You Think Katey Sagal Will Get Nominated For An Acting Emmy This Year?
I do.
Altogether, the acting ensemble cast does some great work. I’ll write about them all, individually, soon.
Sons Of Anarchy Surprised Me By Being Such A Quality Show.
(You can watch full episodes from my Hollywood Actor Prep sidebar. Go to the bottom right of this page that you are reading.—>)
With really great writing; besides the original characters and subject… And great stuff from actors, which I’ve mentioned.
I didn’t start watching this show until it’s second season. Steadily, it has become my favorite show on television.
Now, I’m sorry I missed the first season. Luckily, it’s on DVD. There’s also a wonderful catch-up on Hulu, which has summaries of Sons Of Anarchy, each and every episode. You can click a preference, on Hulu, to play the episode summaries one-after-another without interruption. I suggest that; it’s a serial, with the storyline continuing throughout the episodes. I don’t suggest coming in late in the game for one episode. And it is you that will miss out.
Sons Of Anarchy, or SAMCRO, is a fabulous television series. I see the TV critics have caught on too.
Katey Sagal Has Always Been Known For Her Character Acting
Remember Mrs Peg Bundy?
Like a fine wine, she has moved into this role as only an experienced actress could. As someone with her acting strength and abilities.
There’s another acting quality about Katey Sagal that is so very valuable. She has what I call an “accessible, apparent soul”. Everyone that watches her connects to her, as if they know her; it’s not just that the audience likes her. More accurately, I think that they feel her soul. They see her soul, and connect to it.
Don’t you? Even playing the broadest of characters, as Peg Bundy was; the reason that she was so successful at it was because that character was rooted in a sense of realness because of Katey’s soul accessibility. There’s less of a distance between her and the audience, than the audience has with other actors.
Call me kookoo. I call it as I see it.
Katey Sagal gives off soul. Humanity.
Across the great divide of the medium, people in the audience connect to her, and easily…soul-to-soul.
Soul. Soul to Soul. Soulful. An Accessible soul.
Okay. Enough ethereal stuff.
In this video, she talks about how she approaches the acting, and works on this lead character, Gemma, in Sons Of Anarchy.
She also talks about the writer, Kurt Sutter. I liked him already, because he wrote such a great female character. It inspired a little more faith in the changing industry, and their conventionally archaic women’s roles, and stifling ageism.
What I heard, on second viewing of this, is that showrunner, Sutter (who is @sutterink on Twitter)
…Is also Katey Sagal’s husband.
Well, then, throw out my newfound hope for the industry. But, swelled is my heart about how beautiful that is. Now, I am all inspired about romantic coupling, and great dynamics of artistic types.
Actually, don’t throw it out my newfound hope about The Industry, either: This show is a success. Which means copycatting. It will change the business. Katey and her husband, they will.
She’s great in this show, and everybody knows knows it. The ensemble of actors are great, too.
Great acting is powerful. Makes changes. Already has…
Always my best,
;~Dana
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In His First Film, Orson Welles Lead Actor Wasn’t Afraid
Not intimidated by size of the role, nor that his character’s name was in the title. Nor by the high-level reputation of A-List director, Richard Linklater.
He wasn’t intimidated to play an American legend, known for being larger-than-life.
Nor was he afraid of playing a real-life character, altogether.
He wasn’t void of fear due to an actor’s runaway ego.
Truth Is, This Actor Was Very Prepared.
From the outset, it all looks like sheer luck.
Fate did play a role, in the timing. In that, stage actor and RADA grad, Christian McKay was doing a one-man show at the same time that the director, Richard Linklater, was looking for someone to play the role of Orson Welles; the same real-life person that McKay’s one-man show was about.
Watch him talk about being a novice film actor, and his lack of intimidation about it, in my video below. He reveals some of the actor prep he had done for this role, long before he ever heard of Me And Orson Welles. Long before he ever met Richard Linklater.
On another Hollywood Actor Prepvideo, he talks about how he got the movie role. This video, here, is really all about his lack of stagefright.
It also reveals something about the film’s director, Richard Linklater; and his own sense of confidence about his work.
Backstory: McKay’s Path To Playing Welles, On Film
Still, his sense of affinity with Welles remains with him. “I play him my way, I feel very close to him,” McKay says. He leans forward and smiles: “You can’t play the role without real belief in it.” Twinkling self-confidence indeed.
When he was an acting student at Rada, a teacher told Christian McKay that he wouldn’t find steady work until he was 50.
As it turned out, McKay beat that prediction by 15 years. In his debut film, Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles, he plays the visionary actor-director of the title, sharing top billing with High School Musical heart-throb Zac Efron. His performance has elicited rave reviews from critics and he looks set to lift any number of Best Newcomer awards.
In the film, set in 1937 New York, Efron plays a fictional teenage student, Richard Samuels, who talks his way into a minor role in Welles’s landmark Mercury Theatre production of Julius Caesar. (At the time, Welles was all of 22.) The star-struck Richard makes his stage debut, falls for an older woman in the Mercury company (Claire Danes) and experiences the dazzling, beguiling Welles’s dark side.
McKay landed the role via a circuitous route. He had been portraying Welles in a one-man show, Rosebud, named after the key word in Citizen Kane. It played to sell-out audiences at the Edinburgh Festival in 2004; he still recalls fondly the Telegraph’s review by Alastair Sooke, who called it “a stellar production” and raved about McKay’s “twinkling self-confidence”.
“I always wanted to be an independent maverick, writing plays and putting them on myself,” he tells me. “The one-man show was set up so I could earn a living from it while I pursued other things.”
But then the show’s writer and director relinquished the rights to Rosebud and McKay fell out bitterly with its producers, who wanted to dump him, take it Stateside and, as he puts it, “cast a fat American in the role”. He was living in Tunbridge Wells, considering his future gloomily and sitting in a pub called The Orson Welles (no, he’s not making it up) when the producers called and asked if he would return to the role.
“I said yes, on one condition,” he recalls. “I said, ‘You give up the rights and I’ll set up a little company and produce it myself.’” He thinks they imagined he would continue taking Rosebud round small British provincial venues. But that’s not how it turned out.
First his wife, actress Emily Allen (who plays Orson’s wife Virginia in the film) set up their production company, Atomic 80. “That sounded so hip to me, not being very hip myself,” McKay confesses. “But as she pointed out, 80 is the atomic number for Mercury, the name of Welles’s company.”
When he was asked to accompany the Theatre Clwyd stage company to a “Brits on Broadway” mini-festival in New York, McKay seized the opportunity to present Rosebud for 16 nights in a tiny off-off-Broadway theatre.
Word of mouth was phenomenal and Linklater, who had written the script of Me andOrson Welles, flew from Texas just to see McKay. He offered him the film role, resisting pleas from backers to cast a big‑name actor.
Richard Linklater, Christian McKay, On The Set, 'Me And Orson Welles'
“I Wanted This Role So Bad! …I Loved The Story And The Character, And I Trusted The Director.”
Actor Michelle Monaghan’s star is rising fast, and she’s been getting some great parts. Here’s how she works, her acting process. Here’s also what she thinks about the business, and women’s parts in movies.
The film tells the gritty story of Diane, a long-haul trucker, driving 18-wheelers across the country, hellbent on getting that all-important on-time bonus. She doesn’t shy away from one-night stands, leaving many a guy wondering what him him, nor does she feel the least bit guilty about hanging out with a married man, though there is nothing betwen them. Her life is sent into a tailspin when she is suddenly faced with a son from a marriage in another life, the boy’s father having been hospitalized with cancer.
Forced to think about someone other than herself, Diane is not sure she is up to it, but in the days that she has with the boy, she discovers a humanity within herself she didn’t know existed. It is a spiky relationship, but one that will considerably impact the two of them.
In many ways the film is a return to the sort of picture made in the 1970s, such as “Five Easy Pieces” and “The King of Marvin Gardens,” though in this case, the lead is a female. “I wanted this role so bad,”Monaghan says. “I mean, I loved the story and the character, and I trusted the director to go in the right direction. I like that Diane is not a victim. She is a carefree, independent woman who lives by her own rules in her own world, and though she may be immature in many ways, there’s a lot to like about her.
“And I admired her honesty,” Monaghan adds. “She never lies. She always tells the truth and is not a victim at all. And I really liked that she lived in what was mainly a male-dominated world.”
When she took on the role, Monaghan says it was imperative for her to learn to drive a big rig in order do the character some authentic justice. “I couldn’t even drive a five speed when I started,” she exclaims. “So for two or three hours a day for three weeks I trained to get my CDL, so yeah, I went to truck driving school. It really mattered to me that I did this, it really mattered that I got this right. These are real people with real struggles. I knew I had to honor that with the best I could possibly give.”
“I saw Diane as mustang, a wild horse,” she continues. “And my director told me of a film he had made about wild mustangs, and no matter how hard they tried to rope this one mare, they could not do it, she was going to stay wild. So I saw Diane like that. I don’t know if you noticed but I had a fake tatoo on my shoulder, Wild Mustang, and I think that represents Diane. I tried to achieve that in small ways in my physicality, in the way I moved, the way I moved my head, things like that, and I don’t know if it comes across, but it helped me get there.”
The explanation is perfect because the character is indeed carefree, with a wild streak in her, certainly not wanting to settle down and play family. For me, I tell her, the mustand metaphor is perfect. But as she left her child, is she a bad person?
“She is brutally honest,” she explains. “She never lies, and personally, I have a lot of respect for someone like that. She’s not where a lot of people her age are at in their lives, but it’s not my job, the job of the actor I mean, to judge her, and certainly James [Mottern, the director] never judged her. She is who she is, no surprises.”
In the last few years there have been several films offering strong roles for women, which have given us an array of great performances such as Maggie Gyllenhall in “Sherrybaby,” Kate Winslet in “Revolutionary Road,” Ellen Page in “Juno,” Meryl Streep and Amy Adams in “Doubt” and Helen Mirren in “The Queen,” to name a few. Monaghan says she believes there has been a small turnaround in cinema with stronger roles coming to the fair sex, which she finds quite exciting.“That is so refreshing,” she says. “I would like to see more…The roles are there; sometimes the challenge is getting the film seen.”
“We worked so hard on it,” she says. “I would be happy if more people saw the film, and if being nominated for an Academy Award brings 10 or 20 more people to the theater to buy a ticket, that makes me very happy. This is something we are all very proud of, something we made in less than a month if you can believe that, so I just want to get people out there to see the movie.”
When asked about working with the caliber of actors she has had the chance to work with, there is immediate admiration in her voice.”…I come away better than I was before, because each actor is different in their approach to the work, and the ones I have worked with have been so willing to share with me. I studied journalism, and I have used my five W’s (who, where, what, when and why) in creating my characters, because I write about them a lot, creating a history for each. So merging the writing knowledge and the fact I can watch and listen together, I have learned so much.”
There is a refreshing reality in everything Monaghan does that comes from some honest place deep inside of her. She wants to succeed, she wants to be good, she wants the work to be truthful, and the one thing she learned about herself on “Trucker,” she says, is that she is stubborn.
“It helped me in the role,” she says. “It helped me find Diane and define Diane. We share that I suppose. And you know she’s still with me, I’m still digesting the whole experience, and I found her hard to let go.”
The film tells the gritty story of Diane, a long-haul trucker, driving 18-wheelers across the country, hellbent on getting that all-important on-time bonus. She doesn’t shy away from one-night stands, leaving many a guy wondering what him him, nor does she feel the least bit guilty about hanging out with a married man, though there is nothing betwen them. Her life is sent into a tailspin when she is suddenly faced with a son from a marriage in another life, the boy’s father having been hospitalized with cancer.
Forced to think about someone other than herself, Diane is not sure she is up to it, but in the days that she has with the boy, she discovers a humanity within herself she didn’t know existed. It is a spiky relationship, but one that will considerably impact the two of them.
In many ways the film is a return to the sort of picture made in the 1970s, such as “Five Easy Pieces” and “The King of Marvin Gardens,” though in this case, the lead is a female. “I wanted this role so bad,”Monaghan says. “I mean, I loved the story and the character, and I trusted the director to go in the right direction. I like that Diane is not a victim. She is a carefree, independent woman who lives by her own rules in her own world, and though she may be immature in many ways, there’s a lot to like about her.
“And I admired her honesty,” Monaghan adds. “She never lies. She always tells the truth and is not a victim at all. And I really liked that she lived in what was mainly a male-dominated world.”
When she took on the role, Monaghan says it was imperative for her to learn to drive a big rig in order do the character some authentic justice. “I couldn’t even drive a five speed when I started,” she exclaims. “So for two or three hours a day for three weeks I trained to get my CDL, so yeah, I went to truck driving school. It really mattered to me that I did this, it really mattered that I got this right. These are real people with real struggles. I knew I had to honor that with the best I could possibly give.”
“I saw Diane as mustang, a wild horse,” she continues. “And my director told me of a film he had made about wild mustangs, and no matter how hard they tried to rope this one mare, they could not do it, she was going to stay wild. So I saw Diane like that. I don’t know if you noticed but I had a fake tattoo on my shoulder, Wild Mustang, and I think that represents Diane. I tried to achieve that in small ways in my physicality, in the way I moved, the way I moved my head, things like that, and I don’t know if it comes across, but it helped me get there.”
But as she left her child, is she a bad person?
“She is brutally honest,” she explains. “She never lies, and personally, I have a lot of respect for someone like that. She’s not where a lot of people her age are at in their lives, but it’s not my job, the job of the actor I mean, to judge her, and certainly James [Mottern, the director] never judged her. She is who she is, no surprises.”
In the last few years there have been several films offering strong rolesfor women, which have given us an array of great performances such asMaggie Gyllenhall in “Sherrybaby”, Kate Winslet in “Revolutionary Road,” Ellen Page in “Juno,” Meryl Streep and Amy Adams in “Doubt” , and Helen Mirren in “The Queen”, to name a few. Monaghan says she believes there has been a small turnaround in cinema with stronger roles coming to the fair sex, which she finds quite exciting.“That is so refreshing,” she says. “I would like to see more…The roles are there; sometimes the challenge is getting the film seen.”
“We worked so hard on it,” she says. “I would be happy if more people saw the film, and if being nominated for an Academy Award brings 10 or 20 more people to the theater to buy a ticket, that makes me very happy. This is something we are all very proud of, something we made in less than a month if you can believe that, so I just want to get people out there to see the movie.”
When asked about working with the caliber of actors she has had the chance to work with, there is immediate admiration in her voice.”…I come away better than I was before, because each actor is different in their approach to the work, and the ones I have worked with have been so willing to share with me. I studied journalism, and I have used my five W’s (who, where, what, when and why) in creating my characters, because I write about them a lot, creating a history for each. So merging the writing knowledge and the fact I can watch and listen together, I have learned so much.”
There is a refreshing reality in everything Monaghan does that comes from some honest place deep inside of her. She wants to succeed, she wants to be good, she wants the work to be truthful, and the one thing she learned about herself on “Trucker,” she says, is that she is stubborn.
“It helped me in the role,” she says. “It helped me find Diane and define Diane. We share that I suppose. And you know she’s still with me, I’m still digesting the whole experience, and I found her hard to let go.”
For a list of Michelle Monaghan’s credits, click on this link to IMDB.
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The difference between researching, playing a real-life character and a scripted character?
When you are researching a public figure all the footage to watch is always when they when they are always on display. They know they are being filmed, they are putting out their public image.
What I am desperately looking for is what it is like when they drop the mask
What are they like when they are at home. So you look for tiny little moments where people, sort of, betray themselves.
What I am interested in is where the stuff that’s being hidden bleeds through. Against will.
Involuntarily. That’s where we reveal ourselves and betray ourselves. That’s what is the most compelling thing about watching acting is when that happens
apart from the sheer joy of storytelling and narratives in terms of character i find that really compelling and when i am watching it allows me, when I am watching, to feel complicit in what’s going on, like I’ve spotted something, it allows me to do some work
The difference between researching, playing a real-life character and a scripted character?
“When you are researching a public figure, all the footage to watch is always when they when they are always on display. They know they are being filmed, they are putting out their public image.
What I am desperately looking for is what it is like when they drop the mask.
What are they like when they are at home? So you look for tiny little moments where people, sort of, betray themselves.
What I am interested in is where the stuff that’s being hidden bleeds through.
Against will.
Involuntarily. That’s where we reveal ourselves and betray ourselves.
The most compelling thing about watching acting is when that happens.
…Apart from the sheer joy of storytelling and narratives in terms of character I find that really compelling. And when I am watching it allows me, when I am watching, to feel complicit in what’s going on. Like I’ve spotted something…Let the audience in… and it feels like you have discovered a secret world in the film.”
"So many great painters, great musicians, great geniuses ended with nothing. With broken hearts in rooms with broken windows. I want to see artists sitting at the table that decide the outcome of their lives."
--Bono
