A Little Rant About the SAG Awards

I liked the SAG Awards last night. They were short and sweet and didn’t have the fluff that most awards ceremonies force you to sit through. My favorite moments were the acceptance speeches from Octavia Spencer and Viola Davis and the cast of Bridesmaids yukking it up.

But, out of all the things I liked, there were 2 things that bugged me.

The first was something about the show in general. As SAG member Pam Munro pointed out to me in an email, the tickets for the awards were, according to their website, $800. “Who can PAY that? Certainly not most of the rank & file!” she said.

I absolutely agree. For most of us, $800 is a lot of change. That’s headshots and prints. Rent. 3 Months of acting classes. One drunken night on Sunset. It’s almost like the powers that be want to keep you and me from attending by keeping the price high, isn’t it?  Read more

Broadway Week 2-for-1 Tickets Start January 17th!

Once again, NYC & Company, the city’s marketing, tourism and partnership organization is partnering with Broadway to offer two-for-one tickets to more than 20 Broadway (and Off-Broadway) shows.

Broadway Week starts January 17th and runs through February 4th. Check out the list below of the shows that are on the list.

Off-Broadway Week will offer the same deal but from that starts on January 30th running through February 12th. Some of the shows include Carrie, Rent, SILENCE! The Musical and Avenue Q.  Read more

NBC Set To Fund Musical Theater Programs for Students

NBC has announced they will be teaming up with iTheatrics to fund musical theater programs for schools without arts education money. 

The program, entitled Make a Musical, will start this month with a pilot group of more than 20 schools across the nation, including sites in cities like Atlanta, Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles.

The group they will be working with, iTheatrics Junior Theater Project, helps adapt musicals for student productions and supplies information to help teachers involved in the program.  NBC has set a goal of adding an additional 180 programs by 2014, resulting in the funding of more than 1,000 schools that would benefit around 1 million students.  Read more

Kelsey Grammer: “With drama, you just get to pour it out. Tip the vessel over and out it comes”

As Tom Kane, the Mayor of Chicago in the Starz series Boss, Kelsey Grammer has finally found a dramatic television role, which is something that has been eluding him for much of his career. 

Speaking with the Los Angeles Times, Grammer reveals how he manages to portray a character that is completely different than his past comedic roles — and how his current role relates to the possibility of his own real-life political future.

Though Boss is a one hour series, each episode is shot relatively quickly — the typical episode is shot in eight days.  For many actors that might be an unbearable pace, but for Grammer — who has spent half his life in episodic television — finds it liberating with an experienced cast, explaining, “I actually love working fast — those limitations can be freeing. There’s an honesty to it — you just go with your gut and jump into it. But you need people who are experienced, who can access themselves as quickly as possible. Firing on your first impressions can be really effective.”  Read more

Kate Winslet Talks ‘Carnage’, Polanski and Rehearsing

Kate Winslet is no stranger to playing difficult roles or dealing with demanding directors.  In Carnage, the film adaptation of the Tony-award winning play God of Carnage, Winslet came across both. 

Director Roman Polanski is sometimes better known for his personal dramas (fleeing the country in the 70s after facing statutory rape charges), but his acute skills resulted in many challenges for Winslet. 

In an interview with Wall Street Journal, Winslet recalls, “I think at various different points we all had said to Roman, ‘Look, would you like us to learn [the script]?’  Because it is based on a play and when it’s Roman Polanski, one wants to be as prepared as possible.  And he categorically said, ‘Oh no, no no’—very blasé—‘no need to learn it….’ And by Friday afternoon of week one, Roman said, ‘Ok, I think it would be really handy not to have our scripts in our hands on Monday, don’t you?’  And there was deathly silence, and I could see everyone sort of looking at each other like, ‘Well, what did you have planned for the weekend?’”  Read more

Nineteen Year-Old UK Juror Jailed for Playing Sick to Go to the Theatre

Let’s be honest — very few people actually enjoy jury duty.  Most of us try to come up with any excuse we can to prevent having to potentially spend weeks of lives on a case. 

But according to a story in The Guardian, nineteen year-old Matthew Banks took playing hookey from jury duty to a new level — and it was all because he went to the theatre.

Banks had been serving four days on a trial but proceedings had to be halted when he claimed to be too ill to attend.  But he was only acting sick — turns out Banks had plans to see Chicago at the Garrick Theatre.  But his ruse was found out when court officials called his home and Banks’ boyfriend, Christian Orr, told them he had gone to the theatre.  Whoops!

The judge on the case ordered him to “serve two weeks in a young offenders institution,” calling Banks’ behavior “frivolous.”  Read more

18th Annual Screen Actors Guild Award Nominations

The nominations for the 18th Annual SAG Awards were announced this morning while I was patiently sitting in an airport waiting to board my flight to JFK.

Congrats to all the nominees!

But, I just have one WTF as I go through the list: Glee was nominated as in the Ensemble category? The cast is fine with Jane Lynch, Heather Morris and Matthew Morrison being the standouts but nominating the cast for best ensemble? Seriously?

Check out the nominations below!
Read more

Nick Offerman on ‘Parks and Rec’: “I Didn’t Think a Job That Excellent Could Exist”

Before he was cast as anti-government, mid-level city employee Ron Swanson on Parks and Recreation, Nick Offerman’s career was just how Swanson prefers his: unnoticed and unassuming.

Until a couple of years ago, the 41-year-old earned his keep as a journeyman actor in Los Angeles and Chicago, never aspiring for more and always leaving time for his woodworking – again, just how Swanson makes it through life.

“I’d been making a really nice living for about 10 years here in L.A. I always felt successful just doing that… I wasn’t well known in the public, but I was a dependable working journeyman,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in a recent interview.

“I was working more than all the people I knew from college and my Chicago theater community, so I didn’t notice that I wasn’t ‘successful’ enough. When I got my job on Parks, it was so dreamy, kind of unfathomable. I didn’t think a job that excellent could exist for me.”  Read more

Q & A: Denis O’Hare on ‘American Horror Story’, ‘True Blood’ and His “Addiction” to Theatre

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 14:29 — 10.0MB)

Up until 2 years ago, Denis O’Hare had a terrific career; moving seamlessly from TV (Brothers and Sisters, CSI: Miami), Film (Michael Clayton, Baby Mama, Milk) and Broadway (Cabaret, Assassins, Sweet Charity). But once he was cast in True Blood, his career went to another level.

As Russell Edgington, he made the show 10 times more fun to watch with his portrayal of the Vampire King of Mississippi. From there he went back to Broadway in Elling and now, he’s starring in FX’s American Horror Story. He plays Larry the Burn Guy, a man who was disfigured in a fire started by his wife when he revealed his love for the neighbor, Constance (Jessica Lange).

In this Q&A, Denis talks about the make-up process for the show, how he got the part and how he’s “addicted” to theatre.

Follow Denis on Twitter!

American Horror Story airs on Wednesdays at 10pm on FX

For more American Horror Story, check out our interview with Dylan McDermott and Connie Britton

For the full interview, click the audio link above or download it from iTunes

You’re playing such a dark character, and a lot of times actors say that you have to like who you’re playing to be able to play that character convincingly.  Do you like anything about your character, and how do you connect with him?

Denis O’Hare: You know, it’s funny.  I love this character, and I love him because I feel like he is engaged in a sort of timeless epic struggle.  And I see him as kind of a Dante-esque figure.  He’s somebody who is trapped in a circle of hell, and he’s trying to work his way out.  And he’s a human being who’s flawed, and he’s obviously weak, and he’s given into temptation and made bad choices. 

But through that all he’s still got this sort of, I don’t know, passion and dream to achieve something.  And he’s—it’s an odd character.  Like no other character I’ve ever played in my life, I find that I have to reach for a metaphor to describe him.  I have an innate sense of who he is, and when I’m playing him it’s all very instinctual.  But to describe it I find myself running to literature, and so I think it’s sort of like Igor in the Frankenstein mythology, or an amanuensis in some other mythologies, or a psychopomp as they call them sometimes, somebody who traffics between worlds.  And it’s a really odd, beautiful character.  Read more

Video: Michael Shannon Talks About “My First Exposure to the Wonderful World of Dramatic Arts”

Michael Shannon is not only one of the standouts in a nearly all-standout cast on HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, but he is also currently earning rave reviews for his new film, Take Shelter, which is now in limited release. 

As Shannon prepares for his upcoming role as General Zod in Man of Steel, he sat down with The Hollywood Reporter to talk about his early years as a struggling actor.

Unlike many actors, Shannon didn’t enter acting because of a deep love for movies or theatre.  In fact, he accidentally stumbled into it in high school after he realized that he wasn’t cut out for anything else!

He explains, “I wanted something to do after school; I was in Kentucky and I was not athletic — athletics are very competitive in Kentucky so I was not going to get on any teams — I tried math team or something and that didn’t go very well.  And then I saw this thing for speech team, which I… I didn’t even know what the hell it was.  I walk into the room and they say ‘Tell a story.  Just make up a story.’  I was like ‘okay’ so I made up some goofy story and they’re like ‘All right, that’s pretty good,’ and they said ‘We want you to be in the monologue competition.’  And I was like ‘I don’t know, what is it?  I don’t know what that is.’ And they hand me a piece of paper and said ‘You memorize this.’  Okay, so I went home and memorized it and it was Garrison Keiller; it was from Lake Wobegon Days, and it was like a page long, you know, and I had never memorized anything in my life.  But I practiced it all the time; I would just be in my bedroom practicing it.  I was an alternate, I actually was not a first-stringer, I would only do it if somebody got sick or got hit by a bus.  But that never happened.  Although I did go for… they called me once and said ‘Our extraneous speaker can’t come, would you like to do that?’ and I was like ‘Sure.’  That’s when you draw subjects out of a hat and you have to make a speech about it.  So, that wasn’t really acting, but that was my first exposure to the wonderful world of dramatic arts.”   Read more

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