Renowned as “a one-woman global village,” Sarah Jones is a Tony Award-winning solo performer, writer, comedian and activist. Her directorial debut, Sell/Buy/Date, is a hybrid documentary/meta film which features Jones and four of her characters (all played by her) on a journey across the country to listen to real people telling personal stories about their experiences that land them on both sides of various aspects of the complex topic of sex work in America. On this episode, she talks about overcoming the many obstacles and controversies to bring this important film to life, how trusting in collaborators like cinematographer Joshua […]

Dolly de Leon is a Filipina veteran actor of film and TV who is now, due to her outstanding performance in Triangle of Sadness, being spoken about with words like “newcomer” and “breakthrough.” That might have something to do with the “I’m the captain now” nature of the role she plays in the Palme d’Or winning film. It’s like the character and the actor are both saying “I have arrived.” In this episode, she describes the dark place she was in right before auditioning for the part, how director Ruben Ostlund’s collaborative approach sparked her dynamic creativity, why watching the […]

If Isabelle Huppert is not your favorite actor, she’s the favorite actor of someone you know. Guaranteed. There’s something about her that is unlike any other actor that has ever been on film. But it’s really hard to talk about what that “something” is. In each performance, in every film she’s made, she has such a command of the character, the text, the frame, that we place her in equal authorship with the directors she’s worked with, who happen to be some of most interesting and important in the last half-century—Jean Luc-Godard, Michael Haneke, Claude Chabrol, Michael Cimino, Claire Denis, […]

Australian actor Essie Davis is best known for The Babadook, Game of Thrones, and Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries. This year, she stunned me with two incredible performances in two powerful films. In Nitram, directed by her husband Justin Kurzel, she plays the important and heartbreaking supporting role of Helen, opposite Caleb Landry Jones. In The Justice of Bunny King she broke my heart again, this time playing the house-less titular character who is desperately trying to get her kids out of foster care. It was made pre-pandemic and had a staggered release last year overseas. Look for it in select […]

Adrian Pasdar has experienced a lot in his nearly 40 years as a working actor and in this episode he generously shares the wisdom he’s gleaned. Some of the highlights in his credits include Top Gun, Near Dark, Carlitos Way, Heroes, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, and perhaps the most talked about single-season series of the ’90s, Profit. Not to mention he’s the voice of Iron Man. He talks about how listening became his prime directive as an actor, his search for truth in performance (and the search for a better word than “truth”), “the method” as protective element, and why he […]

Dutch actor Katja Herbers plays forensic psychologist Kristen Bouchard on the hit series Evil, which just finished its third season at Paramount+. On this episode, she talks about how saying no to the audition actually secured her the role, and hitting it off with “the Kings” (show runners Robert and Michelle King) helped her feel ownership of it. We get into the beautiful weeds about the pitfalls of over-directing and how she often simply ignores direction or translates it into something she can use. She explains why laboring over an emotional through-line is unnecessary, how working with the girls that […]

Director, choreographer and dancer Lily Baldwin has appeared in these pages several times over the last decade in interviews about her work across both short film and virtual reality. But throughout this time, one project —  alternately creatively compelling and deeply distressing — has been a persistent focus. In a story she details in our interview below, it began as Glass, an autobiographically-inspired thriller about a woman being stalked, that placed in the IFP (now Gotham) Emerging Storytellers program in 2014. It then morphed into a multi-part documentary TV series before finally now hitting download queues as a six-part Audible […]

Himesh Patel is nominated for an Emmy this year for his incredible performance as Jeevan in Patrick Somerville’s HBO Max mini-series Station Eleven. In this episode, he talks about how that role made him a better actor, which is saying a lot because he had already given us some phenomenal work in films like Tenet, Don’t Look Up, and his first feature film Yesterday. He talks about the attention and care given to him by the big-name directors of those films, and how that helped his work. I ask about his 10 years on the UK television institution EastEnders, and […]

Read just a sample of Juliette Binoche’s credits — Mauvais Sang, Three Colors: Blue, Damage, The English Patient, Chocolat, Certified Copy, Clouds of Sils Maria, Let The Sunshine In — and one thing becomes clear: few actors have been as internationally respected for such a sustained period of time. In this episode, she speaks about the importance of acting from the body and learning to use “sensation” as a starting point. She tells a story about feeling lost on the set of John Boorman’s In My Country, and what set her free should be a lesson to all directors. She […]

James Scully plays Charlie, love interest to Bowen Yang’s Howie, in the new film Fire Island, a touching, hilarious, and entirely queer take on Pride and Prejudice, written by and co-starring Joel Kim Booster, and directed by Andrew Ahn. Scully talks about the imposter syndrome that infected the cast, how sometimes when material is so relatable it’s actually hard to gauge if you’re hitting it right, why having a queer director actually improves the work, and how Ahn specifically led the way so thoughtfully and effectively. Plus much more! Back To One can be found wherever you get your podcasts, […]