Chris Diamantopoulos was always an actor. Never held another job. He was working on the stage at an early age—touring companies, Broadway—then transitioned to television, film, and eventually voice overs. Never stopped. Some highlights: Russ Hanneman on Silicon Valley, Reinhold on Community, Moe in The Three Stooges, the official voice of Mickey Mouse, and right now you can see him playing bad guys in Netflix’s Red Notice and True Story. We recorded this interview hours before he started a new job and he takes us through what’s on his mind on the night before day one. He talks about how […]

Léa Seydoux was a talented young French actor when she reached planet-wide stardom with her incredible performance in Blue Is The Warmest Color (she even shared the Palme d’Or at Cannes, which had never been awarded to actors before). Since then she has invaded Hollywood, starring in James Bond movies and Wes Anderson films, but also continuing to turn in exceptional performances for international directors like Yorgos Lanthimos, Arnaud Desplechin, Ildikó Enyedi, and, for her latest film, France, Bruno Dumont. In this episode, she talks about the “sweet craziness” of working with Dumont, the importance of learning the “language” of […]

Dasha Nekrasova wanted all the exteriors in her directorial debut to have the ambience of Christmas in New York. First up: leering gargoyles lining the 15-foot front door of Jeffrey Epstein’s Upper East Side apartment building. Clearly, Nekrasova doesn’t share the same merry Christmas cheer as most.  In The Scary of Sixty-First, two roommates move into a semi-furnished apartment that may have been owned by the pedophile billionaire. When an amateur detective hyped up on amphetamines and conspiracies shows up to investigate Epstein’s life and death, the roommates are infected with the haunted truth of their new home. Creating a […]

Shakespeare on the stage is his first love, but Alex Hassell loves the camera and it loves him back. Currently he plays Vicious in Cowboy Bebop, the live-action remake of the popular Japanese anime series. On this episode, he talks about being attracted to roles that are difficult, how years of stripped-down live theater work at The Factory formed him as an actor, why he’s more at ease when he doesn’t know what’s going to happen next, his valuable contribution to Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, and how the particular challenges of acting on film excite him. Plus much […]

From The Walking Dead and Punisher to The Wolf of Wall Street, Small Engine Repair, The Many Saints of Newark, and this month’s King Richard, Jon Bernthal has established himself as the hard-working, all-in, go-to, actor’s-actor of the moment. In this episode, he talks about some of the elements he uses—generosity, energy management, isolation, fear-as-fuel, group strength—to do his work, the one thing all great directors have in common, why he’d be just as grateful doing regional theater, plus much more! Back To One can be found wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Stitcher. And […]

Ruth Negga loves words. And even someone who doesn’t particularly love words falls in love with the ones spoken by Ruth Negga. It’s not just her Irish accent. She uses words like a master craftsman uses tools. A profound humbleness. No pretension. Just the right tool, used at the right time, to make you understand, to make you believe. Obviously this goes for her acting work too. But, in true master-craftsman-style, there’s no sign of craft. You just believe. Loving got her an Academy Award nomination, her Hamlet got raves on both sides of the pond, and now Passing, Rebecca […]

Writer, director and actor Matthew Fifer makes his feature debut with Cicada, a very personal urban romance that’s also a perceptive and searching drama about the legacy of childhood abuse. Films that revolve around buried trauma can be overly melodramatic affairs, but Fifer’s Cicada balances painful backstory revelation with the sensuous pulse of the present. His depiction of early-aughts twentysomething Brooklyn romance is alive to the rhythms of the city and understanding of how place as well as economic circumstance frame the ways we connect with one another. Fifer plays Ben, a bisexual who we meet as he’s engaging in […]

After 30 years in the business, with credits ranging from Angels in America to the Harry Potter films and everything in between, Jason Isaacs has cultivated an approach to the craft of acting aimed at bringing himself fully into the moment. As he talks about in this episode, that approach involves not memorizing his lines, erasing all descriptors in the script, making no decisions before seeing what the other actors bring. “I try to do nothing. I try to be an empty vessel.” In Fran Kranz’s Mass—a real-time, one-room, four-hander where every actor shines—Isaacs plays a father of a child […]

Phantom Thread solidified Vicky Krieps as an acting force to be reckoned with. Her incredible performance in that film felt new, like a beginning of sorts. Her latest is Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island. She talks about figuring out ways to turn the difficulties of that production into opportunities to create something magical. Plus she gives us a glimpse inside her process-less process, made up of deconstruction, openness, acceptance, listening, embracing chaos, exploding the method, living with failure, holding space for the unknown, and letting intuition lead the way. Back To One can be found wherever you get your podcasts, including […]