Top Hollywood Acting Teachers

Inspiration and Advice for Actors

Bonnie J Wallace

• Publisher: Hollywood Parents Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780986351174
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

What do Hollywood's top acting teachers know about how to succeed in the Industry? How do they train and coach their students? What guides their different approaches for actors? What wisdom and advice do they have for YOU?

Top Hollywood Acting Teachers reveals all this and more, in generous and intimate conversations with 12 of Hollywood's most successful acting teachers: Zak Barnett, Diane Christiansen, Marnie Cooper, John D'Aquino, Patrick Day, Judy Kain, Anthony Meindl, Eric Morris, Lisa Picotte, Mae Ross, Scott Sedita, and Marcie Smolin.

Perfect for aspiring actors as well as successful working actors who are looking to learn from the best, the real-world insights and secrets shared from these masters will shed light on what it really takes to become a successful actor, whether you are acting on stage or on film, in your hometown, in Hollywood, or anywhere else.

Want to know MORE? Sign up to receive inspiration, education, and acting career advice at https://hometowntohollywood.com.

Bonnie J. Wallace is the founder of Hometown to Hollywood, and helps young actors build safe, successful careers.

She is the author of the bestselling Young Hollywood Actors and acclaimed Hollywood Parents Guide, producer of the Hometown to Hollywood Podcast, and writes a blog for parents of young actors, and young adult actors at hometowntohollywood.com, as well as articles for Backstage.com as a Backstage Expert. She teaches and speaks on the acting business at panels and events internationally.

Bonnie offers one-on-one consultations with parents of young actors as well as young adult actors to help them navigate the entertainment industry safely and successfully.

Mother of Emmy Award winning actress and Columbia Records artist Dove Cameron, star of Disney's Descendants, Liv and Maddie, Hairspray Live, Agents of Shield, Clueless the Musical, Light in the Piazza, Angry Birds 2, Vengeance, Isaac, and more, Bonnie is dedicated to helping other young actors on this journey. Find out more at hometowntohollywood.com.

Anthony Meindl

Founder, Anthony Meindl’s Actor Workshop

“What I teach is so simple, it’s just not easy.”

Anthony Meindl is a master acting coach and founder of Anthony Meindl’s Actor Workshop, which has locations in Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Santa Fe, Vancouver, Toronto, London, Sydney, and Cape Town. His philosophy is radically different from the status quo. He doesn’t use scene objective, sense memory or any of the standard 20th century approaches that most acting schools take as their foundation. Instead, he emphasizes living truthfully in imaginary circumstances. He’s the author of At Left Brain Turn Right, BOOK THE F*CKING JOB! and Alphabet Soup for Grownups.

Alumni include Shailene Woodley, Ruby Rose, Pom Klementieff, Emma Kenney, Camilla Cabello, Trevante Rhodes, Brianne Howey, Sierra Capri, and Jenna Dewan.

Bonnie Wallace:	Your approach to acting is really different from the standard ones. Can you explain your philosophy a little bit?
Anthony Meindl:	Yeah. It’s so weird because I’m reading John Cassavetes’ Lifeworks book right now. For people, who don’t know, John Cassavetes was really the forefather of independent cinema. He and his wife Gena Rowlands, maybe young audiences would know her from The Notebook. She played the mom. It was directed by their son, Nick Cassavetes.
	Anyway, he was really the trailblazer of exploring just living on camera for American directors in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s. The opening quote of his book is, “Life class is the best acting class.” That’s what I teach. Even Stanislavski who came up with many different ways to try to get actors to be real, said, “I just do whatever I have to do to make people stop acting,” basically. Right?
	I think the truth about acting is that we come up with all these words, and definitions, and theories, and concepts, and names for something that is as simple as you and I right now, just listening and talking. The heart of it is all listening. I think people get stuck on the mechanics of something, but we’re not fixing the inner workings of a car. We’re not mechanics. You don’t have to be a mechanic. Mechanics are for mechanics. We just have to try to tell the truth, which is very, very difficult. I find that if we do away with a lot of the things that put people in their heads, they’re already more predisposed to do it naturally.
	I’m just not invested in calling it something because I find that whether they’re painters, or writers, or actors, or singers, it’s literally about the person igniting their art through themselves, so that’s what I teach. Be you, really, which is really very difficult to be.
Bonnie Wallace:	I love that. We were talking earlier, and I shared with you my own philosophy about acting, which is that the actor’s soul, their spirit, is like the light that shines through the stage light gel, and the gel is the character.
Anthony Meindl:	That’s a beautiful way of articulating it. Gary Oldman says something similar: “The characters that you’re playing are just basically prisms of yourself. That’s all it is.” He says, “When it says that a character is crying in the script, or you go and see the movie and you see a character crying, it’s not the character crying. It’s me, Gary Oldman, crying.” That’s the big leap that I think more and more actors are starting to have.
	That’s Gary Oldman and he’s been around forever. You start to see that distillation of it, the talking about it in a way that moves beyond the concepts, and you can see very clearly that you can’t become someone else. The physics make that impossible.
Bonnie Wallace:	Well, there’s a kind of psychosis to that, too. You really are still you.
Anthony Meindl:	That’s a good point.
Bonnie Wallace:	The crying is where you are. I watched my daughter do a very emotional scene a couple of weeks ago. You could tell her whole body was involved and engaged in those feelings and those emotions. It was real. Her body was experiencing it in a very real way. The tears were real and that was her, crying. That wasn’t really her character.
Anthony Meindl:	Well, I guess another way of thinking about it is when we’re watching them, the final edited program, movie, TV show, theater, whatever, the piece, the play, we’re involved in the story so we’re seeing the character ... the storytelling is occurring through the person playing the character. When we surrender to the circumstances in the story, then it’s a subjective experience. Right?
	We’re imprinting on whatever it is that we’re watching, filling in the blanks of who we think these people are or aren’t. That, to me, is where a lot of the character development really occurs. When you’re watching your daughter and you know that she’s crying, if I don’t know your daughter and I go watch the movie and I see her crying as “the character,” yes, of course, I’m watching the story unfold, and she’s doing it authentically, so I surrender to that narrative but it’s still her. It’s not Dove. It’s Dove as Julie. It’s Dove as Sabrina. It’s Dove as whatever the character’s name is.
	I think those are huge light bulbs. You know what I mean? I had a guy last night in intro class where he’s never taken an acting class before. Again, he’s got concepts of it ... He gets up and he tries to show us the idea of a guy who’s nervous or a guy who is ... right? He’s acting.
Bonnie Wallace:	T...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Gratitude
• Introduction
• Zak Barnett
• Diane Christiansen
• Marnie Cooper
• John D’Aquino
• Patrick Day
• Judy Kain
• Anthony Meindl
• Eric Morris
• Lisa Picotte
• Mae Ross
• Scott Sedita
• Marcie Smolin
• Epilogue: COVID-19 note
• Contact
• A Note on Offerings and Pricing
• Glossary
• About the Hometown to Hollywood Podcast
• About the Author