Emmy Award-winning actor Stanley Tucci has plenty to say about acting and his career in an interview with Vanity Fair. While the interview mainly focuses on some of his past roles, Tucci also speaks about two aspects of acting that he tries to avoid — overthinking and waiting.
One approach to acting that Tucci subscribes to is not overthinking a role. He explains, “Sometimes I find that if you start to research things too much, you can do yourself a disservice. In other words, you start to overthink things, and that overthinking will become evident in your performance. I hate to say it, but you fuck yourself up by thinking too much. In any art form, the important thing is that you’re not thinking. When you’re painting, you’re not thinking. You can’t think. You have to have done all your thinking before and now you’re just making a connection and you’re living really in the moment because that’s what we do in real life.”
Stanley Tucci’s Candid Thoughts on Acting and Downtime on Set
While Tucci is against overthinking a role, all the downtime during the production of a typical film or television series — which is far from his favorite part of the experience — might make that difficult. He says:
“Acting is fun. Waiting around to act is so not fun. You feel like you’re wasting your time. Obviously, there are things that are happening that need to happen to be ready for you to go and do your moment. […] But on most films, because either they’re not well organized or people are overthinking them, you can end up waiting in your trailer for days sometimes, and that is really, incredibly boring.
“You never know what that time is going to be, so you can’t really commit yourself to anything, and you have to stay in this emotional and intellectual purgatory until they say, “Okay, we’re ready for you,” and then you can go. So you’re saving your energy. You can’t really commit to anything except a crossword puzzle or Instagram.
