Everybody goes to the theater in the U.K. because it’s accessible. Tickets are affordable. So many theaters are government subsidized, and there are all kinds of schemes where you get £5, £10, and £15 tickets. So there’s a kind of democracy to the whole thing. In New York, theaters are dependent on their subscribers, and everything is based around not losing them. Because without them, these buildings will shut down. The rent on a Broadway space is 10 times the rent of a West End space. The cheapest ticket you can get, even for Off Broadway, is $80. That means you go out for dinner, and you’re out close to $200 in a night. Nobody can afford it, and this makes it very exclusive. If you limit the audience to wealthy, older white people, it changes the type of play you can put on. Don’t get me wrong, the theater community in New York is beautiful—I absolutely love and adore it—but the commerce of it is just a different beast.

I think there’s a lot of pressure in the United States to become a famous person in a way that people in the U.K. don’t really give a shit about. You can work there and be a successful theater actor without having to have a big name. In the U.S., I felt like if I didn’t get some kind of TV visibility, those theater parts might dry up. Because they need to sell tickets, and famous people sell tickets.

Bill and Alec did such a nuanced job of writing a complicated female character who’s as nasty as the male characters on the Barry. But Sally’s not a bad person. She just learned the wrong survival skills. And her ideas of how to get ahead are bit misguided. We’re all so ready to forget that Barry literally kills people for a living and still root for him, and yet we’re challenged by an ambitious woman who has some irritating personality traits.

I wish more people asked about the crew. I wish more people asked about the designers, about the head of departments, about the cinematography, because when I think of the show, I think of you and those people. MYHA’LA: Yeah. LAWTEY: They’re entirely intrinsic to the show. Whatever people take in as an end product is built by them. We have the blessing and the curse of being the face of that, but it takes a village. We’ve been extraordinarily fortunate to have some pretty special villages over the last five years. Mirna was one of those. We spoke about the hair at the start. I want to make sure that my hair doesn’t take away from her work. She was very much on top of my hair, but I said, “Is it okay if I just do it before I come in?” Just because I think there are very few opportunities to feel autonomy as an actor.

The sense of control that you have over what you’re doing often feels quite disconnected and sparse. To have the chance to try to claim some of that can make a real difference to your level of confidence in your work. Because ultimately, you’re going to give everything you have and then it will be taken away from you and made into something that is beyond your control. I heard this quote from this interview with Donald Sutherland recently where he was talking about Marlon Brando, who he knew very well, and he said, “I think it must be very trying when you’re that good and that exquisite, you put your body, yourself, your soul, your ideas in the hands of someone else and allow them to take it, cut it into little pieces, and create a character different from the character that you thought you were giving them. And you have to accept that. And if you accept that, then it’s an adult vocation.”

Question 2: What does age teach you about love? Shannon: Oh my God. Oh, dear. Martin: Oh no. Is that a good "oh my God" or a bad one? Shannon: No, it just moved me. They're very linked obviously. I think when you're young, love can be very self-serving. You want love from other people. You want to have love. It's something you want for yourself because it feels, you know, wonderful to feel like you're loved. And then as you get older, you realize that it's probably ultimately more important to love others regardless of what you get in return. It becomes hopefully less transactional and more just a state of being, you know? Which is — can be hard to accept. It's actually kind of going back to that place that I was at when I was younger, where I was, you know, OK being alone — but with a new, with more, I don't know, more wisdom, some sort of wisdom that I've accrued along the way, hopefully.

You know, when you act, you create these little societies or civilizations to create some piece of art. And then you finish and they disappear. And it's kind of like the rhythm of my life. And there's certain relationships that carry on through those. Or people that you work with on multiple occasions. But for the most part, you get very accustomed to things not being stable or things changing.

I don’t know if it’s actually methodology. I’ve never wanted to be an actor as a source of income. I never cared about fame. I always wanted to do this, so I moved to New York to do theater because I loved it. When I read a script or I am considering a role, I’m going off of this compulsion that I feel. When I read something and I feel that overwhelming sense to be compelled to do it, I just get excited.

What is it about this role or this story that makes me so excited? What is this magnet and this drawn? I believe that the best way to get into a role, to figure out the thoughts and the understandings of another human being is by silencing the noise around yourself. It’s important to create an environment and a space for yourself to just be quiet, to start to really consider what those thoughts are and think about the role.

There’s so many different specific things about a character that let you know who they are. Something he does so beautifully is he’ll give you a very specific action or note to do, and it might feel so incredibly weird, and you’re like, “That makes no sense. Why would I do that then?” and then you do it and you’re like, “Oh my God, that totally worked, and why wasn’t that my instinct at first?” It made me think more about what a character can do in a space, it made me feel more open to the idea of trying things that might feel odd or different. He also edits in his head, which I think is really cool. He’s already editing the scene. That’s why he does two takes.

It was my job to find where her pain is stored, the trauma of losing your career, the idea of never allowing yourself the time to grieve, being in a marriage where she’s in charge all the time, she’s making all the decisions, being accountable for two people. Her life, since she was a kid, has felt so incomplete, because this one true love, which is tennis, has been ripped away from her.

“Maybe another portal is his open chest. He just goes, ‘Please come in, come in,’” says Craig. “It applies to art. It applies to everything. Letting one’s self go. If you don’t do it, how can you ever know? That tragedy of not doing that is greater than the embarrassment of doing it. We’re defined by those moments in our lives.”

“I’m really interested in the repression of others,” Guadagnino says. “I realize many, many times I go back to the theme. The idea of being so vulnerable and ready to be. He doesn’t have a sense of pride or a protection of social codes.”

Starkey, the 31-year-old “Outer Banks” actor, was met with the very different challenge of playing a character with few words on the page and a cryptic presence. He theorized that Allerton is in retreat because it’s “as if you’ve lived your whole life and never seen your own reflection, and someone puts a mirror in front of your face.” “A question I asked early on was: Is Allerton aware of the game that he’s playing? Is he aware that he may have some power over Lee, and does he like it?” says Starkey. “Luca’s answer to that was: ‘That’s a very good question.’”

Missed context - Because you’re not a full-time employee (even if you’re working 5 days a week) you may not be included on all-hands emails, announcements and so on and so you always have to work hard to gain the full context of a client. Tightly scripting a performance doesn’t leave room for new contexts to emerge during the performance. Instead there should always be room for new context to emerge and get integrated into the performance in real-time. Missed feedback - It’s not uncommon as a consultant to be the most proficient powerpoint user in the org (or at least your portion of the org). This has benefits but it also has the unintended consequence of making everything you touch look “finished”. And finished work gets very different feedback from people than raw materials and thinking. So sometimes it’s important to un-design and un-polish your work, to invite people onto the stage to co-create the performance - this way you ensure that you get the appropriate feedback.

“thinking on your feet” is about the balance between deflecting decisions for further analysis and providing the answer there and then.

learning to provide an answer that you believe in but leaves room for revision later is key. The real game that’s being played here is not one of being right or wrong - it’s the executive asking two questions at once - firstly “how much do you know?” and secondly “can you improv?” to understand how useful you’re going to be in the theatre of work.

There’s a fine line between reacting to a situation in the room and bullshitting. As a consultant this is especially hard to avoid. Your default mode of operating is the liminal space between industries, businesses and markets. A few times a year I’m forced to learn something new from scratch. This forces us to work in spaces where we’re often the least knowledgeable about a specific business (even if we are experts in the industry… And sometimes we’re experts at a discipline but neither knowledgeable about the business or the industry).

Yeah. I was thinking a lot about repression, and just not so much just the feeling, but how that would manifest through the body. How you can communicate so much by so little. If you see someone in the corner kind with their shoulders hunched and walking around and keeping to themself and not really taking up so much space, you feel sympathy for them. You feel kind of bad for them.

The man-child. The people who so loved playing characters that they played characters in their real lives, too, without actually transforming themselves into more mature human beings. He knew the cliché about celebrities staying developmentally the age that they were when they became famous. But how is a beloved movie star meant to change the right way? How is he supposed to grow up? How does he meaningfully evolve his life and art without killing his core?

What happens when you deliberately defy the moves that led you where you’d always wanted to go, and try something altogether different? It was a risk. But it made perfect sense. It happens. Your family members start to die. Your elders get replaced by your peers. You pack up your life and plant roots elsewhere. You put down the instrument that made you known and pick up another one instead. You plug it in. Do you hear that? That’s the buzz of something new. Wait till you hear what it sounds like when you strum.