The first two weeks of 2016 have been a bit bumpy in the entertainment world. We’ve lost some legendary artists, most recently Alan Rickman.
Rickman was a legendary theater and film actor. He was known for his emotional range, his intelligence, his ability to move seamlessly between comedy and drama… but more than anything, he was known for his voice. It’s been described as a “silky tiger’s purr,” but he has often said his drama school teachers told him it was his biggest problem, and sounded like it was “coming out of the back end of a drain pipe.”
Rickman is far from the only actor who became known and loved for something their teachers said was a handicap. At my alma mater, there’s a famous story of the faculty threatening Holly Hunter with being cut from the program if she didn’t get rid of her now famous and beloved accent. And in my own career, I’ve been noticing lately that I often get hired to play very wry and deadpan, which is something my own drama school teachers tried to get me to stop doing for years.
It’s obviously incredibly important to know yourself as an actor, and that means knowing what’s distinctive about you. It’s also valuable to have the ability to regulate those distinctive qualities, so they’re not beyond your control. But it’s easy to get stuck in the habit of thinking of those distinctive qualities as problems. They aren’t. In fact they may be among your greatest assets.
Think about the things about you that you consider problematic. Maybe it’s something a teacher told you, or a parent, or something you tell yourself. It could be something about your face, your body, your voice, the way you move, or something else entirely. Then try, just as an experiment, thinking of it as an asset. Like Alan Rickman’s voice. Try on how that feels. Think about characters, stories, even current projects to which that distinctive quality could bring something new and interesting. Make a deal with yourself to try to shift your thinking about whatever it is from handicap to asset, and see how it affects your work.
And if it helps you stay on track, watch an Alan Rickman movie and listen to that voice. As if you need an excuse.