Gurus: The Story of Acting from Stanislavsky to Succession

BD Wong seemed to come out of nowhere when he won multiple Best Actor awards, including a Tony, for his role in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly in 1988. In this interview we will hear the story of how he landed that part - he really did come out of nowhere - and how it was shaped by his hippie acting teacher in LA, a team of expert voice and movement coaches, the brilliant but abusive British director, Jon Dexter, and his very generous costar, John Lithgow. He shares his process for building a character, his feelings about the method and actors who go too far immersing themselves in a role, and the one thing he does just before “action.” We will also hear how he has navigated an incredibly varied career in film and television that has included recurring roles on Oz, Law and Order, Gotham, Mr. Robot, Nora From Queens, and in the film and video game franchise, Jurassic Park.

David Patrick Kelly's training journey - which he considers to be still ongoing - was of the “school of hard knocks” variety - his words. He considered going to Juilliard but couldn’t afford it. So he deliberately set out to cobble together a kind of do it yourself conservatory experience. That journey would take him to Paris where he trained with Marcel Marceau and back to America where he would find his way into the avant-garde theater of Richard Foreman, Hollywood action movies like The Warriors, 48 Hours, Last Man Standing, and the strange world of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. He studied with the legendary Russian, Mira Rostova, who famously coached Montgomery Clift. David also asked for - and got - on set tutorials from Christopher Plummer, Max Von Sydow and Chris Walken, in-between takes on the movie sets they shared. Not bad.

In 1897, a fateful meeting lasting 18 hours between Constantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, would give birth to the Moscow Art Theatre. The MAT would become the incubator for Stanislavsky’s evolving system of acting.

Cherry Jones is an American actress. Having started her career in theater as a founding member of the American Repertory Theater in 1980, she then transitioned into film and television. Celebrated for her dynamic roles on stage and screen, she has received various accolades, including three Primetime Emmy Awards (24, The Handmaid's Tale, Succession) and two Tony Awards (The Heiress, Doubt) as well as nominations for an Olivier Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award.

The shift in theatrical styles at the end of the 1800s was prompted by a parallel literary transformation. In fiction, figures like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky opened the door. Playwrights like Ibsen, Strindberg and Shaw demanded a new actor that would render authentic human behavior. Anton Chekhov was the essential playwright in that moment. In this episode we hear his back story and listen to letters between him and his wife, Olga Knipper, star of the Moscow Art Theatre.

Alan Ruck has made over 100 appearances in films and television, and on stage. He is best known for his role as the friend of Matthew Broderick and hopeless hypochondriac Cameron Frye, in John Hughes's "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" (1986) and as Connor Roy in the critically acclaimed HBO show "Succession" (2018).

When we drill down into the biographies and training histories of the cast of the hit show, "Succession," there's no uniformity of background. Some of them carry the pedigree you might expect: the American conservatories; Yale, Juilliard, Carnegie Mellon, or the London conservatories; RADA, LAMDA, and Central. Some come out of the New York studios; the Neighborhood Playhouse, Stella Adler, the Lee Strasberg Institute. A few have bypassed those training pathways altogether. This episode compares and contrasts the pathways of some of our favorite actors.

Stanislavsky, the early days. If you set out to raise a child who would grow to become a great actor, director, and theatrical guru, this is how you would go about it: expose him to all the arts, build him his own theater, and make sure he has plenty of money to pursue his hobbies. Just don’t be surprised when he abandons the family business and goes pro.

What came before Stanislavsky? In the late 19th century, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree was an actor, director and theater owner in London. He was the original Henry Higgins in Pygmalion directed by Shaw himself. Tree founded the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA.) Today he is forgotten. Tree’s theatre of excess demanded something new and different and true.

Alfre Woodard has been astonishing audiences with her humanity, her truth, her beauty, and her versatility as an actress since she first came into view in the early 1980’s. Starting on the stage in For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide when the Rainbow is Enuf and then in the film, Cross Creek with Mary Steenburgen, she’s practiced and perfected her craft in too many films and recurring TV series roles to recount here. We met around 20 years ago when I had the pleasure of sharing the stage with her at the 92nd Street Y for a performance of Voices of a People’s History of the United States that included her frequent co-star, Danny Glover. Alfre then, in person, was so warm and unassuming, it was no surprise to find her that way again in the  conversation you’re about to hear. We actually spoke twice - there was just too much to cover in one session - and I was glad because I really wanted to hear about her experience playing the healer woman, Paris, in the Apple TV series SEE. It’s about an imagined world, hundreds of years in the future, where sight has become extinct in humans and blindness is the common condition. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT. Alfre Woodard has received various accolades, including four Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and three Screen Actors Guild Awards, as well as nominations for an Academy Award and two Grammy Awards. In 2020, The New York Times ranked her as one of "The 25 Greatest Actors of the 21st Century".