Actors
Interviews - Actors
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“This Little Thing, That’s Like the Size of a Walnut, and the Width of Our Thumbnail, Can Do So Much.” Voice: A Special Episode of Back To One
On this special episode, we’re talking all about voice! Neda Lahidji is an actor, singer, vocal health coach, voice teacher and a certified vocal health first aider. She specializes in the voices and vocal health of actors, VO actors, and singers, including any vocal athletes in the film industry as well as directors who use their voice tremendously throughout production. She talks about the different factors that affect the voice, gives us techniques to help maintain a vocal athlete’s optimal vocal health, shares her own stories of various vocal ups and downs, explains why it’s almost all mental, and much […]
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“I Don’t Want To Know Anything. I Just Want to Listen”: The Bear Series Regular Edwin Lee Gibson (Back To One, Episode 246)
Edwin Lee Gibson’s stage career spans 40 years and over 100 U.S. and international theater productions. On television he is currently reprising his role as series regular “Ebraheim” in season 2 of FX’s hit series The Bear. On this episode, he talks about the importance of listening, “letting the character find me,” working with the late Peter Brook, cultivating a relationship with fear, how his stutter actually made him dig deeper into the study of speech, and much more. Back To One can be found wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Stitcher. And if you’re […]
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“Yes He Was a Visionary, but He Pissed a Lot of People Off”: Spinning Gold Star Jeremy Jordan (Back To One, Episode 245)
Jeremy Jordan is probably best known for his Tony and Grammy-nominated portrayal of Jack Kelly in Newsies on Broadway, as well as his many roles on television including series regulars on CW’s Supergirl, NBC’s Smash and Disney Channel’s Tangled. And now he leads a star-studded cast as the tenacious record industry giant Neil Bogart in the epic new feature film Spinning Gold. On this episode, he talks about how finding a character’s physicality and where they hold tension informs his preparation, the importance of letting every single moment of a performance tell the story, why he’s still getting used to […]
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“I Know This Woman. I Have Her in My Body”: Sophie von Haselberg (Back To One, Episode 244)
Sophie von Haselberg stars as Sissy St. Claire in Amanda Kramer’s psychedelic fever dream musical Give Me Pity! It’s part mock 70’s television special, part monologue film, and requires the creation of a bigger-than-life persona on screen, and von Haselberg carries it all and delivers a virtuoso performance. On this episode, she takes us from Kramer “pulling me from the ether,” through extensive preparation, getting the character “into my body,” a frustrating COVID pause, on to the live theater-like 5 day shoot, and how she doesn’t think she would have “ever allowed myself to dream that something like this would […]
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“You Have To Live and Breathe This”: Marta Milans (Back To One, Episode 243)
Spanish American actor Marta Milans reprises her role as Mama Rosa in the second installment of the Shazam saga, which hits theaters March 17th. If you binged White Lines during the pandemic, you appreciated her work in that Netflix hit series. On this episode, we go way back to when she played Goneril in King Lear…at age 8! She takes us on a journey of her life as an actor, a job she says you cannot do well unless you “must do it to breathe.” She tells us the reason why language comes easy for her, how music plays a […]
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“Seeds for the Revolution”: Robert Townsend on Hollywood Shuffle
I first became introduced to the work of Robert Townsend unceremoniously when his family sitcom, The Parent ‘Hood, premiered on The WB network in 1995. A professorial father figure with a wife and four children, Townsend’s character seemed, at least to my adolescent eyes, the ideal American dad. A noble role that fit him like a glove, Townsend must have enjoyed following up his caped-crusader directorial effort, The Meteor Man, with a sitcom that afforded him a more domesticated form of heroism. Those types of roles were not often offered to Townsend. Released in 1987, his directorial debut, Hollywood Shuffle, […]
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Short Film Premiere: Nat Gee, Lily Baldwin and Joshua Echevarria on Waves
The abstract yet oppressive sensation of an anxiety attack is captured through intense corporeal movement in Waves, the latest from Brooklyn-based filmmaker Nat Gee. The film stars Lily Baldwin as a woman in the throes of an anxious episode, her oft-idyllic surroundings transformed into hostile environments. A well-manicured flower garden becomes a frightening, frenzied feast (and viny prison); gentle waves crashing upon a sandy shore morph into a violent assailant; a stroll in a verdant, tranquil park turns into an uneasy exercise in losing bodily autonomy. Yet as fascinated as Gee is in conveying the unsettling feeling of being consumed […]
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Unimaginable Acts: Writer/Director Mark Jenkin and Actor Mary Woodvine on the 16mm-Shot “Folk Horror” Picture, Enys Men
Enys Men—British filmmaker Mark Jenkin’s Cannes Directors’ Fortnight-premiering follow-up to his 2019 BAFTA-winning breakthrough, Bait, for which he hand-processed the film—is set in coastal Cornwall at the extreme southwestern tip of England, amid jagged cliffs and crashing waves. On a rocky and profoundly isolated island (the Cornish title means “stone island”) is its lone human occupant (Mary Woodvine, in a spellbinding performance), a woman of obscure purpose whose daily routine the camera dutifully catalogs—the monitoring of soil temperature at a specific site and the ritual drop of a pebble into an abandoned mine shaft, along with less cryptic activities—until semblances […]
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“All These Mythologies, They Don’t Really Help Me”: Marc Maron (Back to One, Episode 231)
Marc Maron is a stand-up comedy veteran and the host of the popular WTF podcast. As a screen actor, he cut his teeth playing a version of himself in the series Maron. Lately the Netflix series Glow and Lynn Shelton’s Sword of Trust put more of his range on display. And now he delivers the epitome of “supporting” performance in the incredible new film To Leslie, opposite Andrea Riseborough. On this episode, he talks about his apprehension with accepting the role, his impatience with the process of acting in general, the importance of making himself emotionally available in his scenes, […]
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“You Don’t Find Yaks in America”: Joan Chen on Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl
An international movie star on screens both big (Bernardo Bertolucci’s Oscar-winning The Last Emperor) and small (David Lynch’s mega-hit, Twin Peaks), Joan Chen’s film career went behind the camera with her feature directorial debut, Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl. Released in the United States on May 7th, 1999 (the day the U.S. and NATO “accidentally” bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade), Chen’s film was adapted from a novella by Geling Yan and tells the story of the title character, a young girl (Li Xiaolu) who lives with her family in Chengdu and is being forced into Mao’s Down to […]
