certain fetishization of crying, right? It's like you just, the actors just really wanted to cry. And it, and I think that's really fascinating because, first of all, it is totally possible to be filled with devastating sadness and not cry. There are all sorts of people who don't cry that much, right?

• 13:32Alec Baldwin?

  Try not to cry.

• 13:33Speaker 04

  Or try not to cry is always more interesting than crying on camera or on stage, right?

• 13:37Alec Baldwin?

  It's worth the take.

• 13:38Speaker 04

  It's the playing against, right? And then the other thing is that there are all sorts of things that we respond to with tears that aren't necessarily sad, because again, emotion is so individuated. And I think part of what Strasberg, the thing that Strasberg was getting at that I think is really key and why it was so revolutionary, you know, that is the idea that each person responds differently to everything. And so if you want to be not cliched, you need to harness what's individual about you and, and figure out a way to put it into the character. Because the way that, you know, Alec Baldwin tries not to cry and then cries is different from the way that I would.

• 14:15Alec Baldwin?

  What's one thing you thought about, I mean, because you were acting? And you talk about, first of all, talk about that when you go back into your college dormitory room and have a mini nervous breakdown after some of the work you did.

• 14:25Speaker 04

  Oh, my God, that was, that was the experience that, that, it didn't put me off acting in terms of my interest in acting, but it made me realize I was not actually tough enough to be an actor. And I think we think a lot of times of actors as not particularly tough people. But there's a unique toughness that being an artist requires, and there's a unique toughness that being an actor requires, which has to do with being vulnerable and then not vulnerable. You know, you have to open yourself up to the world and you have to be able to shut it out. You have to be able to get up in front of people and audition and, you know, deal with that rejection and humiliation over and over again. And you also have to be able to do this thing where particularly if you're going in a kind of methody Stanislavski direction, you know, you are plumbing often in a play, if it's a deep play, a serious play, into the shit. And you have to be able to get out of it.

• 15:10Speaker 04

  You have to be able to turn it off. You have to be able to walk away with it. And this is a example of when I couldn't really do that. I, it was my freshman year of college. I had had a couple of years of kind of Stanislavski-ish education at like a acting conservatory run by a local theater in DC. And I had been a professional actor as a kid. So, you know, I thought I was gonna do that.

• 15:30Alec Baldwin?

  What'd you do as a kid?

• 15:32Speaker 04

  I was, I did voiceover for an industrial or two. I was in a couple of musicals and a play and stuff like that. I was in the musical Falsettos, playing Jason, the 12-year-old boy, if you know that show. I was in a musical about the AIDS quilt that then performed at like the Smithsonian. Do you remember when the AIDS quilt came to DC?

• 15:48Alec Baldwin?

  Yes, vaguely.

• 15:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, so we performed as part of that. And we were also at the University of Maryland. And it was a life-changing experience, among other things. It is what politicized me. I mean, growing up in DC, you're always politicized anyway.

• 16:00Alec Baldwin?

  We're gonna get to angels in a minute.

• 16:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, but in this case, it was, you know, working in the theater and knowing gays and lesbians, knowing people with AIDS, you know, who are my friends.

• 16:09Alec Baldwin?

  A lot of colleagues.

• 16:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:11Alec Baldwin?

  Me too.

• 16:11Speaker 04

  And, and...

• 16:12Alec Baldwin?

  Started in the business in the 80s. It was all just roiling then.

• 16:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. That was really life-changing. I started going to protests. I started really caring, you know, about something. And so, anyway, when we get to college, I was at Vassar. I was, you know, a month into school or whatever, and I got cast as the lead in Eric Boghossian's Talk Radio. And for anyone listening to this who doesn't know Talk Radio, the play, the movie's actually kind of wonderful. It's very hypnotic. I forgot that you're in the movie. That's so funny.

• 16:40Alec Baldwin?

  Is that a sign of my age?

• 16:42Speaker 04

  No, I just think of it as just, as just Eric Boghossian, and you sort of forget.

• 16:46Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah, I play the station manager or whatever.

• 16:48Speaker 04

  Stu or, no, no, you're the station manager, right, right.

• 16:50Alec Baldwin?

  Obviously not memorable, but go ahead.

• 16:51Speaker 04

  It's been a while since I've seen it, because I have a traumatic relationship to this material. So I haven't seen the movie in a while. And so, for those of you who don't know the play, if you're playing the Eric Boghossian part in Talk Radio, you are onstage, chain-smoking for 90 minutes, and then you have a three-page-long nervous breakdown. That's the arc of the character, right? And so, it was two student directors, bless their souls, didn't know what they were doing. And so, I just went really, I used everything I knew about how to go deep into the self. Right, which was not enough to be able to control what I was messing with. I was messing with dark forces. That, you know, like a, like a, like a apprentice wizard. Do you know what I mean? It's like, you know, Mickey causing all the brooms.

• 17:30Alec Baldwin?

  With the wand and that.

• 17:31Speaker 04

  And the brooms are just all my self hatred. And on top of that, I'm literally chain smoking during the play. And I was a half a pack a day smoker at the time. I've been, I've quit for over 20 years now. But I was smoking like a pack and a half of cigarettes on stage. So I was making myself physically and mentally ill. On stage at the same time, every night. And, you know, like, the performance would end and, you know, there was this girl I had a crush on. And I made sure she came and saw the show. And the only thing she said to me afterwards was, I'm worried about you. Right? And I would just go home and I smelled terrible and I hated myself because the character hates himself. That's the core of that character. And I would literally stare at the painted white, or probably beige,

• 18:10Speaker 04

  cinter block wall of my seven by 10 dorm room. And I would just fucking stare at that wall until I could feel myself come back together. Like I had obliterated myself and I had to come back together. And one week of that was enough for me. I was like, I can't believe anyone does this all the time. For a living. Now, the truth of the matter is, you actually get a lot of training and you learn how to do that without destroying yourself. Or you don't and you develop a drinking problem. And uh,

• 18:33Alec Baldwin?

  It's called acting, as Olivier says.

• 18:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. And so I was like, you know what? I, I can't do this. And then I realized that I really like telling people what to do. And I knew a lot about theater and so I should try directing. And so I called my parents to tell them this. Hey, I don't think I'm an actor anymore. I think I'm a director. And it was exactly like, a coming out scene from like a early 90s play. Do you know what I mean? They were like, well, do you think this is just a phase? And I was like, no, I think this is for keeps. You know, they were like, well, you know, you might go back to it sometimes. Like, I don't know. You know, it was exactly like that. And then I,

• 19:05Alec Baldwin?

  Why do you think they were disappointed somewhat of you giving up acting?

• 19:08Speaker 04

  Well, they had been so supportive of acting.

• 19:10Alec Baldwin?

  But you'd done it for a while.

• 19:11Speaker 04

  I'd done it for a while and it really saved my life. I was in a really bad place when I got cast in that play as a 12 year old. I was, I was bullied a lot as a kid. It wasn't physical, but it was very, you know, that's where all those brooms came from that I, you know, Mickey style called up. I was bullied a lot as a kid and I, I just, you know, and theater had really saved my life. And so I think they were worried that I was too casually throwing away.

• 19:31Alec Baldwin?

  Do you have any siblings?

• 19:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, I have three siblings. I have three siblings.

• 19:33Alec Baldwin?

  But who?

• 19:35Speaker 04

  I have an older brother, an older sister and a younger brother. My older two siblings both went to boarding school. So they were kind of out of the house by the time I was, you know, 10 or whatever.

• 19:43Alec Baldwin?

  They were smoking a pack and half a day in their bedroom too.

• 19:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. And then.

• 19:48Alec Baldwin?

  Are they in the business and maybe in entertainment?

• 19:50Speaker 04

  No, no, no, not at all. Academia? No, my younger brother, well, my younger brother's like, works for a nonprofit now, doing library stuff and educational stuff for kids. And so I.

• 20:01Alec Baldwin?

  You told him you want to go to directing?

• 20:03Speaker 04

  I told him I wanted to go in directing and I just started doing it all the time. I became like a directing monster and I loved it. I absolutely loved it. And also I felt like I could help actors, having gone through that experience and having had some training. You know, I could work with them in a way to try to bring out the best of them in a way that wasn't abusive, that was about creating a welcoming room.

• 20:22Alec Baldwin?

  So being a facilitator became more important to you?

• 20:24Speaker 04

  It did, yeah.

• 20:25Alec Baldwin?

  That was the opposite in the sense of I directed one film and it was, it was a horrible experience from a financial standpoint and from a business and production standpoint. What did you realize as a director that you liked about directing? Because I hated having to cajole other actors into doing what I wanted them to do.

• 20:41Speaker 04

  No, I will say that part of it eventually grew tiring. Do you know what I mean? But I loved the sense of community. I loved the sense of all of us.

• 20:48Alec Baldwin?

  In the theater, yes.

• 20:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I loved.

• 20:49Alec Baldwin?

  And in film, kind of, yeah.

• 20:50Speaker 04

  And I loved the thing, the thing I miss, because there's, there's things about directing I don't miss, right? The thing I miss, having to tricks other people out of money and 12 people into coming into a room so that I can practice my art. You know, now all I need is a pen and a piece of paper and I'm practicing my art. You know, like that was, that was the grind, the professional grind is the part that really wore me down. But to me, the pleasure of like everyone thinking together in a room and solving these problems in real time, in physical space, in community together, was so beautiful when it worked. It doesn't always work, but it was so beautiful when you got there that it was worth the times where it was like, oh, this one actor is actually, I didn't realize it, but they're drunk.

• 21:33Speaker 04

  You know, and they're calling me at three in the morning because they drink two bottles of wine when they come home from rehearsal and they have lots of notes. You know, it's like. It was, you know, that happened to me once. It was, it was worth putting up with that to get to this other thing. And that was really beautiful. And I loved working with writers on their plays. This is before I realized I was a writer. I loved giving, you know, giving notes and hearing their notes to me and having them in the room. And it's just kind of, you know, idea of a community of people making each other's ideas better.

• 22:03Alec Baldwin?

  Author Isaac Butler. If you enjoy conversations about acting and the performing arts, check out my episode with Ellen Burstyn and Estelle Parsons, celebrating the 75th anniversary of The Actor's Studio.

• 22:18Speaker 05

  And I say to Peter, the director, Peter, I have eight different things to go through here in no line. And he smiles like the Cheshire Cat and says, I know. I said, well, how am I supposed to do that? He said, think the thoughts of the character and the camera will read your mind. That's the best advice any director ever gave me.

• 22:47Alec Baldwin?

  To hear more of my conversation with Ellen Burstyn and Estelle Parsons, go to here'sthething.org. After the break, Isaac Butler talks about acting training today and his conversation with Ellen Burstyn on Young Actors.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by rising star Sienna Spiral. What is so fascinating to you about impermanence?

• 23:36Speaker 06

  Everything about us, everything we do is, is temporary. And I just got terrified of that. You know, what we do with our time and how I feel like the way the world is today and how fast paced it is and how much we don't even acknowledge anything. How I felt temporary to the people around me and how that made me scared and how much I wanted to last and make an impact on people and I guess to change the way I looked at things and to change myself and to change how I guess I approached everything in my life. It's important that things are impermanent because nothing would feel special and enjoying, you know, learning to love with knowing it's not gonna last.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 24:19Speaker 00

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• 25:03Speaker 00

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• 25:15Speaker 07

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• 25:51Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin, and this is Here's the Thing. Isaac Butler has directed numerous productions throughout his theater career, including classic Shakespeare performances and new original works such as Real Enemies and The Trump Card. I wanted to know what pieces Isaac Butler had most enjoyed directing and what he would like to direct in the future.

• 26:14Speaker 04

  I don't know, they're probably not plays that anyone will have heard of because they were in, you know, they were off Broadway, they were in basements. Now, I think if I was to direct again, it's actually, you know, classics I would want to do, or lost backlist plays or whatever. I mean, you know, I teach Shakespeare, I love Shakespeare, I'd love to take another crack at Shakespeare, I haven't done that, I haven't directed a Shakespeare play since college, you know, there's-

• 26:35Alec Baldwin?

  Williams, O'Neill, Shaw-

• 26:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I love, I love all that stuff. Shaw, Shaw is very hard, I do not actually feel like I have the background to do Shaw. But I love all of that stuff, you know, there's a lot of, this last semester I taught new American plays of the 21st century, so it was only plays that had been done since the change of the millennium. At NYU, it was a dramatic literature class before Tisch Kids, right? And it was really fun to revisit those, and there were some of them where I was like, I would, I would love to take a crack at this play, and then there were others where I was like, this play's too hard, I don't even know how they did it. What I especially loved, actually, was when you were doing the second production of a new play, you know, like you had worked on it in a workshop or whatever, and you had learned all this stuff about it, and then you actually got to use what you learned-

• 27:20Alec Baldwin?

  You walked away and came back.

• 27:21Speaker 04

  You know, which doesn't necessarily happen if you direct, you know, if you direct a View from the Bridge or whatever, it's like, who knows when you're gonna-

• 27:26Alec Baldwin?

  Pacino told me when I interviewed him about him doing repeated productions of Salome-

• 27:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:31Alec Baldwin?

  And The Mamet, American Buffalo. Speaking of which, I'm wondering, because I know that Glenn Gary's on Broadway right now, what do you think of Mamet and his very arch, very mamet, I watched an interview with him the other day-

• 27:42Speaker 04

  Oh, really?

• 27:43Alec Baldwin?

  And he was talking to somebody, he says, you know, when someone comes in there, you know, I mean, he didn't say this, but it was along the lines of, you know, the guy comes in and he's, your friend Jeff's got a cast on, and he says, oh my god, what happened? Well, you need to prepare for that.

• 27:56Speaker 04

  Right.

• 27:56Alec Baldwin?

  What he's not understanding is you don't have to prepare for it, for a lot of it. But there are things you do have to prepare for, much of which contextually is not in Mamet's pieces.

• 28:04Speaker 04

  Right.

• 28:04Alec Baldwin?

  People aren't going through any cathartic emotional experiences Mamet's pieces, or it's cut. What's that film, Mantegna and his ex-wife, Lindsay Kraus?

• 28:12Speaker 04

  Oh, House of Games.

• 28:13Alec Baldwin?

  So, House of Games, when I see that movie, even then, I thought to myself, well, this is obviously a kind of an experiment in theater. I mean, you're having everybody flatten out all those lines. No, Bob, no, I won't do that.

• 28:25Speaker 04

  Right.

• 28:26Alec Baldwin?

  I won't do that because, and the cadence and the rhythms of it are something that is so arch.

• 28:30Speaker 04

  But if you watch like State and Main, which has, you know, you're in it, Philip Seymour Hoffman's in it, W.H. Macy is in it, you know, there's actors who have a lot of experience, who work at a very high level, and they can really playfully bring those lines to life in a way that not every actor can using the True and False, that's the name of his acting book, using that sort of true and false methodology. It is also true that, like you said, it's like, you know, his language, his dialogue is incredibly stripped away. It's very, you know, not only is everything you need in it, but he hasn't given you anything else.

• 29:05Alec Baldwin?

  No.

• 29:05Speaker 04

  Do you know what I mean?

• 29:05Alec Baldwin?

  Bob enters, Bob, what time is it?

• 29:08Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 29:08Alec Baldwin?

  There's no Bob, wearing a beautiful cream-colored suede jacket, none of that shit.

• 29:12Speaker 04

  Or what, you mentioned Shaw, you know, Shaw's stage directions are like seven pages long. It's like Bob was born on a cow farm, and you're like, what the? You know, O'Neill does that too.

• 29:22Alec Baldwin?

  Bob was lactose intolerant, oddly enough.

• 29:24Speaker 04

  Exactly, yeah. Kenny Lonergan does that too, his stage directions are very novelistic, you know.

• 29:29Alec Baldwin?

  Not bad, but it's not really very useful.

• 29:30Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, I mean, it depends, right? I mean, I think they're useful for him in creating the characters. I think that if you try to do a lot of, you know, frooferall, or whatever you want to say, with Mamet's lines, it's going to be a disaster. It makes sense why he doesn't like that stuff, do you know what I mean? But if you try to do the incredibly stripped away Mamet-y way of doing Kenny Lonergan, or Shakespeare, or whatever, that's also going to be a disaster.

• 29:53Alec Baldwin?

  You're right, it would apply, obviously, to his text, because I think that, you know, actors can bring, in my time of doing this, they can bring ideas, and you have to just understand how much you're Ideas welcome. Like if I were ever to work for Spielberg, let's say, it's a salute and yes, sir and no, sir. Cause I'm very confident. I'm supremely confident. He knows exactly what he wants. But what I also do with people is I don't tell, I don't talk. I say, let me show you.

• 30:17Speaker 04

  Right.

• 30:17Alec Baldwin?

  Show, not tell. I'm gonna go out and we got everything as written? You, you happy? You got what you want? Let's just do one more take and I'll show you a little idea I had. Nothing that changes the sets or the, the budget or so forth of the casting. It's all inside the template. But I, I really, really have become more subtle, but, but more and more management and like collaborating with them. Because I think that a lot of younger directors today, it's not so much that they don't know what good acting is. Not that they don't know what they want. The thing they're lacking, this is gonna sound strange maybe, is they lack the ability to communicate it to you.

• 30:51Speaker 04

  Right.

• 30:51Alec Baldwin?

  They kinda know what they want. They kinda have an idea what they want. They can't get it out to you and make you understand that a way that's practical to you to speak. Actor, which I hate that idea. I said to this one director, I go, tell me the story of your movie. Tell it to me as a story. What happens? There's the longest pause you could ever imagine. He goes, oh, wow, man. He goes, I don't think I could do that.

• 31:10Speaker 04

  That's wild.

• 31:11Alec Baldwin?

  We're fucked.

• 31:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. You know, there's, it's an interesting, I A D'd for a director once and you know, the, he didn't really do table work. You know, they weren't sitting all around. People weren't sitting around making little back slashes in their script for the beat marks or, you know, he just, he didn't wanna be intellectual about it. Right? And part of what you're talking about here is that you wanna avoid over intellectualizing your choices. You don't wanna get into a long, wordy intellectual conversation with a director. Yeah, but also you wanna.

• 31:35Alec Baldwin?

  That day's work and get it done.

• 31:36Speaker 04

  But it's, it's, it's so much easier actually to show the director than it is for you to get into an abstract conversation about, well, what if what he really wants here is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? When actually what you're gonna do is emphasize a different word. Just emphasize a different word, you know? And what he did instead of table work was he was like, I just want us to go around and say beat by beat what happens in the play. No, no feelings, right? Like, never say, "He feels blah, blah, blah." Just what does each person do?

• 32:00Alec Baldwin?

  Great.

• 32:00Speaker 04

  And that was all the book work we did.

• 32:01Alec Baldwin?

  I love that.

• 32:02Speaker 04

  But you know what? It was really hard to just do that. You get so wrapped up in "he feels X."

• 32:05Alec Baldwin?

  I did the Carol Churchill play, "Sirius Money."

• 32:09Speaker 04

  Love, love that play. Someone's gotta do that play again. It's so expensive, though.

• 32:13Alec Baldwin?

  1988, and we did, we did "The American Company," and they'd come here to the public with Gary Oldman and Fred Molina to play the two lead roles. So I replaced Gary, and we go to Broadway. This is when Pap, Joe Pap, was in that mood he had periodically to force feed

• 32:25Speaker 04

  Right.

• 32:26Alec Baldwin?

  Certain cultural...

• 32:27Speaker 04

  Was that Max Stafford Clark directing?

• 32:28Alec Baldwin?

  Bravo, thank you.

• 32:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:30Alec Baldwin?

  So Max Stafford Clark, who says to me one time, he, he, he says to all of us at the table, Kate Nelligan and all these other people, and he says, he says, "I want you to write down, along the margins of your scripts, a transitive verb for what you're trying to do in that scene." And then, he sat with us all, one by one, and he sat there with me, and he goes, "Now, this line here, what do you think you're trying to do there?" And I go, "I don't know, encourage?" He goes, "No." I go, "Seduce?" "No." And finally, he goes, and he goes, "I've got it. Enlist. You're trying to enlist them into your cause." And I go, "That's great. Enlist, I write." I made to do that for every line in the play.

• 33:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, he called that actioning, and that is Stanislavski script analysis. That's a very basic thing. Stella Adler taught her students to do that. You do it as an infinitive verb with Stella, but that was a very Stanislavski script analysis thing, that like, every line has an action behind it, and that's the thing you're trying to do. And so, write it down as, you know, "to enlist."

• 33:25Alec Baldwin?

  To enlist.

• 33:25Speaker 04

  And then try to keep those, you know, those words be really specific and keep the stakes high.

• 33:30Alec Baldwin?

  He was a great director. So, as you, as you come into this business, as actors come into this business, and writers, and directors, and everybody, having consumed a diet of other material. I watched films as a child. I was obsessed with films. There was no cable back then, no streaming. Nowadays, what people have out there to... Bathe in to lather their body with and to try to get some essence of what movies are in acting is just abysmal. I call it the training table of donuts.

• 33:55Speaker 04

  Well, it's interesting that you say that because, you know, I do often use the food metaphor when talking about one's cultural diet, right? And then it's like, you know, I like donuts. There's nothing wrong with having a donut.

• 34:05Alec Baldwin?

  I like potato chips.

• 34:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, but a diet that was all donuts, I think we would all agree is unhealthy.

• 34:09Alec Baldwin?

  The studios are in the potato chip business right now.

• 34:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of kind of flooding the zone with hastily made.

• 34:16Alec Baldwin?

  Violence.

• 34:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, violent. The acting is often very kind of surfacey, you know?

• 34:22Alec Baldwin?

  There's nothing required of them.

• 34:23Speaker 04

  There's nothing required of them. I remember, who was I talking to? It may have actually been Ellen Burstyn and I were talking at one point. She was talking about how little training a lot of the people she, you know, the younger actors she was working with have. And she's like, you know, it's enough to get you a Netflix show, but it's not enough to make you a good actor, was I think the way that she phrased it.

• 34:39Alec Baldwin?

  People today don't care about being a good actor.

• 34:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, no, I mean.

• 34:42Alec Baldwin?

  That's precious to them.

• 34:43Speaker 04

  Some, some people do. And I think those people who really care, I think that that they're.

• 34:47Alec Baldwin?

  But less than before.

• 34:48Speaker 04

  Totally, totally. But like, you know, my students, anytime I mentioned a movie this, I had a really great group of students this semester. They blew my mind with how amazing they were.

• 34:56Alec Baldwin?

  This was at New School?

• 34:57Speaker 04

  At NYU, at Tisch.

• 34:58Alec Baldwin?

  Oh, you're, oh, you're at Tisch now?

• 34:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:59Alec Baldwin?

  Are you really?

• 35:00Speaker 04

  I'm in the dramatic studies department. So it's like the liberal arts part of the theater degree.

• 35:03Alec Baldwin?

  For undergrads or for?

• 35:04Speaker 04

  For undergrads.

• 35:05Alec Baldwin?

  Oh, wow. I didn't know that.

• 35:05Speaker 04

  For the, for the, for the BFA program.

• 35:06Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah, in your biography, you mentioned New School.

• 35:08Speaker 04

  That's because when the book was published, I was at the New School.

• 35:10Alec Baldwin?

  You started just recently then at NYU?

• 35:12Speaker 04

  Like a couple of years ago. Yeah, yeah. And so they, you know, anytime, not just me, but anyone in class mentioned a movie that they hadn't heard of, they wrote it down. I saw them do it.

• 35:21Alec Baldwin?

  Paths of Glory, write it down.

• 35:22Speaker 04

  Paths of Glory is an incredible movie. We could turn this into the Paths of Glory podcast.

• 35:26Alec Baldwin?

  I got a list for your class. I'll come visit your class.

• 35:28Speaker 04

  Please do.

• 35:28Alec Baldwin?

  Oh, I'd love to tell them my view of movies they should watch to improve their acting.

• 35:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. And so, you know, I do think there are people who are hungry for that. Just like I think that like when you eat only junk food for like, it's fun for a while, but you do get to a point where you're like, am I poisoning myself?

• 35:42Alec Baldwin?

  Or this is wrong. But I think the business itself is not encouraging people to appreciate a hist- film, acting and so forth, and film in general, from an historical perspective. You go out there now, there are films now that win the Oscar, you would never watch a second time.

• 35:57Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, that's true.

• 35:58Alec Baldwin?

  Never, never.

• 35:59Speaker 04

  I mean, I am such a big fan of the Criterion Channel that I just started pitching them until they let me do things with them.

• 36:04Alec Baldwin?

  I'm gonna send you my Criterion list.

• 36:05Speaker 04

  Oh, great.

• 36:05Alec Baldwin?

  I did my Criterion list of 10 movies.

• 36:07Speaker 04

  That's great. I'm actually doing an event with them tonight where I'm the interviewer. So the-

• 36:11Alec Baldwin?

  Who are you interviewing?

• 36:11Speaker 04

  Brian Cox.

• 36:12Alec Baldwin?

  No!

• 36:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's gonna be-

• 36:13Alec Baldwin?

  I worked with Cox.

• 36:14Speaker 04

  Really?

• 36:14Alec Baldwin?

  I said hello. The Nuremberg Trials for TNT.

• 36:17Speaker 04

  Yes, he talks about it in his memoir.

• 36:18Alec Baldwin?

  And he plays Goebbels.

• 36:19Speaker 04

  Yes, he plays Goebbels and you were the prosecutor, right?

• 36:22Alec Baldwin?

  I was Jackson, the judge who was sent by Roosevelt to go over there and inform the Nurem-

• 36:26Speaker 04

  Right, right. Amazing. Yeah, he talks about that in his-

• 36:29Alec Baldwin?

  He does.

• 36:29Speaker 04

  -memoir in finding that role and, you know, how was it that Goering was able to sort of tap dance around the people asking him questions and, you know, so how to get into the psychology of that person without judgment, because you have to bring them to life.

• 36:41Alec Baldwin?

  And of course, you see guys like them score late in their career. He did that succession thing and I gasped. I thought, look at him, doing this TV show. And just running the ball all the way 100 yards down the sideline with that. I mean, he was really, really, took a lot of chances and he was great in that show.

• 36:55Speaker 04

  I mean, there's decades of history, right? Decades of roles in that role. In getting to Logan, you know, in getting to Logan Roy.

• 37:02Alec Baldwin?

  And how are you gonna play those roles if you're not playing the roles for decades?

• 37:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:06Alec Baldwin?

  I always say to people, I say, just give yourself a couple of years in the theater when you graduate.

• 37:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 37:11Alec Baldwin?

  Because if you graduate from college and you have a degree granting program from a university, I'm not so sure that the acting part of that is that pungent and that good. If you want to go to class and work in the classroom for another year or two, great. But after two years of classroom acting, you're gonna become a classroom actor. Get the fuck out of there and go and audition for shows and-

• 37:28Speaker 04

  You know-

• 37:29Alec Baldwin?

  Be in a show.

• 37:29Speaker 04

  Bobby Lewis was very worried about that with regards to the Actors Studio. You know, he felt like there were a lot of people-

• 37:36Alec Baldwin?

  With good reason.

• 37:36Speaker 04

  With good reason, yeah. You know, Bobby Lewis, who was one of the founders of the Actors Studio, and then he and Kazan got into a... Kazan, he and Kazan had a falling out as Kazan was wanted to do with various people, and he quit the Actors Studio, and that's actually why Kazan brought Lee Strasberg in. Because Kazan had originally iced Lee Strasberg out of the studio and did not want him involved because he had so... They had sort of a father-son drama relation, kind of very dramatic relationship. And so that's how he brought Lee in and how Lee wound up taking over the Actors Studio. So, a few years after that, almost a decade, Lewis gives this series of lectures called Method or Madness, which are collected in a book that isn't... It's out of print, but it is one of the most extraordinary books about acting. And in the Method or Madness lectures, Bobby Lewis says, "The problem with acting class",

• 38:20Speaker 04

  and he says this as an acting teacher, "is that you get stuck in classroom acting. You only know how to do scene study. You don't know how to do..." You know, you only know how to do the big moments, but actually like 75% of the actor's job is like, how do you pour a pitcher of a glass of water out of a pitcher? How do you do nothing? How do you do nothing and be comfortable with that? Listen. Right. It's like, you know, there's that all sort of running joke within the industry that we all know of the background actor who does too much because they know they're being observed by the camera. It's like, I can't do it because background actors can't talk. They're not allowed to, but they're making lots of faces. They're pointing there. Yeah. I mean, there's an amazing Saturday Night Live sketch about that with, I think, Fred Armisen and Sheri O'Terry. And, you know, it's that thing of like, how do you actually

• 39:00Speaker 04

  just be when you know you're being observed so simply? And Strasberg actually had a lot of exercises for that private moment. I'm sure you've had to do a private moment in your time or song and dance and stuff like that. Yeah. And how do you, and those were all designed to make you forget that the audience was there, right? But then you get to scene study and you're just doing the huge moments. You never loved me, Mom, right? As opposed to the like, oh, your arm's broken.

• 39:28Alec Baldwin?

  Author Isaac Butler. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend. And be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeart Radio app, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Isaac Butler talks about the original disciples of method acting and his thoughts on actors like Marlon Brando and Al Pacino.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by rising star Sienna Spiral. What is so fascinating to you about impermanence?

• 40:21Speaker 06

  Everything about us, everything we do is temporary. And I just got terrified of that. You know, what we do with our time and how I feel like the way the world is today and how fast paced it is and how much we don't even acknowledge anything around us. How I felt temporary to the people around me and how that made me scared and how much I wanted to last and make an impact on people. And I guess to change the way I looked at things and to change myself and to change how I guess I approached everything in my life. It's important that things are impermanent because nothing would feel special. And enjoying, you know, learning to love with knowing it's not going to last.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Experience before the moment. A Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 41:04Speaker 00

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• 41:48Speaker 00

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• 42:00Speaker 08

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• 42:35Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin, and this is Here's the Thing. Isaac Butler's book, The Method, chronicles the history of Stanislavski's method of acting. The book details acting coaches such as Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg, who refashioned Stanislavski's method for the next generation of actors. Both Stanislavski and Strasberg would often say that the actor can only be 90% of the character. I was curious as to whether or not Isaac Butler agrees with this statement.

• 43:09Speaker 04

  It's actually impossible to fully become the character. That's madness. I mean, if you were to fully become Hamlet before me right now, well, for one thing, you wouldn't be speaking in iambic pentameter. That doesn't make any sense because no one speaks in iambic pentameter. But also, instead of being able to cross the stage or whatever, you'd just be like, "Holy shit, my uncle killed my father. What am I supposed to do?"

• 43:28Alec Baldwin?

  And marry my mother.

• 43:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. You wouldn't be like, "Oh, that this too-too solid flesh would melt thawed resolve itself into a dew." You know, you wouldn't be doing that shit. You'd be like, comatose. So, fully becoming the character is a form of madness. Only, you know, that it's not actually possible. Stanislavski's whole idea, this idea of what is translated as experiencing, the Russian word is perеживаня, this thing where it's like the actor's consciousness and the character's consciousness meet, and they sort of have a baby. Do you know what I mean? And that's what you're doing. You're really in the moment. You're feeling these things. You're alive to the imaginative reality, but you're also not going to walk off the lip of the stage and fall into the orchestra pit or whatever.

• 44:07Alec Baldwin?

  You're gonna try to fly.

• 44:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also, you're gonna do the blocking you've been told to do, you know, because you've agreed to do the blocking.

• 44:13Alec Baldwin?

  And also, so much of what you're doing is almost all, with few exceptions. I mean, even monologues have some context this way with inside the play. You're performing with other people. You're onstage with other people. And when you do that, what I always try to do, not even recently, not from the beginning, but as I was going further and further, is what was the disposition of the character?

• 44:33Speaker 04

  Right.

• 44:34Alec Baldwin?

  And I always talk to people about dispositional acting. When you, are you weak? Are you strong? Are you boo-radly, where everything terrifies you and you're frail and fragile in the world? And you're not brave and confident? Are you boisterous? Are you affable and backslapping? What is the nature of that person in terms of how they talk, how they behave? Are they happy, sad? Are they strong, weak, whatever? You gotta kind of get that adjusted, I think, from in the beginning. The word we use is authorization.

• 44:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:00Alec Baldwin?

  That I do. I need authorization. If I go to see a surgeon, I watched hours of surgery before I did the movie Malice. Why? Not to study surgery, but the point was, what was the disposition of these men? Did they really yell at nurses? Did they really throw the instruments on the ground? Did they really play AC/DC at 7 o'clock in the morning? Yes, they did. They had to go into another zone. To empty their minds, then get in there and do septuple bypasses. That's I can barely watch the Today Show at seven thirty in the morning, let alone do fucking septuple bypass surgery.

• 45:27Speaker 04

  You know, that's interesting. There's this play called Men in White, which births the hospital drama genre. Right. It's where ER comes from, really, if you think about it. And the the group.

• 45:35Alec Baldwin?

  It's a comedy?

• 45:36Speaker 04

  No, no, no.

• 45:37Alec Baldwin?

  Oh, it's a legit play.

• 45:37Speaker 04

  It's a legit play. Won the Pulitzer Prize. It's the thing that put the group theater on the map. Lee Strasberg directed it.

• 45:42Alec Baldwin?

  Oh, wow.

• 45:42Speaker 04

  The group theater was, of course, the company that Lee Strasberg and Harold Clerman and and and Sheryl Crawford founded that all of 20th Century American acting comes out of this organization. You know, Stella's there, Bobby Lewis is there, Kazan is there, John Garfield's there. Anyway. So they did this play called Men in White, and they would do these summer retreats. Most of them were Jews. They were often in the Catskills. They would do these summer retreats where they're rehearsing these plays. Okay, so they rehearsed Men in White, and they kept doing it, and they were sort of like, you know, they they went and they met doctors and nurses, because there were doctors and nurses around this hotel, and they interviewed them, and they they looked at what they did. And Lee Strasberg said, we're gonna learn what doctors do. Let's learn what doctors do, and let's bring those habits into the play. And they were doing these run-throughs, and they're like, something is not working. And I think it was actually Lee who figured this out. He's like,

• 46:26Speaker 04

  doctors don't reveal this much emotion. Actors do. Like, doctors are actually very, you know, when they have a patient who's gonna die, that they're worried is gonna die. They're not like, oh, my God, he's gonna die. They're like, we're losing him. Bring me that IV.

• 46:41Alec Baldwin?

  Prep the other room.

• 46:42Speaker 04

  Prep the other room. Right? They're not. And that's actually a thing The Pit is really great at, if you've watched that TV show. That, you know, there's a level of, you can't get worked up about everything. You you're, this happens to you every day.

• 46:51Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah.

• 46:51Speaker 04

  You can't let this bother you.

• 46:52Alec Baldwin?

  You're the deck of the carrier.

• 46:54Speaker 04

  And so it was through that little bit of withholding, you know, pulling back five or 10% on the emotionality that allowed the play in its power to come to life. Because they had seen how those people really work in the world.

• 47:05Alec Baldwin?

  Now, let's talk about, in the couple of minutes we have left, about some of the disciples of method acting that people were. I mean, I was a fan of Brando. I was drawn. He was a beacon to me like anybody else. But as the years went by, and I saw how much he was just sending up his career and other people, and he was so bad. When I tell people, what's the flame, you know, when Pacino, I mean, I could cry on this. When John Mandel was trying to put the shield on Pacino's chest in Serpico. Here's your shield, Frank. And he's like, doesn't want it. Shot through the cheek. Pacino was the one that made me want to be an actor. Brando, kind of. Then that ended.

• 47:35Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 47:36Alec Baldwin?

  Because Brando's just, you know, his antics just turned me off. Whereas Pacino was the person that made me want to be a movie actor. What do you think about Brando's contribution?

• 47:45Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, there's a point where Brando stops doing the wonderful thing that he can do. And it's after the failure of One Eyed Jax. You know, he was so mad about how that movie had been treated, which was his directorial debut. And, you know, he always had an ambivalent relationship to acting anyway. He wanted to be a jazz drummer. It just turned out he wasn't a genius at jazz drumming. He was a genius at acting, you know? He sort of almost dragged into acting, you know? His sister was the one who cared a lot more about being an actor. And so there's a point where the joy you're gonna get from his performances is not the same. You know, it's gonna be like, wow, that's a really weird choice. And sometimes it works, and that's interesting. He did this movie called Missouri Briggs where his performance is insane. I mean, it is legitimate.

• 48:30Speaker 04

  It's, it's actually, I find it brilliant and delightful. It is not a conventional performance that works. He is an Irish bounty hunter, and then at one, I, I don't know why he's doing an Irish accent, but he has a brogue throughout it. And then later on, he disguises himself as an American and does, literally does the scene as Brando doing an Irish accent, doing an American accent. It is breathtaking. It's insane. Why would you do that? He's, there's another scene where he's like dressed up as an old woman. It's almost like Looney Tunes, you know? Coconut, coconut boots, you know? And that movie is delightful. It's delightful. Is that conventionally good acting? No.

• 49:06Alec Baldwin?

  I think he's someone who, and again, the essentiality here is that he had the youth. He had the sheen of his youth. He did Streetcar when he's 24 years old on Broadway. I did Streetcar on Broadway, I was 34. That's 10 years is a huge difference.

• 49:18Speaker 04

  Well, you were the actual age of the character. I mean, he's too young for Stanley.

• 49:21Alec Baldwin?

  Well, he was, but the thing is, I think that he's someone who, again, with my lame analogies here and metaphors, they hand him the Rubik's Cube when he's 24 years old, and he looks at it for a minute, then he goes, sit, sit, sit, sit, sit, and he goes, you mean like that?

• 49:33Speaker 04

  Right.

• 49:34Alec Baldwin?

  And they go, oh my god. I mean, he puts the pieces together before anybody. You have to be forty.

• 49:41Speaker 04

  Right.

• 49:41Alec Baldwin?

  Before you know it. By the time you're old to play Hamlet, you're too old to play Hamlet, that old line. And he puts the piece together while he's young and beautiful. And he got bored. You know what I mean? He got bored.

• 49:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, you can see, you know, his Julius Caesar, when he plays Mark Antony, the film of that with John Gielgud.

• 49:55Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 49:55Speaker 04

  Is, he's great in that. I mean, he worked his ass off in that. There's a period where he's working and then he sort of stops working. The early, I am also really interested in, you know, a couple of other of that earlier generation. One is, of course, Montgomery Clift.

• 50:07Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 50:08Speaker 04

  The most natural screen presence of that generation, I think, by far. There's that idea of public solitude. Strasberg talks about that. Stanislavski talks about that, that you're not, you don't know your.

• 50:17Alec Baldwin?

  Private and public.

• 50:18Speaker 04

  To be, no one is better at that than early Montgomery Clift. But the other one of that era that I think, you know, I constantly talk about and want more people to go back to is John Garfield. Who is the first method actor. He's the first actor trained by Strasberg to break out in Hollywood and be a star. And his career is very sadly cut short, but first by Hugh Ak and then by his death of a heart attack after he was all but blacklisted. And he is an extraordinary screen presence.

• 50:44Alec Baldwin?

  In a sense, I also view method acting in the way that was, among other things, in that period, the 50s. Not in a labor relations sense, but in a psychological sense, that method acting becomes the unionization of acting.

• 50:56Speaker 04

  Right.

• 50:57Alec Baldwin?

  This is what we do. We decide what we do.

• 50:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:00Alec Baldwin?

  We, you don't decide what we do. We'll tell you what we do. I'm gonna go to work now and I'm gonna educate the director.

• 51:07Alec Baldwin?

  Now we're gonna do this this way. And I found that fascinating as it was almost like them kind of claiming that in order to do good acting, in order to do better acting, more precise acting, I couldn't rely on directors anymore to help me get there. I couldn't. It's the advent of what I call the self-directing period of acting.

• 51:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense. And that's, I mean, the other thing that's happening that encourages that is right when method acting is emerging, the studio system is falling apart. So you're no longer in this factory, essentially making seven movies a year like Clark Gable did.

• 51:36Alec Baldwin?

  You're doing what they told you to do, was in your interest. You didn't pay back then, you know, eighteen hundred dollars a week.

• 51:41Speaker 04

  Right, right, right.

• 51:41Alec Baldwin?

  It was a fortune.

• 51:42Speaker 04

  Right, so you're not on salary anymore. And one of the things that the breakup of the studio system does. Is for the actors who are successful, it empowers the actors and especially their agents. You know, that's a huge change in the industry when the studio system falls apart. And method acting is totally wrapped up in that, right? That it's like, well, now I actually do want to be a serious actor. I don't want to sign a seven year, you know, Montgomery Clift was like, I'm just going to sign a one year contract. And I'm going to go back to doing plays because doing plays is what a serious actor does. And I want to be a serious actor or, you know, whatever it is that that maybe they want to live in New York. You know, maybe they don't want to be full time in film.

• 52:13Alec Baldwin?

  Confined.

• 52:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, and that's, that's, that is a huge change in the industry. And method acting is right there helping to fuel that.

• 52:20Alec Baldwin?

  In this online interview, I see a little clip of Merrill and she's saying to somebody, you know, the condition of the actor really is that life itself is so unpredictable and so uncertain. She said, but especially so for actors.

• 52:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:31Alec Baldwin?

  Their lives are more uncertain than the average person. Last thing, so Angels in America, your previous book.

• 52:36Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 52:36Alec Baldwin?

  I am of the mind that, you know, obviously great musicians, composers, writers and so forth have a halcyon period. Then they run a little dry as time goes on. Now, I'm not going to suggest that Angels in America sapped Kushner of all of his creative abilities. That's far from true, but you wonder, did you get the impression you talked to him?

• 52:54Speaker 04

  Oh, many times.

• 52:55Alec Baldwin?

  Right. So I admire him beyond anything. He's just the most amazing individual I've ever, one of the most amazing people I've ever met in this business. However, I wonder, I sometimes look at Angels, I go, this must have nearly killed him.

• 53:06Speaker 04

  Oh, I mean, it didn't only, yeah, I mean, Angels, the story behind Angels, you know, my co author, Dan Coys and I, it's an oral history. Because we were like, there's no way that we can write better than Oscar Eustace and Tony Kushner and Joe Mantello. And all these people can talk, you know, so we're just, we're going to interview them. We're going to range their quotes. There's nothing we could possibly write in a sentence as good as something Tony says. And so, so we did an oral history and it's got interviews with 250 plus people in it. And what you learn is that that play nearly kills anyone who comes in contact with it. I mean, it's the mountain. It is really the mountain. It's Lear, it's fucking Lear, you know, like it's actually two Lear's because it's, you know, it's eight hours long. And, you know, the theater company that developed Angels in America, Eureka Theater, that Tony Deco and Oscar Eustace ran. It basically went under.

• 53:51Speaker 04

  In the process of doing Angels, the original woman who played the angel died of breast cancer over the course of developing the play. You know, it requires the totality of your being to do that play right. You know, to do both parts right. It requires so much of you and it required so much of him to especially finish the second part. A lot of the interviews, the parts that were so difficult for him, had to do a lot with, you know, the first part was a huge hit, critically acclaimed, gonna go to Broadway. He hadn't written the second part yet. You know, figuring out how to finish the thing that he had started took-

• 54:26Alec Baldwin?

  Millennium was first.

• 54:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, Millennium was first and you know, Millennium's like a perfect play. Like, a high school production of Millennium is still delightful, it's not gonna be brilliant, but you're still gonna have a great time, you know? Perestroika is very hard. It's a brilliant play, it is incredibly hard to do. If you do it right, it's incredibly fun to watch.

• 54:43Alec Baldwin?

  More stop art than-

• 54:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, but it's, you know, the interplay of ideas and imagery and it takes so much of your theatrical imagination and, you know, for the actor playing Pryor especially, it's so hard. And part of that is because of how difficult it was, I think, for Tony to finish it, you know, because he's a guy who, you know, he obsesses over every word. Every word has to be the right word, you know? He's really deep in the nitty gritty of everything. And that's why that took so long, you know, Lincoln took like a decade longer than he expected to to write and it's because he really wants to do right by the things he's choosing to write about and I just find it incredibly admirable. It is not how I necessarily approach my own writing, but it's just, you can't argue with the results of it, it's so brilliant.

• 55:23Alec Baldwin?

  How long did it take you to write that book?

• 55:25Speaker 04

  The Angels in America book? It started as an article and so the article was originally, we spent six months working on the article and our first draft of the article was 40,000 words long, the one we handed in was 40,000 words long and they were like, "Are you nuts?"

• 55:38Alec Baldwin?

  Good going!

• 55:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, and so, we had to cut 25,000 words out of it, you know, something like that. And so, the only way we could deal with the heartbreak of that was to be like, "We're gonna turn it into a book. It'll go in the book, don't worry about it, you know? Don't delete it, put it in this file, put it in the book." And then the article was a hit, we were able to sell it as a book and I think it came out a year or two later.

• 55:56Alec Baldwin?

  How long did it take you to write The Method?

• 55:59Speaker 04

  Two-ish years, two-ish years. I would have maybe gotten it done a little bit faster than that, but the pandemic happened. The third part of the book was written mostly in my mother-in-law's basement during the pandemic because we had left the city. And so we were in the middle of nowhere in Virginia. And I was sitting in the basement, watching a movie every day and then, you know, writing the third part. And after the book came out, my mother-in-law, who I love very dearly, we have a very good relationship, my mother-in-law said to me, you know, when you were living in my basement, I kept thinking, I'm watching this guy's kid and he's watching a goddamn movie, you know, every day. And now I get it.

• 56:38Alec Baldwin?

  Thank you very, very much.

• 56:39Speaker 04

  Thank you so much for having me. This was a joy. Yeah.

• 56:46Alec Baldwin?

  My thanks to Isaac Butler. This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. We're produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach McNeese, and Victoria DeMartin. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is Danielle Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.

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