Acting MASTERCLASS: A working actress reveals 10 steps to perfect your craft!

1. The Ultimate Acting Course Intro: After setting at drama school university and reading as many Acting books as I could, I realized Google voice, speech and movement techniques as useful as they are the kind of only succeeded in creating a kind of cutout version of a performance where something's missing. Actors that are actually crushing their careers right now are using new approaches that fit with the realities of acting today. And in this course, I'm jumping into the tactics that I use that I wish I'd learned when I first started acting. I've gotta shut this down. What's happened? This right here is advanced multistage hybrid technology. Ok. I'm sorry, but you've seen too much neutralizes aren't real. That's right. Fayol rail, none of this. Israel. He didn't see this technology because when people see my acting credits, they always ask, how can you get to work on so many varied TV and film projects like Game of Thrones, Universal Pictures, action movies, BBC comedies, Aries, HBO singletons, as well as American TV dramas to CBS. Well, I've spent the last few years growing my career from unpaid short film projects to walking on some of the biggest TV shows and with some of the biggest film production companies of all time. I've travelled around the world for Boeing and reached in international brace and at the same time gained huge and out of helping other actors to achieve the same successes. We've got OWN careers. Now, I've broken everything I've learned along the way into a simple, practical system designed to help you understand what it takes to experience excellence with you acting and fast. In this masterclass, I'll break down my exact method, sharing the secrets I was told by coaches on set, as well as the techniques that successful working actors that I know used to make sure that they deliver on their first takes, which is kind of our job time and time again. Regardless of what kind of acting roles you've dream of playing. Now is your time to be seen in yes, a sea of actors or I'm not holding anything back. In the next lesson, there was such thing as a performance hybrid. It can reach speeds of a 100 kilometers per hour and just five seconds. It's a logical sum, is advanced, couldn't possibly exist. Just like how aliens don't exist, right this way. So if you went back. 2. How to be 'real' on camera: Now, both of you cheer up and I am a good night. I read another problem though, they'll feel they are not. What should I believe nervous Nor your favorite laws we deal with. The focus of my approach for acting is on moving away from the sense of performance or performance liveness, or the idea of needing to act when on camera. I want you to get the experience of what it means to just completely do, let go and just be. So I'll give you this example that one of my acting she just gave as a demonstration, which really stayed with me. Just a boy from the acting workshop to stand up in front of the class with bicameral setup to stand there in front of it and you can see he was getting a little bit nervous. But she just said to him, just relax and tell me how many letters there are in your first and last name combined. So he gave her an answer and then she said, But did you actually count or just pretend? So what happened is that rather than actually just doing, He had performed the idea of searching through the letters, counting on his fingers, acting like he was thinking bad people often do this when you ask them to pretend they're waiting for a bus, they check their watch. Look, what do people actually do when they're doing these things. It's so much more engaging to watch when he did it again. And instead just date he just in his mind worked out the numbers and gave actually a completely different answer. So in a scene is can be a bit difficult because you might have to have a more complex activity. But in order to give a truthful performance, I think you need to learn to let go. And I want you to have a chance to do this. So if you can prop your camera up or just imagine it's there, but it'd be great if you can film yourself doing this. So think back to exactly two weeks ago today if he can and recall everything you had to eat. Pretty difficult, right. And you probably won't be able to do it. But what you can see on the screen if you film yourself doing this is what you actually look like when you're trying to remember as opposed to like performative Lee trying to remember something and no previous exercise allows you to just trust that being in the moment, focussing on your objective, that thing you want in this scene, which was for this, trying to remember what you had two weeks go to eat actually brings the performance to life and create something that's unique to you without you acting. It's a performance that is full of truth without actually performing. 3. An activity to try - How to practice!: The amazing acting teacher, William Esper, defines acting as living truthfully under imagine circumstances. The imagination is a vital tool for actors. So I'm going to give you the opportunity to film one of my actual auditioned seems just using your camera phone or whatever you might have to shoot. The art of acting is so unique to the individual that I recommend noting down your thoughts and keeping track of what works best for you. Try to use a notebook Lee, you can dedicate to this class. As you begin to hone your personal process, you'll find some techniques work better than others. So use these notes to trick your imagination as we go on to 4. The Best Audition Tip: Before I learned their lines, I find it's important to break the scene up into the character's thoughts, particularly within my character. In some texts, a single floor, good Last three or four lines, but they're just a mere sentence or a word or a sentence split up by a comma, we can sense a new thought as it's generally a new sentence or a direct reaction to something that the other character does. The other character doesn't have a line that's provoked our new thoughts like in the audition seen and I've given you, it's helpful to imagine what they're doing that's provoked us to change our thoughts and expression on their face or an action that they might do caused us to experience someone to vocalize a new thoughts, something separate to the one before. And spreading them up in this way allows us to let the other person to happen to us in the scene. So we're constantly alive and aware of whatever they're doing, working of them to stimulate our reactions, our performance, our choices that we make as the season progresses. 5. How to observe and steal Human Behaviour: Research, observing human behavior whenever you can in as many different circumstances as possible. So just take yourself to an art gallery and started watching how people react, how people are when they sit on public transport, or the simple gestures that people do when they're behaving naturally. So that you can steal these little things and use them for your work. They're all real life human behavior, actual, keep watching plays and films and staying inspired. Make sure that you watch things that are appropriate to the time period. And always be open to opportunities to practice your skills and learn from others. Just dare to imagine, daydream and fantasize to use this to provoke your inner life in your work. 6. What does 'Be Yourself" even mean?: A common piece of advice act as often told is just be yourself, especially young actors. Actors starting out, are those trying to actually make a name for themselves in a sea of competition? Now of course, the actor inevitably then asks, well, who am I? How do you give a performance that's unique to you? How do you actually scanned out in an audition or on screen in a film for all the right reasons, where do they characters actually come from? The ones that others audience look and feel as though they're alive. And I realized that an ability to access your inner emotional goal is basically essential in order to portray the truthfulness, subtlety, and believability required for modern acting for audiences that are watching you with their 60-inch TV with a high definition sound system, the key is becoming the most fearless, playful, and spontaneous version of you reacting in a moment. Suddenly we'll have the potential for, but how many people actually do that? And how exactly do you do that? When I was working on Game of Thrones in the trailer with the acting coach, we started to discuss this. We realize the combative other artists, actors have the most complicated instruments of all. They don't use brushes, Canvas, bronze, stone, or charcoal, but they are using themselves, their experiences. So as your sensitivity, your memory is ungrammatical, dramatic as they might be in your body, in your observations, and most importantly, your imagination. 7. How to learn lines like a pro: As everyone knows, acting is so much easier when we're off the script. But learning lines can be something that's a bit of a stumbling point for some people. They sometimes even think it's the hardest part about acting. But I've found that these simple techniques can really help. So I want you to try them out with your audition scene. See if you can get yourself off books so that you know the lines by heart. So firstly, avoid making fixed choices about how they should be delivered. Don't get stuck in a rhythm of saying the same every single time. Allow yourself to be impulsive. When you go to film yourself doing the scene, you can react in the moment. And this doesn't mean that you learn them as a flat monotonous noise, but instead, experiment with the volume, the pitch, and the emphasis as you learn to break your lines up into small sections like five or six chunks of texts, focusing on a new piece each time or on a different day. Try the next piece and build your memorization that way. When you've got one chunk memorized to take a break, do something else, and then before you start your next section, repeat the first chunk that you learned or the one that you did previously, back to yourself and then move on to the third or fourth and going over the previous take each time. So make sure that you are repeating it. Number three, get out of your comfort zone and perform your monologue off book and standing up, walk around the room. Take your speech for a walk in the park. Go back and forth, getting into your body, repeating it out loud and changing direction each time you go to punctuation or a new thoughts. So this helps you to separate the thoughts as you're learning so you don't run them into each other. If you trip up somewhere, you keep forgetting one section, go back to your script and see if you can work out what the thought is there. Why is your character saying that particular line? It can sometimes signal that you need to build a film or understanding of what you're saying. When we trip up on different sections, focus on those places and making sure that they end up being the bits that you know the most. And make sure you have a clear sense of why the character has a thought that they have in that moment. Once you've got your lines learned, have a go at filming yourself performing the same. You really suck. Have a go at this ancient memorization technique known as the memory palace, which sometimes I use when I put loads of lines. 8. The Memory Palace: When I feel a little bit overwhelmed with how many lines I need to learn. Like I've got a one-person show that I need to learn and it's just filled with speeches. Or I've been given so many auditions in one week, and I just don't think I'm gonna be able to cram it all in at once. I used the technique known as the memory palace. And with this technique I use the idea of locations that I know well in my mind, flat or my parents house or maybe a place that I've worked for years. So that the route that I normally take within that place is entrenched in my mind and filled with images that I pass through, rooms that I pass through every single time I walked through that space. So coming back to my flight, I always go to the living room and then the kitchen. It's like a map of a place already imprinted in my mind that I can use to attach new concepts or images to along the route, the dialogue from the script that you're trying to learn can be attached to systems already in your brain. So here's an example. If I was trying to remember Shakespeare, the speech over amuse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention, a kingdom for a stage, etc, etc. So I'd start with a line, oh, from use of fire. And I take that line and I would imagine walking into my flat, taking the route that I always do. I open the door in my imagination, I'm visually see an image that I can associate with that line to trigger my memory. So standing in the hallway, I'd find that it's completely up in flames and there's amuse floating above it. So I've got that one. Then I'll move into my hall for line two that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention. So I'll come up with an image to match that to a heavenly clouded staircase ascending along my whole with bright cherry black angels singing about inventions. Yet That's an odd image. But now because it's so audits secure in my mind, so I'll go back, I'll recap the hallway on flames, cloudy, heavily clouded staircase and my whole Next up, a kingdom for a stage, princes to act and monarchs to behold the swelling scene into my living room, I go and I can barely open the door as a massive inflatable castle like kingdom in goldfields, my living room. The princes are bouncing on the castle, acting how to play. And there's Kings wearing foregrounds, holding the castle up, be holding this huge swelling scene. I'll keep recapping the journey with these strange things going on in my flat, in my mind. And then I'll go to fill my monologue and those images might come to my mind. And of course, this Shakespearian example works well is it's so full of imagery. Modern scripts often includes short lines like, yeah, I must go now, something like that. For this, I might do the same journey and my flat, but when I'm in the hole, they'll just be something like a big thumbs up emoji that I see in my mind when I walk in. This is an image that I personally use to associate with, yes, I often use when texting my friends. So think about that. Then I'll walk into the hole for the next slide. And in my character's scene, I must learn, I must go now. So I'll give myself an extreme image of a young woman crying, turning away as if storming through the door, tapping her watch to indicate that she needs to go. Now, this image wounds stay in my mind when I'm struggling over a line. 9. Relationships: Our relationships to the people in our lives or emotional, There's no denying it. And when we explore character's relationships with those around them, we have to ask, what does this person actually mean to me? How do I feel towards them? If you love them? Why do you love them, as in you specifically, why do you love them? What is it about them? What can you make up that will strike some sort of emotional chord with you and make sure that you're acting relationships are actually specific. Because if they aren't, then it leads to you forming in general behavior, which is really boring to watch. I use something called a character map to help me to clarify my character's relationships with the other people in the story. I draw it for myself while I'm reading the script. And this is just an example of how a basic character map could look. But this could always be extended hugely depending on how many characters there are to get your head round. I put the name of the character I'm playing in the middle because I think we're all the leader of our own stories. And this is the person I want to investigate. Then the main character of the story gets the biggest circle. So I can visually map out their significance in relation to the others. It's a great way to mark out how the relationships in the story link. If a character doesn't influence me very much, they just get a small circle. Then you can play around with the distances of the circles in relation to your character as the story progresses. This allows me to make sense of what's going on and everyone's relationships to one another and the script, which is particularly helpful if I'm in a really big cost on an ongoing series. I think the best actors never realized early on the circumstances of the screams to bring their Sunday script just gives clues on a direction that they should head in. But how their character is actually formed may have nothing to do with the words that are on the page. It's all come from their imagination. Ultimately, you must work from whatever activates you as a person, whether it's in the text or not. So have a go at mapping out the relationships that your character encounters in just that small seen that I've given you to work on for your audition. In addition to these methods, you may want to really explore the psychology of your relationships. So you can comb through the script and make for more lists. Here, you'd ask yourself, how does my character c themselves? How do other people see my character? What lines are they saying that allow me to go into this? And how does the character think that other people see them? How does the character wants to be seen by others around them? When you've formed those lists, you'll have a clear image in front of you of the patterns and inconsistencies of all your relationships with the others around you in the project. 10. A person I actually know: You want your characters to be true to life rather than be inspired by characters that you've seen played by other actors in films or TV shows. So I find that thinking of a person that I actually know can be really helpful and give me ideas for little character traits and idiosyncrasies that I can use to create layers and where ONE carried as one might think of like my mom's friends down the road or a goal that I used to play with when I was younger. And what she's like now. And I might use some of these little traits to inspire my character. So that when I'm getting into role on sites or backstage, I just have to think of that person. And even if it's a historical character that I'm playing in the World War two or something way, way back historically or fantasy, I might still use those'll traits to add that sense of familiarity to the character that I'm embodying. No matter where that context is. 11. Making it day to day: So one thing that I like to look at is to try to find details that I can bring into the life of my character than just subtle things that I might do on screen or think about the fact that my character is just done that before they enter the scene, where are they going next? What are they just done? And how important did they think this historical event is? The character I'm working on at the moment, is working in Bletchley Park, but she's working there for several years. And then she's going on to train to become somebody that's in the Secret Service. So far, these events are unfolding all the time. Just like us now in our current historical situation, the way that they might be read about in the future might be much more epic than what we actually feel day-to-day when we go out for a run and then we come home and we flick the news on for a little bit and it seems really crazy, but we turned it off and go back to whatever else we might need to do. So I think it's the same thing for characters when they're going through these epic moments in history. That's something I tried to remember when I'm trying to behave naturalistically, realistically in those moments. It's easier when you lay it in the day-to-day routine of the character. 12. Fantasies and Daydreams for Actors: How do you get prepared for scene? What can you do before you start the scene? To alter your inner emotional state, to get you to the right place to perform as accurately to the character and their circumstance as possible. Specifically their frame of mind, so many whatever's just happened before the scene. So for example, if you're playing somebody who's just got home from a loved family members funeral. How do you create that inner reality of the funeral so that it fills you up and the scene is brought to life. So the easiest way that I've found is to use the source of your imagination, something we use all the time in our waking state every day we access these imaginations or daydreams. And we can daydream about anything maybe we can do about things that we really want. Sometimes four, I go to bed or think about winning the lottery and it can be very stimulating emotionally. Thinking about the daydreams that you have. Maybe you, when you're thinking about somebody you fancy, how often they're actually better than the real thing. We put them on a pedestal and they can be really powerful. So we're gonna use this power to create an emotional life. And obviously they come from our subconscious, which is formed very early on, which is children. And they're not sophisticated. They come from the most primitive part of us. Some people, even finer daydreams, a little bit frightening. So they tried to shut them off and block them out or ignore them. But as an actor, we wanna keep them alive and actually use them for our work rather than being freaked out by them. We just see them as our ventilation for our subconscious. They're really actually quite helpful for our mental health. And the audience aren't gonna be able to figure out exactly specifically what we're daydreaming about when we go into the scene, when we prepare our emotions. So it's all good. And the moment you enter the scene, the viewer will just equate your emotion with the circumstances of the situation that's been played out. So to make it simple, I always just use one and feelings so that it's really clear for people to see. So maybe if my character was about to go and quit their job, and I wanted them to be really excited about this because they hate their boss. So right at the start of the scene, I'll give me a situation that's going to help me to enter that sense of excitement. I'll spend some time imagining a fantasy like, I don't know, you've just been told that channeling Tatum is on his way to see you and take you out for there was amazing date of your life in Italy with candles. I'll make it really specific and I'll probably imagining, I'll feel that emotion of excitement and joy swelling up inside me. Then when I start the scene, I'll quickly add something that takes me to the specifics of that situation. Like I've got to chatting Tatum situation. But not only that, I'm going to tell my boss that I'm quitting my job. And then I enter the scene with my eyes brought to life by this fantasy I'm gonna flame behind my eyes. And this of course, will be altered for whatever the appropriate scene might be. But I never have to share this daydream with anyone because it could ruin a, takes it into something real when it's most powerful, when it's a fantasy. So maybe you can use your actors notebook to write down some band disease that you could use to get yourself to the appropriate in a state of mind or condition ready to work on a scene. So maybe you can have a go now with the subtext scene that I've given you for this project. So right in your actors notebook, stream of consciousness or fantasy that could get you into the right state for how you want your characters to be when you're portraying your interpretation of the scene. 13. Breaking down the script: It's our job to interpret the text in order to know what we're doing throughout the scene and to know how to play it. Naturally, all actors who interpret a given scene or character will see it slightly differently, which is the beautiful thing about creating art in this way, everyone's completely unique. And you want to become a unique detective when you prepare your scenes. Reading it as though you're mining the text for any given clues by the writer that will inform how we play the scene and give you the freedom to come up with more specific information about the context in order to strengthen it and make the performance more believable, easier to play naturalistically. The simplest and most effective way to investigate a scene thoroughly and clearly for yourself, is to write four columns with these headings. The first one is what my character does during the scene, what my character knows, objectives, so what my character wants and what the obstacles are. And these columns are gonna be filled out with simple lists for each, which include the fact that we found out from reading over the text. But because we're just looking at the scene as if we've been given it for an audition or the whole episode is unavailable to us as it's too confidential. You've had to sign an NDA just to get your hands on the scene. We might not know all the answers to these questions in these headings from the text. But it's our job to make sure these four columns are filled out before we pay the scenes so we can have a full sense of how we need to play. So I use the idea of strong probabilities so that you can garner and pick up as much as you can as you go and then come up with anything that's missing. So an example would be if the character is sitting at a bar table like the character of star is here. I might add in that they're looking at the menu or they're contemplating their drink, or they're looking at their phone. There's definitely something on their mind. No dead time. As an actor, we would normally research the whole script. That's what I've been taught to do in drama school. Which is absolutely great if you have it and you have the time to do it. When I landed a job, I'm given the whole episode or a film script and that's what I'm always gonna do. But many, many times over with projects becoming increasingly confidential, I just get given the scene or the scenes that I'm doing with the audition. So that's why I'll teach you this method first on how to approach the scene, ready for your auditions. So you can get really good at that skill, which is vital for an actor. And it's also fun to do it this way. So we'll read through the text starting with filling out the first column, what your character does during the scene. This list usually includes all the stated or implied physical actions plus a simple summary. The dialogue, such as something like star tells the bomb and more drinks, you would like just a summary like that. As the scene progresses, we write out what activity or action or they may say whatever they're focusing on from moment to moment. Writing out like this also helps you to notice where the important emotional changes happen for the character when they flip from one moment to the next. My next column is what my character knows and the start of the scene. And this one is going to contain all the relevant factors that contextualize the scene. It contains everything from the background facts, specifics of this particular time and place. We also sometimes call this the given circumstances of the sea. I'm being clear about what your character nose or the circumstances at the point when the scene starts. Its essential preparation, because it can hugely affect your characters reactions to events in the scene. Protects will give you almost all of this. And whatever it doesn't state, you can either work of yourself or try to imagine this scene as I'm going through. I can see from stylings in this conversation, style already knows that sin has a meeting with her boss. So I can make up something to go here like sin fancies their boss and star knows that. So I'll put that in this column. I can also imagine what the setting around me would be like asking myself as many questions as I can think about that specific setting. Frankie spot. So it's the bulb busy, what time of day is it? And if I decide that it is busy, I might add this into this column. And when I play out the scene, I may vary my voice accordingly depending on if staff feels that she's a bit self-conscious without voice potentially being overheard. So she quite a little bit on the objectives. This is what my character wants in the scene. In order to make the scene comes to life, it's good to spend a little bit of time thinking up an objective for the character that you can specifically relate to. So if I decide my characters represent come to the Bar in order to see me, I might spend some time using my imagination or my memory to think of someone I know or maybe a celebrity that I have, major crusher would help me to feel that sense of excitement. For example, I might be joining Tatum and imagine it's him that I'm on the video call to when I filled in that scene and it's going to awaken my life during the scene. And great and much more unique, specific and then live performance that feels really real to me when I'm going through the motions of the moments of the scene. And therefore it's going to come across as engaging the audience. There'll be engaged in the story. So obstacle. Now in the obstacle resistance that's getting in the way of your desire or objective coming to fruition can help you to gain a sense of folks dry. And once you start to rehearse or play out the scene on, the obstacles are going to appear in front of I saw in ears are around us in the video call. These obstacles are distractions. What's going to allow us to have things to react to in order to deal with the idea of getting wherever we want our objective. One thing to bear in mind here is the importance of your impulse reactions to the other characters, lines and the things that are going on around you. You need to react quickly and in a real way. The reactions can be almost as important as the speech and the lines themselves in order to show on thoughts. One exercise that you can try with this scene when you're filming it is to take moments to react to. And whenever something like that happens to you or from sin on the screen, style might be a little bit worried. So a simple reaction that's going to help us to demonstrate this might be a swallow. So whenever we get a new distraction or obstacle throughout the scene like the bomb and asking for the order, you might take that second, swallow and then speak. Anybody else see from watching the scene back just how much in life that adds to the scene, just how many thoughts we can start to interpret as an audience about what's going on on screen. Just from that simple swallow that simple beat before the line gets spoken or the reaction takes place, that becomes the reaction as a whole. 14. How to break down film lingo. : So you've got yourself take audition that you need to do. Here it comes into your inbox from your agent or a casting director, and it'll look something like this. There's loads of terminology, so I'm just gonna give a quick explanation of what some of these filmic abbreviations actually mean and how that affects our performance. We start with our scene heading at the top, just here. So I've made some notes. So you can see it starts with this int. Int means interior. Other options that you could have our Xt, so an exterior location, and as it says in means interior location, or you could have a mix of both than we've got name of the location of the scene. So Frank, spark be living room wherever the place is. And then we've got the day or the night versus the lighting. And for context for anyone reading the script, that's a good thing to remember that anyone reading the script is obviously struggling with Tetris software. There's a character in action is going to be these, these, these first time we see them as in capital letters. And these just lines here that strict spread the width page are the action. So we can see that just got a text that in its direct says where are you, that's the bit that would appear on the screen and there's a beat. So this is just a moment of non-text. The moment for the actor to process something like star is now a moment without dialogue was something happens. And then we see that there's another piece of actions, these orders pieces of action as the sound of stars phone, we can see the character of sin who we first or they're in capitals is video calling to start answers. And then she starts to speak. So we only see our character of sin, which is who you replace got sin. That's the character q. There's we know it's our turn to speak and we've got this off screen or something. It sounds offscreen So we can't see sin there. And she says, the dialogue, that's the dialog appears in these, in these bits here. So the dialogue continues personally, what was an interruption there? Dash means that she's, she's caught off because he looks up to these bombers who got our interaction going on there. And then we've got continuing through what's a little bracket in-between here. So this is a parenthetical which is action for the actor. So it's just for the actor to know what to do. So, just so we know that that line as for sin and this is directed to the barman in front of her. So wherever he is. So star says hairline as another interruption there. And she sees She's interrupted by Cornell coming in from rich. This comment, this means continued. So it's just, you can see she starts there and it just keeps going. More actions going on, more actions going to the offscreen here. Keep going through. And we've got another parent that's cool there. And then another part that's cool guys with two itself so you can have it read about script to yourself. There we go. And that's all of the little bits of technical information that you need. Also. 15. Research like an actor: When you're always searching your character from an historical contexts as normally so much audio footage or images or videos or archives and accounts that you can try to get your hands on in order to piece together maybe what a usual routine would be like somebody what somebody would feel like going through their day-to-day business. These things can really help us to inform the way that the character might feel as they go about their daily lives. And another thing to remember is that the way that the characters might experience really big events in history might be a lot more day-to-day in a sense for them. They're experiencing it moment by moment. As opposed to the way we look back on things with just the key events and the highlights of these wars and revolutions that maybe two years to take place. Actually, it's interesting to dive into what the real day-to-day life was like for the character. What do they have for breakfast that day? Who they love with? Who do they want to get the attention of? Thinking about it in that way is different to how we look at history now where we just look at the key dates. So one thing that I like to look at is to try to find details. I can bring into the life of my characters that are just subtle things that I might do onscreen or think about the fact that my character is just done that before they enter the scene, where are they going next? What are they just done? And how important do they think this historical event is? The character I'm working on at the moment, is working in Bletchley Park, but she's working there for several years. And then she's going on to train to become somebody that's in the Secret Service. So far, these events are unfolding all the time. Just like us now in our current historical situation, the way that they might be written about in the future might be much more epic than what we actually feel day-to-day when we go out for a run and then we come home and we flick the news on for a little bit and it seems really crazy, but we turned it off and go back to whatever else we might need to do. So I think it's the same thing for characters when they're going through these epic moments in history. That's something I tried to remember when I'm trying to behave naturalistically, realistically in those moments. It's easier when you layer in the day-to-day routine of the character. It's not just about how they feel as well, It's about their physicality. Thinking about the wider cultural context of the time, especially for women. What might they be wearing? How will this influence the way they sit or stand? If my character, when she's working in Bletchley Park, I might think about the way that she would be stooped over that typewriter for so many hours on end. It's going to be slightly different to how I am in my relaxed jumper now, just on my laptop. Actually, she might have to feel that she needs to be a bit more upright, but she also needs to be quite demeanor and cover her body it rather than being expansive and relaxed and laid back and whether over time she would become more relaxed, depending who is around terror at the time, whether it was just the women that would have a slightly different physicality when she was around just the women. And it is the little details that help to bring a character to life. 16. Using documentaries: I was fine document from real life as opposed to act as interpretations of what real life is like. So I was recently watching one on Bletchley Park for the character that I'm researching for the historical archives piece. And I could see women from the era. There was some previously never before seen footage of some women that were working in Bletchley Park at the time and just seeing them walking around, laughing, the way that they touch their hair, the way that they held their posture was giving me all these little details that I could actually steal for my character. So some of the ones I wrote down where The collect voice that I noticed from some of the voice clips that appear in the documentaries. This is something that I could use for my character and actually having the film. There were mentioning Gordon Welchman and the dashing way that he was with the ladies at the time. And I was imagining maybe that that could be a motivation for my character. In the scene where she's frantically typing away on a typewriter, that maybe the reason that she was so motivated in that moment was not only to try and help with the war, but also so that she could impress her colleagues. Because that's something to this. Because that's something that's just more immediate for her in that given moment. There was also a book that was mentioned calls cool and lonely courage when talking about the women that worked in the Secret Service at the area that my character did. And I thought that phrase are cool and lonely courage was such an inspiring phrase that would be able to help me to get into character right before I stepped into this scene where I'm doing the Secret Service work, where I'm actually out there in Europe working on my own. So really think back to the fact that these women actually existed and they worked in this way on their own. And these terrifying situations that they were maybe only trained a little bit for really did help. When I was researching about the training, when I was researching about the training that they had to do, I read that they went up to Scotland and read about some of the figures that actually existed, that they did train and recruit these women. And it was really insightful to think about the process I might have had to go through in order to get that role. That very, very general. 17. How Use Youtube: Another great resource for actors is YouTube. You could find anything on there. Just recently with this historical film, I've found real life surviving Bletchley Park working secret agents, women that are still alive today talking about their experiences and I'm able to observe their accents. And wondered to myself how their accents might have changed since the time that I'll be portray in that role. And for them to tell genuine stories about things that happened to them. As well as the documentaries like I've spoken about previously. You can find so many free documentaries up on YouTube that might delve into a different part of historical life and help you to get a sense of the world at the time from a more truthful backdrops. So something I'm looking at at the moment is the idea of my character being out in Europe, working with the Secret Service for Britain at the time and the fake documents that she would have had to have had in her bag. So you might not see these onscreen, but they're talking in the documentary that I'm watching it at the moment about the different ways that these documents were faked. And so these women could exist in Europe to move around the space, have ID in case they needed it. So I'm going to maybe four *** a little document like that and allow myself to access the process that my character would have gone through when she was preparing for her trip. Of which you only see a small scene in the film. But I think just having that object, they will add that sense of reality. Maybe in that confrontation that she has with one of the bodies that they tried to catch. She could think in her mind to that to that document that she has in her bag that she might need to show just in case. I think it adds that other layer of thoughts that my brain can travel through while I'm panicking in that scene to give that sense of lots of different directions. So the thought, so YouTube is such a great resource, You can learn anything on there. I'm sure if YouTube, how to ride a horse before in preparation for an audition. So go learn about the world or whatever. 18. Keep in touch!: Having you join me and thank you so much. Good luck. Don't be shy. Go out and be brave and making magical stories never been more important right now.