Exploring Television Acting 9781474248587, 9781474248600, 9781474248594

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EXPLORING TELEVISION ACTING

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ALSO AVAILABLE FROM METHUEN DRAMA Acting on Television: A Craft Book for Screen Actors Genre and Performance: Film and Television Television: Critical Methods and Applications

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EXPLORING TELEVISION ACTING Edited by

TOM CANTRELL AND CHRISTOPHER HOGG

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METHUEN DRAMA Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Methuen Drama logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 This paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Tom Cantrell, Christopher Hogg and contributors, 2018 Tom Cantrell, Christopher Hogg and the contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Louise Dugdale Cover image: Luther © Photographer Robert Viglansky/BBC Photo Library All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cantrell, Tom, 1982- editor. | Hogg, Christopher, editor. Title: Exploring television acting / edited by Tom Cantrell and Christopher Hogg. Description: London ; New York : Methuen Drama, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017047788| ISBN 9781474248587 (hb) | ISBN 9781474248594 (epdf) | ISBN 9781474248570 (ePub) Subjects: LCSH: Television acting. | Television acting--Vocational guidance. | Television programs--Casting. | Television--Production and direction. Classification: LCC PN1992.8.A3 E97 2018 | DDC 791.4502/8--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017047788 ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-4858-7 PB: 978-1-3501-3919-0 ePDF: 978-1-4742-4859-4 eBook: 978-1-4742-4857-0 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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For Anna and Billy —Tom

For Patricia —Christopher

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CONTENTS

Notes on contributors ix Acknowledgements xii

Introduction

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Tom Cantrell and Christopher Hogg

PART ONE TELEVISION ACTING: HISTORIES AND INHERITANCES 1 Performing Sherlock: A study in studio and location realism 15 Richard Hewett

2 ‘Visible’ and ‘invisible’ performance: Framing performance in 1970s television drama 29 Douglas McNaughton

3 ‘No-nonsense rozzer’: Philip Glenister/Gene Hunt, Life on Mars and the particularity of television acting

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Stephen Lacey

PART TWO TELEVISION ACTING: APPROACHES AND PERSPECTIVES 4 ‘The organic and the technical’: A psychophysical approach to television acting 63 Tom Cantrell

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CONTENTS

5 Viola Davis: A context for her craft and success in series television 79 Cynthia Baron

6 ‘I’m going in there GC style’: Performance and performative contracts within a crossover of reality television environments 95 Louise Cope

7 Truth and ‘truthiness’ in acting the real

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Derek Paget

PART THREE TELEVISION ACTING: TRAINING AND INDUSTRY 8 Exploring actor training for television

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Trevor Rawlins

9 Accent on talent: The valorization of British actors on American quality television 140 Christine Becker

10 Exploring the casting of British and Irish actors in contemporary US television and film 154 Simone Knox

11 Well-being and the television actor: Challenges and coping strategies 171 Christopher Hogg and Charlotte Lucy Smith

Index 187

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CONTRIBUTORS

Cynthia Baron is a professor in the Department of Theatre and Film at Bowling Green State University. She is the author of Denzel Washington (2015) and Modern Acting: The Lost Chapter of American Film and Theatre (2016); the co-author of Reframing Screen Performance (2008) and Appetites and Anxieties:  Food, Film, and the Politics of Representation (2014); the co-editor of More Than a Method: Trends and Traditions in Film Performance (2004); the founding editor of The Projector: A Journal on Film, Media, and Culture and the series editor of Palgrave Studies in Screen Industries and Performance. Her forthcoming work includes a chapter on acting and performance in Craft of Criticism: Critical Media Studies in Practice and the co-authored book, Acting Indie: Aesthetics, Industry, and Performance. Christine Becker is an associate professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame, specializing in film and television history and critical analysis. Her book It’s the Pictures That Got Small: Hollywood Film Stars on 1950s Television (2009) won the 2011 IAMHIST Michael Nelson Prize for a Work in Media and History. She is currently working on a research project comparing contemporary American and British television production and programming. Tom Cantrell is a senior lecturer and the head of theatre at the University of York. He has published on modern British drama, documentary theatre and acting processes. Publications include Playing for Real: Actors on Playing Real People, co-edited with Mary Luckhurst (2010) and his monograph Acting in Documentary Theatre (2013). His most recent book, Acting in British Television, written with Christopher Hogg, was published in 2017. Louise Cope is a doctoral researcher and associate lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University. Her research primarily investigates the ways in which social class is represented in British television, drawing upon psychosocial and historical perspectives whilst analysing contemporary textual examples, particularly those of ‘factual’ programming and ‘reality’ television.

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Richard Hewett is Lecturer in Media Theory at the University of Salford; his research interests include the impact of changing production context upon television performance and the processes of adapting literary texts for television. His PhD thesis, ‘Acting for Auntie: From Studio Realism to Location Realism in BBC Television Drama, 1953–2008’, was completed in 2012 at the University of Nottingham, and he has since contributed articles to the Journal of British Cinema and Television, Adaptation, the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television and Critical Studies in Television. His first book, The Changing Spaces of Television Acting, was published in 2017. Christopher Hogg is Senior Lecturer in Television Theory at the University of Westminster. He has published work on television drama, television acting, international television adaptation and music in period film, in edited collections and journals such as the Journal of British Cinema and Television, Critical Studies in Television, the New Review of Film and Television Studies, Media International Australia and Senses of Cinema. His book, Acting in British Television, written with Tom Cantrell, was published in 2017. He is currently developing a new interdisciplinary research project (with Charlotte Lucy Smith) exploring the individual and situational factors which affect the psychological well-being of actors working in the UK television industry. Simone Knox is Lecturer in Film and Television at the University of Reading. Her research interests include the transnationalization of film and television (including audio-visual translation), aesthetics and medium specificity (including convergence culture, and acting and performance) and representations of minority identities. She has a particular interest in the lived experience of screen culture and often conducts practitioner interviews as part of her research. She sits on the board of editors for Critical Studies in Television and her publications include articles in Film Criticism, Journal of Popular Film and Television and New Review of Film and Television Studies, as well as the co-authored blog strand ‘What Actors Do’ for CSTOnline. Stephen Lacey is emeritus professor at the University of South Wales. He has published widely on post-war British theatre and television drama, including Tony Garnett (2006) and Cathy Come Home (2010). He is co-editor of the following:  (with Jonathan Bignell) British Television Drama:  Past, Present and Future (2000; 2nd ed. 2014); (with Ruth McElroy) Life on Mars: From Manchester to New  York (2012); and (with Derek Paget) The ‘War on Terror’:  Post-9/11 Television Drama, Docudrama and Documentary (2015). He was co-investigator on the AHRC-funded ‘Spaces of Television:  Production, Site and Style’ (with the Universities of Reading and Leicester). He is a founding editor and currently associate editor of Critical Studies in Television.

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Douglas McNaughton has a PhD in television studies and is a Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies at the University of Brighton. His research interests include British television drama, telefantasy, screen technologies and the sociology of space. His research focus is on the intersection of space, technology and labour in television production. Recent publications include work on the historical influence of the actors’ union Equity on British television production in the Journal of British Cinema and Television and research on experimental multicamera film technologies in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. His other publications include book chapters on television fandom and television melodrama. Derek Paget is visiting fellow in the Department of Film, Theatre & Television at the University of Reading, where he was principal investigator for the AHRC project ‘Acting with Facts:  Actors Performing the Real in British Theatre and Television since 1990’ (2007–2010). Before becoming an academic, his professional theatre work included West End productions, shows for Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop and experimental work at the Kings Head, Islington. He has authored two books – True Stories? Documentary Drama on Radio, Screen and Stage (1990) and No Other Way to Tell It:  Docudrama on Film and Television (1998, 2011). His many articles include a foundational piece on Verbatim Theatre for New Theatre Quarterly, written in 1987. Most recently he co-edited the collection Docudrama on European Television (2016). Trevor Rawlins is Head of the Department of Acting and Performance at Guildford School of Acting (GSA) at the University of Surrey. He trained at East 15 Acting School and has worked in the UK, the United States and New Zealand as an actor, writer and director. His experiences working as an actor in television and teaching acting in conservatoires led him to research and write a PhD thesis examining approaches to actor training for the screen. Upon completion in 2012 he was appointed to run the BA Acting programme at GSA, where he continues to develop his approach to actor training. Charlotte Lucy Smith is Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour and Management at Lincoln International Business School, University of Lincoln. Her research mainly focuses on employee reward (particularly non-cash forms), with recent projects exploring individuals’ experiences of recognition in organizations and higher education institutions. She also has an interest in workplace stress and is currently developing a new interdisciplinary research project (with Christopher Hogg) exploring the individual and situational factors which affect the psychological well-being of actors working in the UK television industry.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank all our contributors to the collection and the various actors, directors, writers and industry professionals who provided interview material for many of the chapters. Thanks also go to our colleagues in the School of Media, Arts and Design at the University of Westminster (with particular thanks to colleagues in the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media) and the Department of Theatre, Film and Television at the University of York. We have been supported in this research by the care and wisdom of our publishers at Bloomsbury, in particular John O’Donovan in the book’s earlier stages, and Camilla Erskine who saw it through to publication. We would also like to thank colleagues who have offered their time and expertise over the past few years. Thanks to Dr Kristyn Gorton, Prof. Andrew Tudor, Prof. Andrew Higson, Prof. Duncan Petrie, Prof. Michael Cordner, Prof. Judith Buchanan, Dr Tom Cornford, Dr Doug Kern, Dr Ollie Jones, Dr Nik Morris, Dr Mark Smith and Dr Karen Quigley. Tom would like to extend personal thanks to Robert Waiting and Amy Waite, Richard and Caroline Waiting; Robbie Nestor; Lily and Jonny Vincent; Alan Stewart; Brian, Janice, John and Richard Pinkstone; and his family – Richard, Rosie and Rachel Cantrell – for their support; and to Anna, for being brilliant. Christopher would personally like to thank Ged Maguire, Jane Thorburn, Rob Benfield and Rosie Thomas for their support and warm welcome to the University of Westminster. Thanks also to Nick Shay, Anja Müller and Scott Andrews for the London pub/film nights; to Patricia Hogg for the bacon sandwiches and unwavering belief; and to Charlotte, for everything.

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INTRODUCTION Tom Cantrell and Christopher Hogg

This collection brings together the work of twelve researchers in order to respond to a growing interest within television studies: the identification of the actor as being of significant conceptual and critical interest and crucial to the ways in which we understand television storytelling. In the actor, the interests within this discipline – textual, industrial, historical, technological and cultural – are made manifest. The actor therefore becomes a site at which the different (distinct or interconnected) strands of investigation within television studies collide and combine. For example, the actor’s work has a significant role to play in questions of genre and its relationship to style and tone. Similarly, it is the actor’s individual work on rhythm – of line delivery, movement, gesture, as well as rhythm of thought  – with which the editor and director work to construct and manipulate meaning in the final production. Likewise an actor’s previous work and their own celebrity status (or what Jordan has called a ‘background resonance’ [1981: 197–8]) combined with their interpretation of the current role, has a significant bearing on the creation of meaning in audience reception. It is the actor’s position as a site of convergence which has led Caughie to argue that acting is ‘very difficult to nail down analytically’ (2000: 162) and ‘tests the limits of critical language’ (2000: 170). Acting, and the role of the actor, thus run across critical frameworks, theoretical models and modes of analysis. For all of these complexities, this book aims to celebrate actors as being central to the discipline. The collection sets out to demonstrate that analysing the histories, contexts, careers, working methods and approaches of television actors enriches our understanding of television, and to ignore these areas leaves us with only a partial view of our object of study. This collection is a sibling to Acting in British Television, which was published by Palgrave in 2017. Acting in British Television features interviews with sixteen television actors. Across case-study chapters in four central television genres: soap opera, police and medical drama, comedy, and period drama, the book examines how actors create their celebrated portrayals. In our analysis of the actors’ work in these genres, we identify television as a specific medium which

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prompts actors to work in particular ways. Rather than seen as a poor relation to the time and space afforded to acting processes in theatre and film, we analyse the innovative and previously hidden acting approaches and identify the uniquely televisual properties of this work. Our aim in our two books is simple: to bring together new material, both from actors working in television and from researchers investigating acting on television. As we will go on to explore, this area has been neglected in scholarship within television studies and as such acting, as an area of enquiry in its own right, sits at the margins of current critical discourse (and is frequently similarly side-lined in many television or media studies courses within universities and colleges). We want this to change and for analysis of the work of television actors to be as prominent in research and teaching as the far more well-established critical engagement with the work of writers and directors. Acting in British Television focused primarily on acting process and how actors work on television roles. By contrast, in the eleven chapters that comprise this collection, the authors take a more holistic view of the actor. The collection not only explores case-study programmes, celebrated performances by leading actors, and the actors’ creative approaches to developing their television work, it also analyses the work of the actor in the context of other key roles in the production of television work, such as the ‘performance’ of camera operators. In addition, this collection investigates the actor’s wider career, such as via emerging trends in casting processes, trans-Atlantic work and actor well-being. Bringing together cultural theorists, actor trainers, theatre and performance scholars, management experts and television researchers and historians, this collection provides a rounded view of the work and career of the television actor.

Acting on television This work is part of a growing appreciation of acting on television. Until relatively recently, the actor has received significantly less attention for their work on television than they have for their work on film or stage. Both film and theatre studies have a long critical tradition of analysing acting. An appreciation of these as distinct disciplines can be found not only in scholarly literature but also in pedagogies for actor training, suggesting that both academics and actor trainers acknowledge that these media call on specific skills and for the actor to modulate their work in particular ways. The same, however, cannot be said of acting on television which does not have this lineage and only recently has attention been drawn to acting on television by the industry and training institutions. Eighteen years ago, John Caughie asked ‘What Do Actors Do When They Act?’ in his seminal chapter on the subject of television acting (2000). In the chapter, Caughie stressed the conspicuous ‘absence of theoretically informed critical writing about [television] acting’, noting that whilst there is ‘a considerable body of writing about film stardom, and some about television personalities . . . there

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is very little attention to reading the actor’ (2000: 162). Our present collection, like Acting in British Television, can be seen as a response to Caughie’s question, and should be viewed within the context of other responses to his appeal for action in this research area. There have been a number of valuable chapters and articles that begin to address this absence since the initial publication of Caughie’s chapter. For example, Roberta Pearson’s ‘The Multiple Determinants of Television Acting’ (2010) offers a valuable examination of the force-field of production elements and concerns that impact upon television acting, focusing primarily upon the US production context. Her work can be seen as an antecedent to the focus of two chapters in this collection in which Simone Knox and Christine Becker tighten the focus to analyse the precise relationship between British performers and American casting practices. Lucy Fife Donaldson’s article ‘Camera and Performer:  Energetic Engagement with The Shield’ (2012) provides further insight into the creative conditions of television acting, investigating the relationship between actor and camera in US cop drama, an aspect which will be considered in a historical UK context in this collection by Douglas McNaughton. Donaldson’s work on the creative conditions of television acting has also been extended to consider the significance of studio and location environments for the television actor via McNaughton’s article ‘ “Constipated, studiobound, wall-confined, rigid”: British Actors’ Equity and BBC Television Drama, 1948–1972’ (2014) and via a trio of articles by Richard Hewett (2013, 2014 and 2015). Hewett’s forthcoming monograph, The Changing Spaces of Television Acting (Manchester University Press), also promises to be a valuable addition to this emergent body of actor-focused research into the relationship between television acting and the creative conditions and working processes of British television, and we are delighted to include his most recent research in this collection. In addition to these recent publications, there have been two illuminating UK-based symposia investigating television acting specifically; the first, organized by the authors, Playing the Small Screen (University of York, July 2012), and the second, organized by Simone Knox and Stephen Lacey, Acting on Television (University of Reading, April 2016). In addition, since 2015, Knox has co-authored a blog strand for CSTOnline.tv, titled ‘What Actors Do’, with Gary Cassidy. As evidenced by such recent activity, and as we argue elsewhere (Cantrell and Hogg 2016), over the past few years, researchers have been energetically pursuing answers to Caughie’s question. This book aims to make a significant contribution to arriving at those answers.

Television acting/television performance As noted above, the position of the actor as a site of convergence, not only in critical trends within television studies but also within the creative context of

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television production, means that there are significant complexities when analysing their work. We would also suggest that the very term ‘television acting’ resists easy definition. In our previous research into this area (Cantrell and Hogg 2016, 2017) we have distinguished television acting from television performance. We have used ‘acting’ to refer specifically to the actor’s portrayal of a character within a dramatic context, and identified ‘performance’ as a term that extends more broadly to other forms of performative involvement within television. In this light, we identified that ‘performance’ extends to the inflection of an actor’s work by other performative elements beyond the contributions of the actor themselves, such as costume, lighting, framing and editing, for example. This distinction was a deliberate intervention designed to focus attention on the creative contribution of actors. This distinction has been important, as a broad trend within previous screen acting analysis has been to conflate the actor’s contributions with other adjacent modes of ‘performance’.1 Elisions of this kind appear regularly in journalistic appraisals of television acting. For instance, in an article for The Guardian titled ‘Happy Valley TV Review – Sarah Lancashire Gives Her Best Performance’ (2014), Mark Lawson frames his review of Lancashire’s ‘performance’ almost entirely through noting the repeated use of close shots of her ‘bloodied face’ and discussing the merits of the script provided by writer Sally Wainwright, as opposed to reflecting upon what Lancashire actually offers up as an actor portraying a character within that story. Across the chapters that comprise this collection, the actor’s work will be analysed from a wide range of viewpoints and using different critical frameworks. However, throughout the collection, the key focus of the contributors has been on the actor, not other performative elements. We have been careful to avoid treading a familiar path of writing about editing or directing as if these are the primary determinants of television acting. Rather, when contributors consider adjacent modes of performance, such as those of the editor, director or camera operator, the analysis will return to the question of how these impact on the work of the actor. We recognize that such adjacent performative elements undoubtedly inflect the work of the television actor considerably and therefore certainly merit recognition in the analysis of television acting. Our contention, rather, is that these elements should not conceal the work of the television actor, but can be used as ways to illuminate the actor’s contribution. As suggested above, this collection is also interested in the training of actors for television and the appreciation of television as a form that involves specific challenges and opportunities for the actor. At the Playing the Small Screen symposium mentioned above, the authors brought together television actors, actor trainers and academics (and those who combine these roles) to discuss this very question. A number of high-profile British drama schools were represented by staff who lead or contribute to the screen training components of their programmes, including the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), the

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London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA), the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, Guilford School of Acting and Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. It became clear through round-table discussions, presentations and subsequent conversations that all of these institutions have recently or are currently redesigning their training approaches for television, reflecting the fact that the specific demands of television acting and how training institutions should best prepare their students for this work are presently high on the agenda. The actor trainers who spoke at the symposium were continuing to design innovative new programmes of training. Moreover, it was evident that such programmes were being constructed with an aim to move beyond the more well established technical acting classes for television, in place in various forms at RADA, for example, since the 1950s, in an attempt to meet the needs of a then relatively new performance medium.2 These traditional technical classes, with their focus on becoming familiar with a studio environment and the industrial processes of making television, may have prepared actors for the day-to-day practicalities of working in the medium but left most of the more fundamental questions of character construction and narrative development, as well as those concerning the practical logistics of a career in television, largely untouched. One of the intentions of this book is to provide a resource which might assist the theoretical underpinning of these developments in actor training for television drama. When designing courses on acting for the stage, actor trainers can choose from a rich range of potential models of character construction and development. By contrast, the relative lack of research noted above means that designing new syllabuses to prepare actors for the specific challenges of television acting is a difficult undertaking. This book aims to assist in tackling these challenges.

The chapters Television acting: Histories and inheritances This collection is organized into three sections, each with a particular angle on the actor’s work on television. The first section includes three chapters which explore the ways in which historical, industrial, organizational and technological developments have shaped television acting. The first chapter, ‘Performing Sherlock: A Study in Studio and Location Realism’ by Richard Hewett, analyses three televisual treatments of one of the most famous Sherlock Holmes stories, The Hound of the Baskervilles. Hewett places three versions of the same scene – the initial consultation between Holmes, Watson and their client – side by side. Hewett examines the 1968 BBC version, the 1988 Granada television film, and the 2012 Sherlock episode and discusses the key role that production processes play in the shaping of television performances. In particular, Hewett considers what he has termed ‘studio realism’ and ‘location realism’ and

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explores how the different approaches to rehearsals, blocking, and the material context of performance have influenced the actor’s work. Hewett uses this historical span to consider the evolution of acting style, scale and gestural range in relation to these celebrated versions of Conan Doyle’s novella. Alongside Hewett’s chapter is Douglas McNaughton’s chapter, ‘ “Visible” and “Invisible” Performance: Framing Performance in 1970s Television Drama’. McNaughton explores the relationship between ‘visible’ performance by actors and ‘invisible’ performance by camera operators. With reference to Jacobs’ identification of television as an ‘intimate screen’ (2000) in which the focus on the nuances of the actor’s facial expression is so central, McNaughton considers the collaborative process between actors and camera operators, highlighting the contribution of camera operators to the generation of onscreen television performance. McNaughton uses archival resources, institutional and textual analysis, and new practitioner interviews to consider the interaction between the actor’s performance and camerawork in the 1970s multi-camera television studio. He focuses his analysis on the BBC’s I, Claudius (1976) to consider the proxemics of performance both in front of and behind the camera. Like Hewett, McNaughton charts these dynamics in relation to the development of camera mobility across the history of television drama. The final chapter that comprises this section is Stephen Lacey’s ‘ “No-Nonsense Rozzer”:  Philip Glenister/Gene Hunt, Life on Mars and the Particularity of Television Acting’. Lacey analyses one of the most iconic television performances in recent years. He identifies the range of ‘acting’ on television and notes the ‘particularity’ of this medium. Lacey’s chapter focuses on the specificities of the drama format and questions of method. Through his analysis of Glenister’s work on Life on Mars (BBC 2006–7), which he defines as a hybrid of cop show and sci-fi drama, Lacey identifies the micro and the macro influences on the actor’s work: the specifics of the studio environment and the technology used, and also the wider ecology of broadcasting. By using this as a context for his detailed textual analysis of a scene from Life on Mars, Lacey demonstrates that it is the particularity of the contexts in which television actors work that makes acting on television distinctive.

Television acting: Approaches and perspectives The second section comprises four chapters that focus on particular performances. Tom Cantrell’s chapter, ‘ “The Organic and the Technical”:  A Psychophysical Approach to Television Acting’, considers Stanislavski’s writings on psychophysical acting (which were designed for stage work) and how this term might be understood in the context of the actor’s work on television. Focusing on Jason Watkins’s BAFTA-award-winning portrayal of the title character in The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies (ITV 2014), Cantrell uses new interview material with Watkins to scrutinize how the two constituent parts of the

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term, the psychological and the physical, functioned in the service of character development for television. Watkins met Christopher Jefferies in his preparation to portray him in this docudrama, and the challenges of playing a real person formed the focus of Watkins’s process. By analysing Watkins’s private work, away from formalized rehearsal time, Cantrell explores the innovative and previously uncharted work that goes into creating a television performance. Cynthia Baron’s chapter, ‘Viola Davis: A Context for Her Craft and Her Success in Series Television’, explores the work on US television of the three-time Emmy Award winning actor. Davis became the first black artist to win an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series for her portrayal of law professor Annalise Keating in How to Get Away with Murder (ABC 2014). Baron’s chapter charts American television’s troubled history of representation of black characters and contextualizes Davis’s work by considering significant milestones in portrayals by black actors. Including interview material from Davis on her role in The Help (2011) as well as a detailed analysis of her training at Julliard, Baron explores Davis’s contribution to new representations in American television. Baron offers an examination of Davis’s performance on How to Get Away with Murder and draws on Stanislavski’s ‘Active Analysis’ and ‘Events’ to consider specific moments in her portrayal. Louise Cope’s chapter looks at a very different form of performance. In her chapter, ‘ “I’m Going in There GC Style”: Performance and Performative Contracts within a Crossover of Reality Television Environments’, Cope examines the rapid rise in popularity of constructed reality television over the past few years and analyses what constitutes ‘performance’ and ‘acting’ within it. Cope charts the range of hybrid and convergent forms which have come to dominate some channels’ schedules. She analyses the complex negotiation with viewers around performative credibility, and unpicks the interweaving of role and self which lies at the heart of programmes such as The Only Way is Essex (ITV 2010–). Cope questions how the participants master the ‘performance of the self’ and what ‘authenticity’ means within performance in these contexts. Using the example of Gemma Collins, who launched her television career in The Only Way is Essex, Cope examines questions of agency, acting skills and the notion of a ‘marketable self’ within these negotiated contexts. The final chapter in the ‘Approaches and Perspectives’ section is Derek Paget’s ‘Truth and “Truthiness” in Acting the Real’. Paget was the Principal Investigator on the AHRC project ‘Actors Performing the Real in British Theatre and Television since 1990’ (2007–10) and here he reflects on the findings of the project and re-evaluates them in the context of the contemporary televisual landscape. Drawing on a wide range of interviews with celebrated actors such as Hugh Bonneville and Maxine Peake, Paget explores how actors experienced their training for television, the industrial context of their work, and also their view of the cultural currency of television acting. In particular, Paget considers the different vocabularies that actors and academics use to talk about acting. He probes terms such as ‘truth’ and ‘essence’ in the context

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of playing real people on television. Like the Introduction above, Paget pursues Caughie’s question and arrives at ‘truthiness’ as a useful term to unpick television acting in this ‘Documentary Moment’.

Television acting: Training and industry Part Three explores the wider context of a modern television actor’s career with analyses of their training for the profession, their well-being within it, and the casting practices of British and American television. The first chapter, ‘Exploring Actor Training for Television’, is by Trevor Rawlins who is the Head of Acting at Guildford School of Acting, one of Britain’s most celebrated drama schools. Since Rawlins has run the actor training courses at the School, he has overhauled their provision for training television actors. In his chapter, Rawlins analyses these changes and the ways in which he aims to equip actors to work effectively in television. He charts the historic reliance on theatre within conservatoire training and how the employment landscape has changed in recent years. Via an analysis of the power dynamics at the heart of training actors, he considers how to train resilient, resourceful actors whose skill-set allows them to work across theatre, film and television and, crucially, also across new digital platforms. The next two chapters analyse the relationship between American and British television acting, from the point of view of researchers from both sides of the Atlantic. Christine Becker’s chapter, ‘Accent on Talent:  The Valorization of British Actors on American Quality Television’, explores the prominence of British actors in American television drama. Becker analyses the cultural rhetoric offered by journalistic coverage and the effect this has on perpetuating the familiar axiom that British television actors are more talented and better trained than their American counterparts. Considering the work of both famed and unfamiliar actors to US audiences, Becker explores the notion of the ‘un-starry’ UK actor and also the ways in which an actor’s star image can be framed by broader cultural assumptions that reach beyond the actor’s individual skills. Central to Becker’s argument is that the nature of these cultural assumptions perpetuates gender inequality in television. Using interview material with actors, casting directors and studio executives, Becker analyses the male-dominated westward flow of actors. From a British perspective, Simone Knox’s chapter, ‘Exploring the Casting of British and Irish Actors in Contemporary US Television and Film’, contextualizes the current profile of British and Irish actors in American television within similar trends throughout the history of cinema. Knox explores this area with reference to four new interviews – with a talent agent, an Equity official, an actor, and a casting director. Together they provide a detailed and rounded view of the current practices which have been so crucial to the success of British actors in the US. Knox considers employment and immigration law, auditions and casting processes, and uses the example of Hugh Laurie’s casting process

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for House (Fox 2004–12) to analyse the mechanisms which have enabled a number of British actors to gain success and recognition on contemporary American television. In the final chapter of this book, ‘Well-being and the Television Actor:  Challenges and Coping Strategies’, Christopher Hogg and Charlotte Lucy Smith use new interview data with actors to analyse the challenges to wellness that actors can face within the television industry. Building upon Maxwell, Seton and Szabo’s study of actor well-being in Australia (2015), Hogg and Smith explore the reality of working in contemporary television. Their interview data comes from three actors currently working in the industry but at different stages in their careers. The chapter thus maps the difficulties, responses and coping strategies employed by early-career and established actors in what is for many a precarious and high-pressure employment environment. This material is contextualized within recent research into stress, mental health and the performing arts, allowing the authors to bring valuable insights regarding actors’ well-being to light for the first time.

What next? The eleven chapters which comprise this collection are designed to provide a rounded view on acting in television. They are written by academics from a range of disciplines and explore the writer’s particular interests within this field. We are aware, however, that any research is defined by what is left out as much as what is included, and this is brought into sharp relief by the historical, cultural and, in particular, technological moment at which the collection has been written. As many contemporary television scholars have noted, technological advances provoke fundamental questions about what television is. No longer the ‘black box’ in the corner of the room, television is now consumed on a variety of devices, in limitless locations, and at times to suit the individual viewer. This raises questions about television as a broadcast medium, as a social medium (watched by groups in a domestic setting), but also about performance. This collection tends to focus on broadcast television, but as more and more television is consumed after initial broadcast, via ‘binge’ viewing habits, viewers can watch a character develop across hours of material. What difference does this make to acting on television? If a six-part mini-series can be consumed in a single day, or even a single sitting, does this affect the actors’ work? Given the change in viewing habits, these questions begin to come to the fore; no doubt over the next few years this trend will continue to evolve, and new questions will arise. There are other emergent trends across the contemporary televisual landscape which look set to provoke further questions about acting and performance. Over the last few years, soap operas and police and medical procedural dramas in particular have experimented with ‘event’ episodes which are filmed and transmitted

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live. Most recently, the BBC’s flagship medical drama, Casualty (1986-), transmitted a one-take episode. The hour long, single-camera episode was broadcast just before this book’s completion on 29 July 2017. These episodes, though still marketed as being distinct and experimental, are becoming a regular addition to television drama. Such developments further complicate the actor’s work on television. For example, one of the regular cast members of Casualty, Catherine Shipton (who plays Lisa Duffin), described the one-take process as being ‘like a stage play’ (Brown 2017). Indeed, such forms of production evidence parallels with the more ‘theatrical’ performance contexts of early live-transmission single-plays for television. Therefore, rather than conforming to a narrative of television drama’s steady historical distancing from theatrical traditions and practices, it is clear from Shipton’s experience of shooting in one take that questions persist regarding the nature of acting in hybrid and convergent media as opposed to more discrete conceptions of theatre, film and television. Convergent conditions such as this are thus useful in exploring what elements of an actor’s work are medium specific, what can be adapted across media, and how actors navigate these distinctions. The combination of increasing production budgets for television and technological advances has also seen techniques once the province of film becomes standard on television. Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) and chroma key (or ‘green screen’) technologies are now commonplace in contemporary television. Both of these technologies remove the actor from some or all of the context in which their work takes place, including set, props and, on occasion, the other actors. Most of the performances explored in this collection take place on set or on location. The impact of these environments is examined in the chapters herein, but if the direction of travel continues, actors will have to become increasingly familiar with the challenge of working with less and less of the material world of the drama accessible to them. Again, this raises profound questions about how actors are trained for television, how they generate their portrayals, and how directors work with actors. This collection, therefore, focuses on acting on television at a time of change. As the chapters here demonstrate, there is much to learn about the work of actors both in contemporary television and in the history of the medium. As well as providing analysis of the work of the actor from a wide range of standpoints, we also hope that this collection provides rich potential approaches to exploring new and emergent forms of television performance.

Notes 1 Baron and Carnicke’s assert that ‘both academics and journalists . . . identify film performance with almost anything other than actors’ labor and agency’ (2008: 17). This remains a persistent truth in the study and discussion of screen

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acting in general. The particularities of the screen actor’s work often become overshadowed by the more visible ‘authorial’ status of the director, writer, producer or televisual ‘showrunner’ hyphenate, or conflated with the more easily discernible formal components of the finished performance text, such as framing, editing, lighting, costume and set design, for example, as parallel/intersecting performative elements. Tellingly, prominent essay collections with a cinematic focus, such as Lesley Stern and George Kouvaros’s Falling for You: Essays on Cinema and Performance (1999) and Cynthia Baron, Diane Carson and Frank P. Tomasulo’s More than a Method: Trends and Traditions in Contemporary Film (2004), are inclined to foreground the director in framing their investigations of screen acting. More recently, Claudia Springer and Julie Levinson’s Acting (2015) offers welcome new material on screen acting and includes interview data from the actors themselves, but still views film acting chiefly through the lens of broader technological, industrial and aesthetic shifts within the medium over the last century. 2 Hewett (2015: 81) outlines the limited success of such early classes at RADA, from the perspective of actors subsequently working on television.

References Baron, C. and S. M. Carnicke (2008), Reframing Screen Performance, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Baron, C., D. Carson and F. P. Tomasulo (eds) (2004), More than a Method: Trends and Traditions in Contemporary Film, Michigan: Wayne State University Press. Bright, R. (2015), Interview with authors, 7 June, London. Brown, D. (2017), ‘Casualty’s Duffy on the Secrets of the One-Shot Episode – Cathy Shipton Interview’, The Radio Times, 29 July. Cantrell, T. and C. Hogg (2016), ‘Returning to an Old Question: What Do Television Actors Do When They Act?’, Critical Studies in Television, 11 (3): 283–98. Cantrell, T. and C. Hogg (2017), Acting in British Television, London: Palgrave. Caughie, J. (2000), ‘What Do Actors Do When They Act?’, in J. Bignell, S. Lacey and M. MacMurraugh-Kavanagh (eds), British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future, 1st ed., 162–74, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Fife Donaldson, L. (2012), ‘Camera and Performer: Energetic Engagement with The Shield’, in J. Jacobs and S. Peacock (eds), Television Aesthetics and Style, 209–18, London: Continuum Press. Hewett, R. (2013), ‘Acting in the New World: Studio and Location Realism in Survivors’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 10 (2): 321–39. Hewett, R. (2014), ‘Spaces of Preparation: The Acton ‘Hilton’ and Changing Patterns of Television Drama Rehearsal’, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 34, (3): 331–44. Hewett, R. (2015), ‘The Changing Determinants of UK Television Acting’, Critical Studies in Television, 10 (1): 73–90. Hewett, R. (2017), The Changing Spaces of Television Acting, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jacobs, J. (2000), The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Jordan, M. (1981), ‘Realism and Convention’, in R. Dyer (ed.), Coronation Street, London: BFI. Lawson, M. (2014), ‘Happy Valley TV Review – Sarah Lancashire Gives Her Best Performance’, The Guardian, 3 June. Available online: http://www.theguardian. com/tv-and-radio/2014/jun/03/happy-valley-end-of-series-tv-review-mark-lawson (accessed 1 May 2015). Maxwell, I., M. Seton and M. Szabo (2015), ‘The Australian Actors’ Wellbeing Study: A Preliminary Report’, About Performance: The Lives of Actors, 13: 69–113. McNaughton, D. (2014), ‘ “Constipated, Studio-Bound, Wall-Confined, Rigid”: British Actors’ Equity and BBC Television Drama, 1948–1972’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 11 (1): 1–22. Pearson, R. (2010), ‘The Multiple Determinants of Television Acting’, in C. Cornea (ed.), Genre and Performance: Film and Television, 166–83, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Phillips, S. (2016), Interview with authors, 6 June, York. Springer, C. and J. Levinson (eds) (2015), Acting. London: I.B. Tauris. Stern, L. and G. Kouvaros (1999), Falling for You: Essays on Cinema and Performance, Sydney: Power Publications. Wilton, P. (2015), Interview with authors, 11 September, London.

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PART ONE

TELEVISION ACTING: HISTORIES AND INHERITANCES

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1 PERFORMING SHERLOCK: A STUDY IN STUDIO AND LOCATION REALISM Richard Hewett

Given his status as one of literature’s most popular creations, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes  – usually accompanied by his faithful chronicler, Dr Watson – has been less ubiquitous on British television screens than might be imagined. Having debuted in 1951, played by Andrew Osborn in The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone (BBC), the Baker Street sleuth returned a few months later in the guise of Alan Wheatley for a series of six live plays. Viewers then had to wait until 1965 for a home-grown run of episodes,1 this time featuring Douglas Wilmer; when this production returned in 1968, it was Peter Cushing who donned the deerstalker. In 1984, Granada’s series saw Jeremy Brett injecting a 7 per cent solution in the long-running and popular production, but following Brett’s death in 1995 there were few attempts to revive Holmes in the UK, and audiences had to wait until 2010 for the character’s enormously successful twenty-first-century reimagining in the form of Sherlock (BBC 2010–), starring Benedict Cumberbatch. I have written elsewhere (Hewett 2013; 2017) of the prominent role that production process plays in the shaping of television performances, and Holmes’s UK television career conveniently spans the eras I have termed ‘studio realism’ and ‘location realism’  – from the multi-camera set-up of the 1960s episodes, through the single-camera filming of the Granada programmes, and up to the HD techno-wizardry of the modern series. As will be seen, these three versions illustrate in various ways the chief characteristics of the models I  developed in order to unpack the evolution of British television acting, which are briefly outlined below:

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Studio Realism

Location Realism

1. Actors are working primarily in a constructed space, that is the studio set, providing a link with the traditional practices of theatre performance.

1. Actors are working primarily in a ‘real’ location, whether exterior or interior, as opposed to a performance space created for that purpose.

2. Performances are prepared in advance, 2. Performances are evolved ‘on site’, with in a separate space such as the little or no prior preparation, allowing rehearsal room, before being transferred actors to respond to the environment in to the recording site. which they are working. 3. Scenes are performed in their entirety, with limited opportunity for retakes.

3. Master shots aside, scenes are performed repeatedly, in segments, to accommodate different shot framings.

4. Representation of reality is mediated by both space (typically an artificial, threewalled set) and technology.

4. Representation of reality, though mediated by technology, is less shaped by the use of an artificial or constructed performance space.

5. Use of voice and body are ‘scaled down’ from the level of projection required for the stage, but still feature a greater degree of projection than would be employed in real life.

5. Body and voice are used on a scale similar to that employed in real life.

6. Physical movement is often designed to provide visual interest within the set, rather than deriving from character objectives.

6. Physical movement derives from the situation and character objectives; visual interest is produced by framings and editing.

7. Gesture is employed selectively to signify meaning and intent, though on a smaller scale than that used in the theatre.

7. Gesture to signify meaning and intent is minimal.

8. Clarity of diction is paramount.

8. Clarity of diction is not always required.

These will now be applied to three televised versions of Doyle’s novella The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) – one of the most adapted stories in the Holmes canon. The iterations chosen for analysis and comparison are the two-part 1968 BBC version, featuring Cushing; the 1988 Granada television film, with Brett; and the 2012 Sherlock episode ‘The Hounds of Baskerville’, starring Cumberbatch. While the latter is, in strict terms, a pastiche rather than an adaptation, it features a scenario common to all three: the initial consultation between Holmes, Watson and their client. In the 1968 and 1988 versions this is Dr Mortimer, representing Sir Henry Baskerville, while in Sherlock the client is Henry Knight – a Baskerville manqué. While, as television versions of a much-adapted text, there is the risk

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that these examples will include some ‘cross-contamination’ in terms of the performance of Holmes and Watson, each actor in fact brings a distinct approach, while still remaining very much of their respective periods – and the characters of Mortimer and Knight, who arguably carry less ‘baggage’ in terms of performance preconceptions, act as a useful barometer of the extent to which production context helps shape acting style.

1968 The Hound of the Baskervilles centres round the fears of Dr James Mortimer for his new neighbour Sir Henry Baskerville, recently arrived from America to take up inheritance of the Baskerville estate in Dartmoor following the death of his uncle, Sir Charles. The latter had, according to Mortimer, recently become obsessed with the legend of a spectral hound that is believed to have killed his notorious ancestor Sir Hugo, and the discovery of a dog’s footprints next to Sir Charles’s corpse has once more fuelled local superstitions. The book opens with Watson, surreptitiously observed by Holmes in the reflection of his silver coffee pot, examining a walking stick left by the absent-minded Mortimer, who called while the duo were out. The 1968 version begins with a colourful depiction of the legend of Sir Hugo being hounded to his doom, followed by the regular opening series titles and music, and then features two brief scenes culminating in the death of Sir Charles (Ballard Berkeley) – an event only related by Mortimer in the book – before moving to the Baker Street sequence which provides our case study. The scene opens with a foreground close-up of the coffee pot, through the handle of which Holmes (Cushing) can be seen observing the examination by the off-camera Watson (Nigel Stock). The camera then pulls out and pans left (somewhat jerkily) to reveal Watson, before cutting to a close-up of the stick in his hands. When Holmes asks Watson to apply his own methods and ‘reconstruct the man’ by examining his stick, the line is clearly enunciated by Cushing, and projected at a volume slightly louder than that which would be needed for normal conversation in a similarly sized space. However, both here and throughout the episode Cushing does not over-project, and his Holmes is notably softer spoken than either Brett’s or Cumberbatch’s. An experienced television actor who had by this point spent several years working in film, Cushing had learned to ‘scale down’ his performance from that which would be necessary, for example, in the theatre. Others to have recognized Cushing’s facility for television include Lez Cooke, who praises his skill in ‘close-up’ acting for the camera in Rudolph Cartier’s Saturday Night Theatre production of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (2003: 26). In this sense, while Cushing’s acting might still be regarded as somewhat stage derived, he represents the emerging period of studio realism, in which actors

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were coming to understand the degree of vocal projection and scale of physical gesticulation required for the multi-camera studio set-up. Indeed, Cushing is in several respects less ‘theatrical’ – if we employ the term in the same sense as James Naremore, who defines it as involving ‘a degree of ostensiveness which marks it off from quotidian behaviour’ (1988: 17) – than the later Brett and Cumberbatch, though as will be seen this is as much due to personal style and actor choice as production process. In contrast, Nigel Stock as Watson is far more projected, over-stressing key words to convey meaning; his delivery of the line ‘Me, Holmes?’, for example, emphasizes Watson’s surprise that Holmes should solicit his opinion. Much has been made of the long history of ‘buffoonish’ portrayals of Watson, and while some claim that Stock’s performance was a departure from this stereotype, his performance choices serve as clear signalling devices that the character is, alas, setting himself up for a fall in his attempts to apply Holmes’s deductive methods. Signifiers include Watson’s self-satisfied chuckle at his cleverness in deducing that the owner of the well-worn stick walks frequently (scarcely a difficult conclusion), as does his dramatic turn towards Holmes when he exclaims, ‘He’s a doctor!’ Finally, Stock’s adoption of the stance of a performer, arms slightly bent at his sides, as Watson delivers his coup de grace (‘I should say that the owner is an elderly practitioner. . .’) proves a comic prelude to Holmes’s gentle – yet devastating – debunking and correction of the majority of his deductions. The scene also features much of the unnecessary physical movement that typifies studio realism, designed to provide visual interest in what would otherwise be a static conversation, rather than deriving from the objectives of the characters themselves. To facilitate Stock’s movement into a position from which both he and the walking stick will be in medium close-up, it is necessary for him and Cushing to swap positions. The latter therefore moves out of shot towards the rear of the set in order to light his cigarette (an action not specified in the book), leaving Stock free to move forward to where Cushing had previously been sitting. Stock then moves to the left of the frame, the camera tracking with him, as Cushing returns ‘downstage’ to seat himself in a different chair, now facing Stock but with the back of his head to the camera as he smokes. He then rises, takes the stick from Stock, and crosses back to where the latter had begun the scene, for the purpose of obtaining his magnifying glass, with which he then commences his own investigation, leaving Stock downstage and on the right of the frame, a reversal of their initial positioning. Such manoeuvres illustrate both the perceived need for some form of action on screen and the lack of mobility of the pedestal-mounted studio cameras, but at least demonstrate an attempt on the part of director Graham Evans to avoid an entirely frontal performance, and escape the sense of a three-walled set which typified so much studio realist drama.

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However, there are several moments where the exigencies of multi-camera are all too obvious. While Cushing examines the stick in the background, Stock remains at the front of the frame in medium close-up, in order that his increasingly affronted facial expressions (as Holmes corrects his various deductive errors) can be read by the camera. At this point Stock is standing partially side-on to the camera, his back to Cushing as the latter continues to speak – hardly a natural position for two people conducting a conversation, but necessary if the faces of each are to remain visible to the audience. After Holmes observes the arrival of both Mortimer and his curly haired spaniel through the window, Cushing is clearly aware of the camera tracking backwards as he moves forwards, controlling his own pace in order to avoid collision, and pulling a ‘thoughtful’ face, his eyes moving sideways to indicate cogitation. Later in the scene, a slight shadow is cast over the now-seated Cushing when Stock (off-screen) inadvertently stands in his light. As Dr Mortimer, David Leland takes a similarly gestural path to Nigel Stock, pointing at his stick in recognition when he enters the set, and exclaiming loudly. The actor then strolls round the apartment in long shot as Mortimer outlines the mysterious circumstances surrounding Sir Charles’s death. While it is possible that a client would so dominate the space of a famous detective on his first visit – Mortimer’s pacing arguably typifying the nervous energy with which Leland imbues the character – this movement again demonstrates the perceived need to provide some form of visual stimulus. Leland’s gestural performance is completed by him raising his hand (in a manner that can only be described as dramatic) on the line: ‘By the time that I reached him, he was dead.’ Of the three performers, Cushing would, by today’s standards, be regarded as the least projected. Moments such as the sudden exhalation of smoke through his nostrils when Mortimer confesses to coveting Holmes’s skull, and the brushing of cigarette ash from his dressing gown near the close of the sequence, seemingly occur spontaneously, though they were doubtless carefully pre-rehearsed ‘bits of business’. However, even in Cushing’s performance there are also examples of stage-derived, gestural acting. The actor uses both Holmes’s cigarette and magnifying glass to point and gesture (though not as broadly as Stock and Leland), and also employs several non-verbal signifiers, such as an intrigued ‘Ah!’ when Mortimer hands Holmes the scroll detailing the legend of the hound. The 1968 scene is indicative that studio realism was gradually reducing the scale of performance employed for stage work  – which is what most British actors of the time were trained for, and where they received their grounding. Some performers, whether through instinct or experience, were adapting more quickly than others, Peter Cushing being a case in point. By the time of the Granada television film in 1988, studio realism had become far more established, but the increased use of single-camera film for television drama meant that significant changes were afoot.

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1988 In the late 1980s single-camera film production was beginning to overtake multicamera as the preferred production model for British television drama, and by the time Granada’s production of Sherlock Holmes stories ceased in the mid1990s, the latter model only continued to be employed for situation comedies and soaps. However, this shift  – which had arguably begun in the 1970s with Euston Films’ series productions, and prestigious serials such as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (BBC 1979) – was a slow one, and the still-projected, gestureinflected style of studio realism did not disappear overnight. The 1988 version of The Hound of the Baskervilles opens with Sir Charles’s death as part of the opening title sequence. The action then cuts to shots of Granada’s exterior Baker Street set, ending with a slow close-up on the door to 221B. This then cuts to a medium interior shot of Holmes (Brett) with the coffee pot, the lid of which Brett lifts to observe Watson, signalling Holmes’s enjoyment with a slight smile. Watson (Edward Hardwicke) is also seated, in the background, with his back to the camera, but turns, startled, on Brett’s line ‘What do you make of it, Watson?’ From the outset, Brett is more vocally projected than Hardwicke; a reverse of the 1968 situation due largely to Brett’s more overtly ‘theatrical’ performance. While both Cushing – a long-time devotee of Doyle’s work – and Brett immersed themselves in the character of Holmes, the latter arguably drew upon his own personality to a far greater extent, producer Michael Cox not being alone in his speculation regarding the extent to which the actor’s bipolar disorder (then known as manic depression) informed his performance (2011: 207). Brett’s version of the detective is far more of a performer than Cushing’s, for example applauding and shouting ‘Bravo!’ when Watson concludes his largely inaccurate analysis of Mortimer’s walking stick. For his part, Edward Hardwicke presents a far quieter Watson than Nigel Stock’s, the small pauses in his speech being indicative of Watson actually thinking through his examination of the stick. Hardwicke employs far fewer physical and non-verbal signifiers, other than Watson’s small nod to himself, a narrowing of his eyes as he reads the inscription on the stick, and a quiet ‘Oh’ when Holmes berates him for habitually underestimating his abilities. He does adopt a slightly defensive posture, left hand placed on his hip, when Holmes begins to challenge his deductions, but overall these moments are balanced by naturalistic touches such as Hardwicke speaking with a cigarette in his mouth as he goes to light it. It is also notable that, once he has risen, Hardwicke’s Watson is fairly static. Although he strolls to the fireplace to light his cigarette after examining the stick, he does not feel the need to stroll around the apartment as Stock did. There is no need here for multi-camera style blocking to engage the viewer’s eye,

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as movement within the space is provided instead by director Brian Mills cutting between single-camera set-ups: a low angle medium close-up of Hardwicke as Watson examines the stick and a close-up of Brett for Holmes’s reactions, alternating with the initial medium shot. By contrast, even when not projecting vocally, Brett’s delivery is somewhat mannered, signalling the coming admonishment of Watson with a wry facial expression indicative of Holmes attempting to conceal a smirk. As Holmes makes his own pronouncements regarding Mortimer’s stick, Brett’s voice veers between extremes of volume, becoming quite loud when Holmes deduces that their client is the possessor of a dog. The line ‘Larger than a terrier’ is similarly voluble, seemingly pitched towards Watson, yet the next, ‘Smaller than a mastiff’, is almost whispered, with Brett now in extreme close-up. It is unclear why Holmes would wish Watson to hear the first half of the deduction but not the second, and this variation in volume is almost certainly due to the performance choices of Brett, rather than being a response to the narrative logic of the scene or the details of the text. This is followed by a triumphantly noisy ejaculation of ‘Hm!’ after Holmes moves to the window and observes Mortimer and his spaniel alighting outside. Played here by Neil Duncan, Dr Mortimer is initially no less projected than David Leland’s 1968 incarnation, his eyes widening in fascination as he admires Holmes’s cranium. Brett’s reaction to Mortimer’s request for a cast of Holmes’s skull ‘until the original becomes available’ is a full-throated chortle, followed by a pert ‘Behave and sit down!’ However, the fact that Duncan remains seated for the remainder of the scene provides a marked contrast with David Leland’s unnecessary roaming around 221B in 1968. As Mortimer describes Sir Charles’s death, his voice now softer, he is kept in medium-sized framings, cutting between reaction shots of Holmes and Watson. Duncan then removes his glasses and looks away, in partial reverie, as Mortimer recalls the dead man’s facial distortion. This could indicate either that Mortimer still finds the memory disturbing, or that – as a medical man – he is mulling over the possible cause. A moment such as this would have been difficult to manage using the 1968 multi-camera set-up, in which Mortimer never dominated the frame, and was usually on the move (as were the cameras). The main physical movement in the 1988 version is provided by Brett, who moves across to Duncan to take the scroll containing the legend of the hound, and then stands next to Hardwicke as Holmes reads it aloud. In contrast to the 1968 version, in which an ellipse was employed to cover Holmes’s reading of the legend, here Brett casts his eye over the document only briefly before Mortimer’s discovery of Sir Charles is shown in flashback, with Duncan narrating in a voiceover. When the footprints of the hound are revealed, the action cuts back sharply to Baker Street with a close-up of Brett jerking his head round to face Duncan on the line ‘Why did you not consult me

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immediately?’ This moment of heightened delivery is clearly designed entirely to drive the narrative, and emphasize the significance to Holmes of Mortimer’s discovery. Duncan now indicates that Mortimer is unnerved and discomfited by not making eye contact with the other characters, instead tapping his left hand nervously on the arm of the chair. Brett, in a low angle medium shot, rubs his hands together suddenly on the line ‘Well, if you believe this to be supernatural you will find more help from a priest.’ The noise of hands rubbing continues as we cut to a medium shot of Duncan, then back to Brett. The hand rubbing now slows, and Brett quickly glances sideways at Duncan before suddenly dropping his hands and gently but rapidly muttering ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no’. Now signalling Holmes’s resignation to the inevitable, Brett emits a lavish sigh and his eyelids droop. He proffers his left hand in another theatrical gesture as Holmes offers Mortimer his assistance, then flares his nostrils and smiles; the game is once more clearly afoot. By this period television actors were better accustomed to the multi-camera studio set-up than in 1968, but studio realism was a style of acting which, when transferred to the single-camera film set-up, could appear overly projected  – much as theatre acting had previously seemed for multi-camera. Leaving aside the performance of Jeremy Brett, who was by this point bringing much of his extravagant personal style (and several of his personal demons) to his portrayal, Edward Hardwicke and Neil Duncan are, in general, noticeably scaled down in terms of vocal projection and physical gesture when compared with their 1968 counterparts, though it is Hardwicke whose performance is arguably best adapted to single camera. This production in fact contains the seeds of location realism, which by the time of Sherlock – nearly a quarter of a century later – had become the dominant form of British television acting.

2012 As already noted, the Sherlock episode ‘The Hounds of Baskerville’ is in no way a direct adaptation of Doyle’s novel, but shares such commonalities as certain character names, the Dartmoor setting (now repurposed as the site of the Baskerville MoD base) and a monstrous hound which may or may not be the product of a client’s over-active imagination. The consulting room scene no longer features the business with Mortimer’s walking stick; instead we find Holmes – or Sherlock (Cumberbatch), as he is referred to in the series – in need of something to engage his faculties after solving his latest case, his aggressive craving for nicotine steadfastly refused by John Watson (Martin Freeman) until the arrival of the troubled Henry Knight (Russell Tovey) provides a much-needed distraction.

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The episode opens with an attack by the hound upon Henry’s father, shown from his point of view as an infant. The closing shot is a close-up of the adult Henry’s face, which then pulls out to a wide aerial long shot, depicting him alone in the misty hollow where his father died, before cutting to the opening titles. As with the 1988 version, the episode proper begins with a shot of the door to 221B, this time being forcibly slammed by Sherlock. One element of this version that was arguably lacking (or at least underplayed) in earlier iterations is the black humour which forms a major component of script, mise-en-scene and performance, as indicated by the cut to a point of view shot of Sherlock’s feet, panning upwards to reveal him bloodied and carrying a harpoon, before cutting to John for Freeman’s line, ‘You went on the Tube like that?’ Following an ellipse, Sherlock is shown striding restlessly around the flat, still carrying his harpoon but now bathed and wearing a dressing gown. Unlike the cumbersome multi-camera of the 1968 version and the largely static single-camera set-ups employed in 1988, ‘The Hounds of Baskerville’ uses handheld camera throughout to follow Cumberbatch round the frame, while Freeman remains seated – signifying his role as the calm voice of reason. Although Cumberbatch is here occupying the space of 221B in much the same way as Stock and Leland did in 1968, his actions are motivated by Sherlock’s inability to settle until some fresh stimulus presents itself, rather than being devised purely for the sake of providing visual interest. In terms of vocal performance, Cumberbatch is not projected in a stage-derived sense, but does employ loud, explosive declamations – in a manner not dissimilar to Brett’s – to signify Sherlock’s sense of frustration, bellowing ‘God!’ before commanding John to ‘Get me some [cigarettes]!’ When John refuses, Cumberbatch begins frantically riffling through piles of newspapers, and calling for his landlady-cum-housekeeper Mrs Hudson (Una Stubbs), a character who featured irregularly in Doyle’s stories, but a mainstay of the BBC version. The continuing calm of Freeman’s performance – seated, static, passive – again contrasts with Cumberbatch’s manic physical performance. The arrival of Mrs Hudson provides an interesting contrast in terms of generational acting styles. Una Stubbs’s television acting career began in the 1950s, later including the long-running sitcom Till Death Us Do Part (BBC 1965–75). In Sherlock, the character of Mrs Hudson  – much enlarged from the sketchy descriptions provided by Doyle – functions primarily (though not exclusively) as comic relief, and as an experienced sitcom performer Stubbs’s acting style at times features slightly studio realist traits, for example gesturing to Sherlock’s piles of bric-a-brac on the line: ‘You know you never let me touch your things; chance would be a fine thing.’ When Sherlock seizes upon Mrs Hudson’s appearance as an opportunity to exert his analytical powers, Cumberbatch’s performance  – while still manic  – becomes more focused, speaking rapidly as he rattles out deductions. Comedy is provided by Cumberbatch pointing at Mrs Hudson with the harpoon, as though

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it has not occurred to him that this is a dangerous weapon. As Sherlock reveals that Mrs Hudson’s current beau has a secret wife in Doncaster that nobody knows about – ‘Nobody except me!’ – Cumberbatch employs ‘jazz hands’, indicative of Sherlock’s awareness that he is showing off his powers as part of a performance. After Mrs Hudson’s distraught exit, Cumberbatch sits in Holmes’s armchair with knees drawn up, rocking backwards and forwards to signify the character’s distraction. Two contrasts between this episode and earlier versions are the much faster rate of cutting, several shots lasting less than a second (particularly in the initial exchanges between Sherlock, John and Mrs Hudson), and the use of a 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio, as opposed to the 4:3 that was common until the 1990s. As Sarah Cardwell (2014) has observed, the latter has a significant impact on framings, as for example where, at the conclusion of their argument, Sherlock and John are shown, seated, at opposite extremes of the frame, in long shot, emphasizing the physical (and emotional) distance between them. The use of rapid editing means that a far greater number of takes would be required here than for the 1968 and 1988 iterations. In 1968, the scene as broadcast would have been recorded in two takes – before and after the ellipse – with each segment played all the way through continuously unless mistakes were made, as was the norm for ‘as live’ multi-camera production. In 1988 a greater degree of repetition would have been required, with the first take representing a ‘master shot’, possibly played in its entirety (with the exception of the flashback). Dialogue would then have been repeated several times in order to facilitate the various medium shots and close-ups of Brett, Hardwicke and Duncan, which would then be pieced together in post-production. By 2012 the number of repeat takes has increased significantly to accommodate a variety of framings, including medium shots in the main living space, long shots through the door of the kitchen, medium shots, close-ups and extreme close-ups of Cumberbatch, Freeman and Stubbs, all of which are handheld. These diverse modi operandi represent very different demands upon the casts involved, and result in widely divergent performances. The frantic pace of editing and performance in ‘The Hounds of Baskerville’ slows significantly with the arrival of Henry Knight, and the camera set-ups at this point come to more closely resemble those of 1988, with a mix of medium shots and close-ups of the three protagonists as Henry outlines his case. There are several over the shoulder shot/reverse shot set ups between Sherlock and Henry, and it is notable that the pace of cutting has slowed significantly, giving Russell Tovey time to exhibit Henry’s nervousness. While Tovey’s vocal performance is in no sense projected, barely moving above a breathy whisper, there is a sense throughout of him clearly signalling Henry’s troubled mental state. There is a break in his voice when Henry talks about Dewer’s Hollow being a name for the devil, and Tovey looks away as

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Henry recalls his father’s death, his voice broken, and his eyes heavy lidded. When Sherlock seems not to be taking his story seriously, Tovey’s eyes begin watering, and the last two words of the line, ‘I’m not sure you can help me, Mr Holmes, since you find it all so funny’ become venomous. Tovey then quickly rises to leave, but when Sherlock reveals that he knows something happened to Henry the previous night, he sits again, incredulously. When the moment comes for Tovey to deliver what was previously Mortimer’s big line: ‘Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound’, there is an extreme close-up on Tovey. However, the moment is played for laughs, Holmes twice talking over him before Henry at last manages to make his point. Tovey’s hesitant delivery on Henry’s first two attempts – allowing Cumberbatch plenty of time to butt in – is not naturalistic, and when he does finally get it out (the first time the actor raises his voice), the line is very clear and overly enunciated. When Holmes asks Henry to repeat what he just said, there is a sense of Tovey milking the moment via an extremely slow, clear delivery, his voice again catching. By contrast, Cumberbatch signals Holmes’s distraction via the nervous twitching of his fingers as he rests his face upon his hand. He gestures with his hands on the line, ‘Hmm, not interested. Moving on’, which is delivered in a fast, flat monotone. Cumberbatch then employs a sotto voce stage whisper when Holmes mocks Henry by speculating that the appearance of the hound was part of a genetic experiment, and delivers Sherlock’s deductions regarding Henry’s journey to London in another rapid monotone. When Holmes leans in to sniff Henry’s cigarette smoke, the moment is played broadly, the detective’s flared nostrils and blithe intrusion into his client’s physical space emphasizing the humorous aspect of the usually controlled Sherlock’s insatiable craving for nicotine. Cumberbatch’s voice here remains low and fast, but the change in tone as Sherlock asks what Henry saw the previous night indicates that he is now taking it seriously. Overall, Cumberbatch’s performance comprises a blend of the projected or gestural – waving Henry away on the line, ‘Off to Devon with you; have a cream tea on me’, or pulling a mock sad face when Sherlock pretends he is too busy to come to Dartmoor – and the still and focused, providing more than an echo of Brett’s ‘manic depressive’ performance. As with the 1988 version, the most restrained performance comes from Martin Freeman as John. Though required to display a greater range of emotions – disbelief at Sherlock’s behaviour, restraint as he attempts to keep his temper with his friend, frustration at the latter’s flamboyant display of his deductive powers for a client’s benefit – Freeman does this with a great sense of economy. There is virtually no gestural acting, other than John holding up his finger when the doorbell rings just once, announcing Henry’s arrival. While, like Una Stubbs, Martin Freeman is an experienced comedy performer, the sitcom via which he became known to the public, The Office (BBC 2001–3), has been hailed by Brett Mills as comedy vérité (2004); the diametric opposite of projected, multi-camera sitcom.

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An example of this is Freeman’s underplayed reaction shot on Sherlock’s insensitive line to Henry: ‘Yes, good, skipping to the night that your dad was violently killed; where did that happen?’ Freeman also employs ‘in character’ touches such as former soldier John almost standing to attention, ready for action, when Sherlock charges him with travelling to Dartmoor to investigate Henry’s case. Overall, ‘The Hounds of Baskerville’ offers several marked contrasts with earlier versions, proving a far livelier sequence in terms of framing, camera movement and editing, combined with the restless physicality of Cumberbatch’s Sherlock. Despite the fact that the scene is similarly dialogue-heavy, there is none of the movement for movement’s sake that was present in 1968, or the static camera set-ups of twenty years later. The performance of Martin Freeman in particular demonstrates just how far television acting has scaled down in the modern day, but to what extent is this the result of changing production processes?

Studio versus location realism Given that all three versions of The Hound of the Baskervilles featured herein were produced in the studio, it might seem problematic to define the changes in performance style in terms of studio and location realism; surely the fact that each of these scenes, at least, was a product of the studio militates against the use of location realism for the purposes of categorization? However, studio and location realism refer to more than just site, instead encompassing broader changes in production approach, such as the amount of rehearsal time typically allocated to television drama. Each of the BBC’s 1968 50-minute episodes had nine days’ ‘outside’ rehearsal (i.e. in a room separate from the studio in which recording would take place), before moving into Television Centre for two days’ videotape recording apiece, location filming having taken place a month earlier (‘Sherlock Holmes Schedule’ 1970). This period would typically encompass a read-through of the script on the first morning, followed by several days’ blocking of scenes, the focus being upon the learning of lines and movements. The resulting preponderance of theatre-style blocking, Peter Cushing, Nigel Stock and David Leland conducting a delicate ballet with the cumbersome studio cameras, can therefore readily be understood. The studio in this sense was the home to a number of three-walled sets, offering limited room for manoeuvre. By contrast, the Baker Street interiors used by Granada in 1988 and the BBC in 2012 were ‘standing sets’; i.e. semi-permanent edifices. In the case of the former, Holmes’s apartments were part of the Victorian Bonded Warehouse in Manchester (Haining 1991: 119), while Sherlock’s 221B interior is erected on a soundstage. Each provides the production with a ‘base’ which becomes a location in its own right, as Sherlock co-creator and ‘The Hounds of Baskerville’ author Mark Gatiss explains: ‘It’s something that is incredibly useful; we had to

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relocate a couple of scenes to Baker Street, just because we ran out of time. You think: “With a little bit of jiggery-pokery we can move that there” ’ (2011). Sherlock had far more limited rehearsal time than the earlier productions,2 only two days being allocated to the episode, including a table read of the script and some time blocking movements in a church hall (Gatiss 2011). It is therefore possible that, with less time available to pre-plan movement and gesture, performance becomes a more instinctive response to environment on the day of recording, rather than a pre-planned orchestration from which performers cannot deviate, as would have been the case in 1968.

Conclusion A number of variables can affect the performances given by television actors, including their own personalities and performance style (as characterized in these case studies by Jeremy Brett), which in turn can be informed by background, for example drama training, or lack thereof, and the amount of experience acquired in a particular medium. However, the significant changes in the production processes employed on British television drama are clearly evidenced in the performances which, in some part, resulted from them in the 1968, 1988 and 2012 iterations of The Hound of the Baskervilles. These offer a snapshot of historical developments in television acting, from the still largely theatre-derived, gestural performances that typified studio realism, to the scaled down, less projected style of location realism we have come to expect today. Even when compared through a character such as Sherlock Holmes – whose special place in the hearts and minds of the public makes him a potentially problematic subject – these differences are highlighted via the performances seen in the case studies examined herein.

Notes 1 The 1954 US series starring Ronald Howard was transmitted in some ITV regions. 2 The Granada series initially allocated five days per 50-minute episode, though this was increased to eight at Brett’s insistence (Cox 2011: 20), meaning that The Hound of the Baskervilles would have had at least a fortnight’s rehearsal.

References Cardwell, S. (2014), ‘Persuaded? The Impact of Changing Production Contexts on Three Adaptations of Persuasion’, in J. Bignell and S. Lacey (eds), British Television Drama: Past, Present, Future, 2nd ed., 84–100, London: Palgrave. Cooke, L. (2003), British Television Drama: A History, London: BFI.

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Cox, M. (2011), A Study in Celluloid, 2nd ed., Indianapolis: Gasogene. Gatiss, M. (2011), Interview by the author, 7 November. Haining, P. (1991), The Television Sherlock Holmes, 2nd ed., London: Virgin Books. Hewett, R. (2013), ‘Acting in the New World: Studio and Location Realism in Survivors’, The Journal of British Cinema and Television, 10 (2): 321–39. Hewett, R. (2017), The Changing Spaces of Television Acting, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mills, B. (2004), ‘Comedy Vérité: Contemporary Sitcom Form’, Screen, 45 (1): 63–78. Naremore, J. (1988), Acting in the Cinema, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ‘Sherlock Holmes Schedule’. (1970), BBC Written Archives Centre T5/1907/3 Sherlock Holmes – General, File 3, 1967–1970.

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2 ‘VISIBLE’ AND ‘INVISIBLE’ PERFORMANCE: FRAMING PERFORMANCE IN 1970s TELEVISION DRAMA Douglas McNaughton

Introduction Critical orthodoxies around television drama have tended to neglect its aesthetic qualities, leading to a tendency to characterize it as a medium for relay of ‘theatrical’ performance; paradoxically, it has also been categorized as a medium of the ‘intimate screen’ (Jacobs 2000) through the close-up of the face. While investigation of television performance considers the need to tone down ‘theatrical’ performance for this intimate medium, little consideration is given to the production processes by which the ‘intimate screen’ is generated. This chapter argues that the contribution of camera operators to the generation of that screen is a key element in the production of onscreen television performance. Using archival resources, textual analysis and practitioner interviews, the chapter considers the interaction of actor’s performance and camerawork in the 1970s multicamera television studio, and elaborates on how the multiple understandings of and practices relating to this interaction were engaged with. The final section of the chapter examines a case study of 1970s television drama, using close analysis of the BBC’s I, Claudius (1976) to consider the proxemics of performance both in front of and behind the camera. Cantrell and Hogg (2016) differentiate between ‘television acting’ (actors portraying characters), and ‘television performance’, that is, ‘adjacent performative components within the construction of text’ (285). They warn against the danger that ‘the particular contributions of the television actor become obscured within the larger technical mechanics of constructing a television performance’ (286). This chapter, however, builds on Cantrell and Hogg’s distinction of ‘acting’ and

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‘performance’ to argue that the ‘invisible performance’ of camera operators can be as important as the ‘television acting’ of actors, and therefore demands further investigation. As well as furthering critical understandings of onscreen television performance, the chapter draws attention to the off-screen contribution of camera operators in the framing of performance in 1970s television drama. It therefore suggests that there are two categories of performance at work here in the interaction of actors and camera operators: ‘visible’ onscreen and ‘invisible’ off-screen performance.

Intimate screens and dramatic rooms Assumptions about the limited aesthetic capability of television have meant a neglect of its production processes in favour of considering the writer as the creative figure in television. Academic orthodoxies consider television in general to be a visually impoverished medium (Geraghty 2003), whose multi-camera, vision mixed aesthetic and notan1 lighting normatively generate only functional images within a tightly constrained frame. Helen Wheatley has pointed out the way in which theorists have privileged the 1960s studio as an innovative and dynamic space but dismissed the 1970s television studio as ‘clumsy, dated and inexpressive’ (Wheatley 2005: 145) with dialogue-driven close-ups confined to Williams’s (1968) ‘dramatic room’. However, as Panos and Lacey (2015) comment, studio multi-camera technique merits a critical reassessment: Television scholars are increasingly returning to the electronic studio era and attempting to understand it on its own terms, tracing practical, material and conceptual factors that influenced studio production and drawing out the dramatic and aesthetic consequences of multi-camera recording and the studio as site. (Panos and Lacey 2015: 2) Likewise, performance in television has been little studied. The teleological ‘developmental model’ assumes ‘a broad movement away from the interior world of studio production, as also moving from a theatrical precedent’ (MacmurraughKavanagh and Lacey 1999: 60) comprising ‘moments of change’ in technology and aesthetics (ibid.). The ‘developmental model’ has implications for screen performance, assuming a move from studio’s ‘intimate screen’ model (Jacobs 2000) of dialogue-driven close-ups to a more naturalistic mode, as well as a tendency towards more ‘cinematic’ wide shots. However, theorists have struggled to find a critical vocabulary with which to investigate screen performance. As Bignell, Lacey and MacMurraugh-Kavanagh put it, ‘[c]ritical discourses on British television drama, arising from studies of “Golden Age” drama like The Wednesday Play and Play for Today series, have been constrained . . . by questions of authorship,

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realism and communicative effects’ (2000: 81–2). John Caughie comments that criticism of TV drama seems ‘quite tongue-tied’ about acting (2000: 207).

Framing performance Screen performance is characterized by the interaction of performers within a frame, and therefore, by the interaction of camera and performers. Lury (1996) suggests that television performance is a combination of technique and technology. Tucker (2003) discusses how actors scale performance to the size of the screen: performance is literally framed by the selection of details of bodily gesture and dialogue delivery within a chosen shot size. This is a collaborative process: Cynthia Baron comments that the selection and combination of movements, gestures, and vocal/facial expressions are themselves mutually interactive elements in the performance montage that actors and directors create. When montage is understood as the process of both selection and combination in film, choices about framing, editing, production, and sound design can actually be seen as implicit choices about performance, and acting choices can be seen as implicit choices about other cinematic strategies. (2007: 33) Performance then must be seen as one element in a matrix of creative and technical choices. However, most accounts of this collaborative process focus on the performer in front of the camera, rather than the activities going on behind it. In television studies, critical assumptions about television’s aesthetic limitations have led to an almost total neglect of the role of camera operators in mediating pro-filmic performance. Foucault (1980, 1991) and Bourdieu (1984) suggest that space and action are dialogically related, and this chapter therefore argues for an understanding of television’s production spaces as Bourdieuian fields shaping the subjects and texts produced within them. Within this field, subjects position themselves hierarchically according to various forms of symbolic capital  – taste, education, skills and so on (Bourdieu 1993, 1998). Camera operators are not passive functionaries, capturing pro-filmic ‘theatrical’ performance, but instead actively contribute to the generation of the screen within which performance is both figuratively and literally framed. While this research therefore considers the proxemics of the interaction between camera and actors, it also considers the neglected issue of ‘embodied’ performance on the part of technical crews as making an essential contribution to the poetics of the performed text; thus drawing a distinction between ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ performance in 1970s studio drama.

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Hierarchies of distinction Even within the industry, 1970s multi-camera operators were dismissed by their peers. Within the mixed production ecology of 1970s television, it is generally the case that studio interiors were on videotape, and location exteriors were shot on 16mm film. A clear distinction (in various meanings of the word) existed between video camera crews and film cameramen. In the multi-camera studio, with a team of four or so camera operators each assigned to separate cameras, directors can select the output of each camera on monitors. The BBC film cameraman A. A. Englander argues that a key difference between studio production and location filming is that in the latter, the director cannot see the viewfinder picture. Englander suggests that the expertise of film cameramen means that they require little instruction from directors in framing images – hence the film cameraman’s dislike of electronic viewfinders which can be monitored by the team. Film cameramen know about making compensation for movement, when to pan left or right, when to tilt up, how much headroom to give. This is one of the fundamental differences between the film cameraman and his electronic equivalent who is basically under orders from the studio gallery all the time. (Englander and Petzold 1976: 67) In a startling dismissal of studio camera crews, Englander comments ‘in this context, cameraman is a really confusing term’ (Englander and Petzold 1976: 67). This comment identifies a key tension within the network of forces structuring the field of 1970s television production, between video and film, and exposes a rupture between the embodied cultural capital of multi-camera operators and film cameramen, within which the former are distinctly disadvantaged as contributors of ‘invisible performance’. The scholarly neglect of the aesthetics of studio drama may in part relate to institutional attitudes to video camera operators. With notable exceptions2 BBC studio cameramen were not named on programme credits, whereas film crews were credited by name. Producer Barry Letts suggests that this derives from BBC bureaucracy: ‘because they were trained originally with the engineers and so on, they were treated as engineers’. Letts recalls a work-to-rule by which studio camera crews demanded precise instructions from directors on framing and camera movement, resulting in ‘terrible terrible camerawork’ as cameramen tried to convince BBC management that they deserved status as ‘real cameramen doing real work as people doing compositions, and were artistic, artists you know. And they won the day, they didn’t change their grade, but they got their money.’ Director Timothy Combe recalls of this period: ‘the camera cards all had to be exact. Track in, on and you’d give them a cue. Track in, stop. It was

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hell!’3 The position of studio cameramen within television’s craft hierarchies was normatively low status, but this account demonstrates camera crews attempting to reposition themselves within this hierarchical structure through demonstrating embodied symbolic capital.

Intimate screens and spaces Within the (much contested) developmental model, critical orthodoxies of a shift from ‘theatrical’ to ‘cinematic’ television categorize this as a move from a distant, observational camera to more involved, active camerawork. In many accounts, Armchair Theatre’s4 long takes and mobile pedestal camera transformed static 1950s multi-camera setups (Jacobs 1998; Caughie 2000; Wheatley 2007) and this transformation is an essential component of the development of television studio acting. Caughie comments: What is striking is not that the space which is created by this depth of field has become ‘real’ in the Bazinian sense, but that the studio has become fluid and expressive, freeing the actors within the space. There is a sense that the actors inhabit a space, rather than being constricted within a frame [ . . . ] Crucially for notions of realism in television, what is created in plays like Lena, O My Lena5 is a performative space – a space for acting – rather than a narrative space – a space for action. (2000: 77) Ironically, and perhaps significantly, Caughie focuses on camera mobility, not acting, in his close analysis of the generation of this new televisual space in Lena, O My Lena (ITV 1960). Cantrell and Hogg warn that ‘observations about the actor’s work regularly become entangled with the discussion of framing, editing, scripting and the overall production values’ (2016:  286) and, as this book demonstrates, Caughie is not alone in his focus on camera mobility. Individual directors are credited in practitioner discourses with revolutionizing the practices and aesthetics of television drama. Director Alvin Rakoff describes fellow Canadian Ted Kotcheff as ‘a very violent mover of cameras’ (Rakoff 2010). As director of the much-discussed Lena, O My Lena, Kotcheff – and the ‘invisible performance’ of his camera crews – has some responsibility for constructing what Caughie identifies as a ‘performative space’ (2000: 77). The development of this performative space is a heterogeneous one. Director Herbert Wise recalls the working practices of BBC studio camera operators in the 1950s: When I first worked at the BBC senior cameramen would sit on their motorised cameras you know, the others would have to be the dollies, pushing

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used to be four members to a camera crew. And I stopped all that. I said, get off the motorised thing. They didn’t like that. Why? I said, because it’s too unwieldy! I want movement! Thing has to be lively! I like developing shots, in other words, that you bring the actors to the camera and the camera to the actors, that the whole thing would have a fluidity. [ . . . ] my intention was to make things exciting, to make them live, to make them real. (Wise 2010) The fluidity Wise discusses may be a desire to have the camera mimic the subjectivity of a human observer rather than an artificial movement of a mechanical camera mount, making the shot phenomenologically involving. In any case, Wise is clearly encouraging increasing dynamic, improvised interaction between actors and camera operators, in the face of some resistance: If an actor would not be in a correct position, the cameraman would always say ‘well I’m on my position’ and I killed all that. I said there’s no use talking to me like that. What matters is what comes out at the end. If the actor’s not in the right position you have to chase it! Doesn’t matter what your mark is! Go where the shot is! (Wise 2010) While practitioner testimony should always be treated with some degree of critical suspicion, Wise’s resistant studio crews evoke Bourdieu’s ‘struggle for the transformation or preservation of the field’ (Bourdieu 1998:  40), suggesting a reluctance to change the nature of their professional practice to a more active, embodied form of ‘invisible performance’. Both academic and practitioner discourses in this vein suggest that camera mobility can result in greater viewer involvement in the onscreen drama. The tracking shot, with its changing parallactic perspectives, arguably creates an impression of the viewer being present in dramatic events. Apparatus film theorists argue that the eye of the observer and the eye of the camera are roughly consonant, encouraging immersive viewing, although in suture theory, edits make viewers aware of the frame (Friedberg 2006:  81). Multi-camera framing is usually roughly eye level – a convention which audiences take largely for granted, subliminally placing viewers in the action (Selby and Cowdery 1995). However, while camera mobility conveys the experiential topology of pro-filmic space better than static framing, its immersive jouissance is still delimited by the frame’s edge (Friedberg 2006: 129); the ‘spectatorial paradox’ (ibid.: 145) of virtual mobility whereby movement in the frame is necessarily constrained by the generation of that frame. Director Don Taylor also stresses the importance of framing and camera performance in his account of directing multi-camera drama, connecting the experiential qualities of visual style and aesthetics to narrative and performance:

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The cameras were the story, they were the expressive instrument, as words were for the poet . . . They would get in among the sweat and the anger and the fear, they would be the sweat and the anger and the fear. They would go close to the actors, and inhabit their dilemmas, swirl and swing inside the action of the play, not on its periphery. (Taylor 1990: 22; emphasis in original) This account seems to confirm the ‘intimate screen’ model:  cinema does not operate in this mode because it does not offer continuous live (or as-live) performance; theatre cannot operate in this mode because in most theatre spaces the audience is at a fixed distance from the performers, denying potential for the close-up. Taylor’s ‘expressive’ cameras ‘swing inside’ and ‘inhabit’ the action, constructing dramatic space in which camerawork and aesthetics contribute to the meaning and experience of the drama. Despite that movement however, the frame retains Friedberg’s epistemic hegemony. While seeming to offer a phenomenological involvement which the contemplative still image or fixed camera cannot, the camera never breaks the Friedbergian epistemological frame because it necessarily generates that frame, offering an ‘ontological cut’ (Friedberg 2006:  157) which constantly develops as the camera moves. This underlines the contribution of camera crews  – and thus the construction and development of the televisual frame – to the making of meaning in television performance. The persistent issue of intimacy in television drama then seems to be a function of the interaction of camera operator and performer: the intersection of visible and invisible performance.

Casting ‘invisible’ performers As with the casting of actors, producers and directors sought to assemble effective teams behind the camera within the 1970s studio system. An important structuring feature of the BBC’s planning system then was the allocation of its human resources. While creative teams of writers, directors and producers shaped productions, those teams had limited control over which craft personnel they could secure for production teams.6 Former producer Jonathan Powell recalls: It was just like an absolutely rigid machine. And your facilities were given to you by rote. And then you had to fit your project into that [ . . . ] they’d give you Joe Bloggs and you’d say but I don’t want Joe Bloggs and they’d say tough shit. (Powell 2009) This situation applied to craft personnel in both studio production and location filming. When planning camera scripts, directors had to consider studio crews’

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abilities and allocate complex shots according to a further hierarchy of distinction within the crew (usually comprising four camera operators, inevitably male). Director Waris Hussein recalls ‘The senior cameraman was the one who was the best – supposedly – then it went down and the fourth cameraman sometimes was a very new guy so what you’d try to do was give him the least amount of work’ (Hussein 2010). Depending on the quality of crew allocated, ‘the number one cameraman was not up to the demands’ (ibid.) in terms of their capacity for ‘invisible performance’, and tensions emerge here between ability and aspiration. On occasion this would not be apparent until camera rehearsal, when the director would discover that the planned choreography is beyond an operator’s performative skills: ‘I suddenly realise I’ve put too much effort and burden on one guy. Because I like to shoot continuously [ . . . ] but in those days to have a camera dance around the actors was a tough call’ (ibid.). A stylistic tendency to shoot continuously with developing shots on one camera places heavy physical burdens on individual camera operators, and industry myths have arisen around certain teams: Crew Number Five, I’ll never forget, a man called Jim Atkinson who was [ . . . ] not only brilliant but unique. Everybody wanted his crew and you had to book them in advance. And a lot of the times he wasn’t available, so you got another crew and then you didn’t know who the senior cameraman was. (Hussein 2010) Camera script planning had to take into account crews’ embodied performative abilities. A  proponent of Atkinson’s single camera, long take approach is Herbert Wise, with his penchant for unbroken developing shots. Wise claims some degree of patronage over Atkinson’s career at the BBC: I went to the authorities and said you’ve got to make him a number one, which they did and he became sort of my crew, he didn’t do every single show I did at the BBC because it was impossible but he did a great many of them including the whole of I, Claudius. And his contribution was fantastic. (Wise 2010) Given the stability of such discourses around Atkinson,7 and the critical neglect of multi-camera aesthetics, it is worth attempting to delineate the specificity of Atkinson’s approach. Wise claims that Atkinson adapted the pedestal camera equipment to serve his vision of camera mobility and performance: They have a handle, and he broke the handle [ . . . ] and he used to have the handle with the grip at the top on his, the lower arm on his sleeve [HW mimes

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vertical forearm braced against vertical handle] and if you then moved off you can move off without any jerk. (Wise 2010) The pedestal camera’s articulated panhandle is normally extended (Millerson 1979:  32) and 1970s production manuals recommend starting camera dollying while off-shot to prevent wheel jerk (ibid.:  57). Adjusted to a right-angle in this way and parallel to the operator’s arm, the panhandle affords Atkinson closer physical contact with the camera and a more intimate, performative camera mobility. The camera functions as a prosthetic extension of the operator’s performance, underlining the ‘embodied’ nature of Atkinson’s professional distinction. Another distinctive element claimed of Atkinson was his investment in productions, exceeding the standard contribution given by allocated crews. Wise claims that some cameramen had the attitude of ‘tell me what to do and I’ll do it’ (2010), thereby demonstrating limited creative input. Atkinson’s status meant that he was allowed to transcend normal studio hierarchies as Wise’s liaison: I would not allow the cameramen to talk to actors about anything unless it went through me. But he had my permission to because he knew, we thought exactly alike. He would often say to actors, a bit to your right, a bit to your left, or just turn your head because it’s a better angle. And he was very keen, he used to come to rehearsals [ . . . ] so that he had an idea what was required on the [studio] floor. (Wise 2010) An Atkinson protégé, cameraman Bernard Newnham (2010), recalls Atkinson’s ‘endless rescuing of less talented but nevertheless famous directors  – Rudi Cartier springs to mind’ and remembers Atkinson as someone who evolved techniques which took the available equipment to its limits. The pedestal based turret camera was never going to be more flexibly used than with Jim’s fluid style, with whole scenes shot on one camera in a way rarely repeated until Steadicam.8 (ibid.) Vision mixer Clive Doig notes of Atkinson’s technique: ‘the majority of the play would be on one continuous developing shot on his camera on a ped, albeit in a multiple camera “live” set up. No editing!’ (Doig 2010). Again, Doig claims that Atkinson ‘often directed the actors more on the studio floor than the director did from upstairs’ (ibid.). Atkinson then is validated by his peers as possessing embodied cultural capital, making an active creative contribution which elevates him in the hierarchy of his field, and marking him out as a particularly dedicated and skilled ‘invisible’ performer. Doig’s comment, like Herbert Wise’s above, also

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suggests that access to actors and their performance process is a particular signifier of creative capital within the studio hierarchy.

The choreography of performance The metaphor of choreography or a ‘dance’ between the visible and invisible performers in studio emerges repeatedly within practitioner discourses. For Waris Hussein, resisting multi-camera vision-mixing emerges as a key technique in the aspiration towards developing a distinctive studio aesthetic, with both framing and long takes maintaining the ‘intimate screen’ effect of the actors’ unbroken performance: ‘I like to shoot continuously without cutting [ . . . ] my technique is to try and shoot actors moving within the frame and the camera moving with them if necessary, in other words there’s a kind of dance’ (Hussein 2010). Hussein suggests a strategy whereby camera crews contribute creatively without the full knowledge of actors, making camera operators’ performance ‘invisible’ in more ways than one: ‘The cameraman knows it’s a dance but the actors are moving according to the way you rehearsed. So they’re doing their natural thing but I’m moving my camera’ (ibid.). Bazin (1971) argued that the long take is both more ‘cinematic’ than montage editing but also, in its exploration of temporal and spatial unities within a scene, underlines the perceived realism of a narrative. For Bazin, the edit compromises an event’s unity, converting it from real to imaginary. The practitioners quoted here may be atypical in their ‘cinematic’ aspiration to Bazinian developing shots, given the shot-reverse shot rhetoric built into multi-camera vision mixing; but they also demonstrate a preference for sustained performance suggesting a habitus of cultural capital privileging the theatrical and therefore the spoken word. This, then, demonstrates a double aspiration, combining the perceived strengths of both theatre and cinema technique. This as-live Bazinian space is Caughie’s live-seeming ‘performative space  – a space for acting’ (2000:  77), suggesting that Caughie’s model of a specifically televisual space for performance emerging around 1960 has some validity. As discussed, the long take places heavy demands on operators’ ‘invisible performance’. Ironically, given studio’s persistent interiority, one challenge of the cabled pedestal camera is to represent fully enclosed spaces in three-walled studio set environments, materializing the ‘fourth wall’ in a continuous take. Waris Hussein recalls an example of expressive choreography of camera and performer in a production of Hedda Gabler (BBC 1972): I wanted a sequence where [the] main character walks all the way around the room and I wanted to follow her on one camera. In other words they danced round each other and you saw all four walls. [ . . . ] But in those days for a

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camera to do that – we had to stop tape for that particular shot – the camera cable would have to be wound round and round and round and unwind with someone pulling it [ . . . ] it was a tough call but I did it because I was trying to be cinematic. (Hussein 2010) Textual analysis of this sequence shows that, although the enclosed four-walled set and the use of a long take visually underpin the character’s frustration, some slightly jerky camera movement and clumsy reframing draws attention to the ambition of the manoeuvre and highlights the demands placed on the embodied performance of camera operators. However, in its visual contribution to the play’s theme of social and personal constraint, the shot demonstrates how this production is enhanced by the camera operator’s ‘invisible performance’. The discussion so far in this chapter has demonstrated the performativity of camera operators, the embodied cultural capital for which they were known, and their placing on a hierarchy of abilities within institutional and practitioner discourses. It has also demonstrated how camera operators can contribute to the overall aesthetic and effect of a screen text through their embodied performance. Given the repeated appearance of Jim Atkinson’s name in this research, particularly in association with the director Herbert Wise, this chapter now looks in depth at an example of a significant Atkinson/Wise collaboration.

Through the keyhole: I, Claudius The BBC’s I, Claudius (1976) is a particularly effective example of the power of distinctive camerawork in the overall construction of a screen text. The serial was based on Robert Graves’s historical novels I, Claudius (1953) and Claudius the God (1954), presenting the saga of the recently formed Roman Empire. The narrative covers the ambitions of Claudius’s grandmother Livia to secure the Emperorship for her son Tiberius, the reign of the mad Caligula, and Claudius’s own unexpected Emperorship. Scripted by Jack Pulman, produced by Martin Lisemore and directed by Herbert Wise, each episode of I, Claudius was recorded onto videotape across two studio days following a fortnight of outside rehearsal. Scenes were recorded throughout the studio day using rehearserecord technique (BBC WAC T5/2, 606/1). Discussing the serial’s studio production, Herbert Wise comments ‘necessity is the best part of invention, I was forced to make use of the studio with all the complicated scenes that I had, particularly exterior scenes [ . . . ] things like battles or anything like that was absolutely out’ (Wise 2010). As Sandra Joshel has argued (2001), the production context of I, Claudius results in a drama of interior states, with studio sets used to generate the psychological claustrophobia of the degenerating Imperial family. Adapting the novel’s events for studio

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interiors and three-walled sets adds to the production’s sense of constraining claustrophobia, and despite some aspiration to architectural spectacle, the tight framing on sets and faces illustrates Wise’s realization that ‘I must do the whole thing like looking through a keyhole’ (2010). Helen Wheatley (2005) suggests that the room is ‘television’s definitive space’ (145). Adapting the novels for the parameters of studio involves translating epic events into the scale of characters delivering dialogue in a room. The focus on studio interiors results in a focus on personalizing the events and themes of the novel, which means of course a focus on performance. A distinctive example of the interaction between onscreen and off-screen performance comes in episode 8 (Zeus, By Jove!). In the novel, Caligula crosses the Bay of Baiae on horseback over a vast bridge of ships, but it was clearly impracticable to achieve this in BBC Television Centre’s Studio One. Caligula’s excesses thus had to be demonstrated by other means. In the serial, Caligula’s three sisters are combined into one, Drusilla, who embarks on an incestuous affair with Caligula. The novel’s passing reference ‘Drusilla died. I am certain in my own mind that Caligula killed her, but I have no proof’ (Graves 1953: 342) was developed into a controversial scene where Caligula tears his unborn child from Drusilla’s womb and devours it, with Claudius witnessing the gory aftermath (BBC WAC T41/502/1). The death scene starts near the end of the episode, at 46.00, with a shot of the inside of the door to Caligula’s bedroom, through which Drusilla (Beth Morris) enters.9 The tight framing here draws attention to the detail of the bolt on the door. In medium two-shot, Caligula (John Hurt) leads Drusilla to the bed and makes her stand on it, securing her wrists above her head with chains. The scene is framed mostly in medium two-shot until 46.46 when the camera pulls back to show the arrangement of the space and the proxemics of the characters within it. The camera then tracks in to a close up on Caligula on his line ‘There’ll be no pain, I promise.’ The only vision mixed ‘cut’ in the scene comes as Drusilla looks down at Caligula, with a medium shot showing her face (lasting from 48.07–48.13). There is a cut back to Caligula as he disrobes Drusilla, the camera close on Caligula’s face (left of frame, in three-quarter shot showing his expression) with Drusilla’s midriff before him (right of frame, her back to camera). From 48.25, the camera tracks back to a long shot to show Drusilla standing on the bed with her back to camera, with Caligula before her as he explains: ‘I must draw the child from the Queen of Heaven’s womb and swallow it whole.’ Having established the spatial relations of the characters with this wide shot, from 48.46 the camera tracks back in to focus on Caligula’s face in ‘intimate screen’ closeup as he picks up a knife. Almost exactly centred, the knife is the focus of the shot at this point. Caligula’s face, in three-quarter shot so his expressions can clearly be read by the camera/audience, is left of frame with the knife held in front of his face, with Drusilla’s naked body right of frame.

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Zucker (1999: 159) notes the importance for television actors of recognizing the lens and framing used in order to modulate a performance for the intimate screen. The combination of framing, performance and soundtrack work together at the point of this close-up to signal Caligula’s internal state. At 49.03, Caligula says, ‘There’ll be no pain, I know it’ and hooves are heard on the soundtrack. The sound of hooves drumming in Caligula’s head has affected his sanity and the combination of camera movement, facial close-up, and soundtrack in combination with dialogue denote his madness. The camera holds on this arrangement until Caligula pushes the knife into Drusilla, at which point (49.12) the camera whip-pans left as Drusilla screams. The developing camera movement slows to crab left as the door to the room comes into view on the left of the frame. The camera tracks slowly in on the door and rests on the door’s bolt, in a repeat of the shot which opened this scene. The fluid, observational feel of the camerawork up to this point is contrasted with the abrupt way in which it pulls away from the actual stabbing, as if a spectator snatching their gaze away from something horrible. Then, the almost leisurely pace of the track towards the door contrasts with the abrupt pan away from Drusilla’s stabbing and the intensity of her screams on the soundtrack. This dramatically effective counterpoint between the unhurried camera move and the traumatic soundtrack demonstrates the affective potential of the camera operator’s ‘invisible’ performance. As the developing shot continues, the camera tracks very close to the bolt on the door, showing through this detail that the door is locked from the inside. This camera move suggests the desire to escape, to leave the gruesome scene, but the door is bolted, and with no agency in the scene, the viewer is unable to leave. The epistemic frame’s shift from Drusilla’s body to the door means that this part of the scene is heavily driven by sound, including the drumming of hooves in Caligula’s head (the only non-diegetic sound in the whole serial, which also features no incidental music), Caligula’s verbalized explanation of what will happen, Drusilla’s screams and the sound of Claudius (Derek Jacobi) hammering on the door outside. As a result, despite the sense of confinement inside the room, the viewer is still unsure what has happened. The camera’s drifting move to the inside of the door denies a clear view. A cut to the other side of the locked door (49.34) aligns the audience with Claudius, demanding access and knowledge. From this cut, the remainder of the episode is also played as a continuous take. After Caligula emerges on Claudius’s side of the door, bloodied beard hinting at gruesome events, Claudius puts his head through the doorway and, it is implied, sees Drusilla’s ruined body. As the horrified Claudius withdraws his head and staggers out of frame, the camera starts to track in on the door, which is slowly opening to give a glimpse of the room beyond, at which point there is a cut to the end credits. The final shot, with a view of Drusilla’s ‘gory middle’ (BBC WAC T41/502/ 1) was cut by management before transmission. Herbert Wise recalls:

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We don’t actually see what he was seeing, we just get it from his face and the door finally opened completely, and we get one glimpse of the woman hanging there. Now that was edited out the night before it went out, without my permission, consultation, or [producer] Martin Lisemore’s. (Wise 2005) Given the emphasis throughout the scene on obscured vision, the truncation of the final view of the disembowelled Drusilla is thematically consonant with the scene as a whole. The audience’s view of Drusilla is snatched away twice, once by the camera move and once by the edit, and thus – although the edit is not part of Wise’s intended design – underscores the production’s sense of ‘looking through a keyhole . . . like a fly on the wall’ (Wise 2010). This scene has lasted 4 minutes and 19 seconds with only three cuts: the six-second cutaway of Drusilla looking down at Caligula, and the cut to Claudius outside the room. In place of edits, the scene has relied instead on reframings and expressive camera moves to support the action and the actors’ performances. This expressive camera movement is not merely about mediating the action. It is also about the mobility of the camera itself; in Jacobs’s phrase, this is ‘exhibitionistic camera movement, a mobility on display as mobility, and not motivated by performance, but is the performance’ (2000: 144, emphasis in original). This chapter has described Wise’s patronage of camera operator Jim Atkinson and their shared preference for fluid developing shots, and it seems likely that Atkinson was the camera operator for this scene. This embodied camerawork should be considered part of the scene’s aesthetic and underscores this chapter’s claim for the performativity of studio camera operators. Wise comments on the subjectivity and performativity of his camera: With me, the camera is always an actor. It’s very very rarely an observer. And [. . .] [it] particularly paid off in I, Claudius because I was able for the camera to tell the story as much as an actor would tell the story. It contributed as much. Because you can tell so much more in a camera movement or a sudden cut to a close-up than you can do in words. (Wise 2002) The expressive camera mobility discussed here both supplies and withholds information, and in addition conveys affect, with the shocked pull away from the stabbing, as the camera averts its eye from a sight too horrible to witness. The developing shots place the viewer inside the room and the move to the door suggests attempted escape, and entrapment within the dramatic room. The camerawork thus enhances the impact of the scene through framing, movement, and the operator’s performance through continuous single-camera takes and embodied camera movement. In the production of I, Claudius, the usual vision-mixed multi-camera aesthetic is subverted through Wise’s single-camera technique and Atkinson’s perfomativity: ‘[m]ostly it was two cameras or one [. . .] it was all

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motivated by getting fluidity into the camera’ (Wise 2010). There is a jouissance to the expressive performativity of this fluid developing shot; it is camera movement which complements visually the content of the scene, while the manipulation of the epistemic frame contributes extra layers of meaning and involvement.

Conclusions This chapter has demonstrated the extent to which performance in 1970s television drama results from the ‘dance’ between actors and camera. To paraphrase Wheatley (2005), while the electronic studio may be dated and occasionally clumsy, it is certainly not inexpressive. The reliance of I, Claudius on camera mobility, the unbroken take, and the combinations of facial close-up with wider framings confirms Caughie’s view of the electronic studio as ‘a performance space – a space for acting – rather than a narrative space – a space for action’ (2000: 77). However, it could be argued that performance in the electronic studio is its action. This chapter has demonstrated the extent to which it is the combination and interaction of actors’ performance and camera performance which gives television studio drama much of its power. Furthermore, the ‘performance space’ identified by Caughie is not merely a space for acting, but for other sorts of performance, both visible and invisible; both dramatic and technical. Performative camera movement can contribute ‘embodied expressionism’ (Jacobs 2003: 38) to the image, intersecting narrative and aesthetic through visual mobility and framing. The importance of the studio camera operator’s embodied symbolic capital is evident, although this creative contribution has not been recognized in television scholarship. This research therefore demonstrates the potential of studio as an expressive site and redresses institutional and critical dismissals of studio camera crews as engineering functionaries, repositioning them as creative artists giving a form of performance. The chapter thus demonstrates the significance of camera operators in contributing to television drama’s aesthetic at the intersection of performance and frame, and complicates conventional notions of authorship in television. The repeated invocation of Jim Atkinson as a distinctively skilled camera operator in both institutional and collegiate discourses suggest that using his work as a case study could yield interesting data about individual visual style brought to television drama through the particular ‘invisible performance’ of a skilled camera operator. Examining a wider sample of Atkinson’s work could raise interesting questions about the possibility of a distinctive visual idiolect based in a set of embodied performative skills. While analysis of television performance is itself relatively undeveloped, this chapter has suggested that such analysis could be extended from the interaction

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of performers in the frame to the interaction between performers and the camera operators who generate the frame itself, thereby understanding camera crews as contributing a form of performance to the process. Recognizing the performative quality of camera operators draws attention to camerawork and thus to the various levels of creative labour at work in the 1970s studio, thereby extending critical understandings of historical television aesthetics. By extension, this consideration could be applied to the interaction of actors and camera in the contemporary production context, suggesting ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ performance as a useful framework for analysing any screen text.

Notes 1 i.e. overly bright, low contrast, diffuse lighting. 2 For example, Jim Atkinson as senior cameraman on the 1978 BBC Romeo and Juliet. 3 Discussion in this paragraph taken from DVD commentary track, Doctor Who and the Silurians. 4 ABC/Thames Television, 1956–74, and heavily influenced stylistically by Canadian practitioners (White 2003). 5 This single and much-quoted example may be unable to bear the critical weight placed upon it (Ellis 2007). 6 See Irene Shubik’s bitter complaints about the ‘perpetual frustration’ (87) of trying to assemble a creative team within the BBC’s Fordist systems (Bakewell and Garnham 1970). 7 Panos (2015) notes a memo recording praise for Jim Atkinson on the physical effort involved in meeting the operational challenges of new, heavy colour cameras in the late 1960s. 8 A body brace supporting an arm with a free-floating gimbal to which a camera is fixed (Millerson 1979: 435), much used for mobile point-of-view shots and in action sequences. 9 The proliferation of scenes in I, Claudius which begin and end with shots of doors suggest a further debt to theatrical entrances and exits, as well as pointing up Wise’s ‘keyhole’ approach.

References Bakewell, J. and N. Garnham (1970), The New Priesthood: British Television Today, London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press. Baron, C. (2007), ‘Acting Choices/Filmic Choices: Rethinking Montage and Performance’, Journal of Film and Video, 59 (2): 32–40. Bazin, A. (1971), What Is Cinema? Volume I, translated by H. Gray, Berkeley: University of California Press.

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BBC WAC T5/2, 606/1. I, Claudius, Episodes 1 and 2. BBC WAC T41/502/1. I, Claudius. Bignell, J., S. Lacey and M. Macmurraugh-Kavanagh (2000), British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Bourdieu, P. (1984), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1993), The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, edited and with an introduction by Randal Johnson, Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, P. (1998), On Television and Journalism, translated from the French by P. P. Ferguson. London: Pluto Press. Cantrell, T. and C. Hogg (2016), ‘Returning to an Old Question: What Do Television Actors Do When They Act?’, Critical Studies in Television, 11 (3): 283–98 Caughie, J. (2000), Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Doig, C. (2010), Clive Doig – Stories from a Life in TV. [Online] Available online: http:// tech-ops.co.uk/next/2010/09/clive-doig-stories-from-a-life-in-tv/ (Accessed 16 December 2010). Ellis, J. (2007), ‘Is It Possible to Construct a Canon of Television Programmes? Immanent Reading Versus Textual-Historicism’, in H. Wheatley (ed.), Re-viewing Television History, 15–26, London: I.B. Tauris. Englander, A. A. and P. Petzold (1976), Filming for Television, London: Focal Press. Foucault, M. (1980), Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, translated by C. Gordon, L. Marshall, J. Mephan and K. Soper, London: Prentice Hall. Foucault, M. (1991), Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, translated by A. Sheridan, London: Penguin Books. Friedberg, A. (2006), The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, London: MIT Press. Geraghty, C. (2003), ‘Aesthetics and Quality in Popular Television Drama’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 6 (1): 24–45. Graves, R. (1953), I, Claudius, London: Penguin Books. Graves, R. (1954), Claudius the God, London: Penguin Books. Hussein, W. (2010), Interview with author, 20 May 2010. Jacobs, J. (1998), ‘No Respect: Shot and Scene in Early Television Drama’, in J. Ridgman (ed.), Boxed Sets: Television Representations of Theatre, 39–61, Luton: University of Luton Press. Jacobs, J. (2000), The Intimate Screen: Early British Television Drama, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jacobs, J. (2003), Body Trauma TV: The New Hospital Dramas, London: BFI. Joshel, S. R. (2001), ‘I, Claudius: Projection and Imperial Soap Opera’, in S. R. Joshel, M. Malamud and D. T. McGuire (eds), Imperial Projections: Ancient Rome in Modern Popular Culture, 118–61, London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lury, K. (1996), ‘Television Performance: Being, Acting and “Corpsing” ’, New Formations, 26 (1995–6): 114–27. MacMurraugh-Kavanagh, M. and S. Lacey (1999), ‘Who Framed Theatre? The “Moment of Change” in British TV Drama’, New Theatre Quarterly, 57 (XV:1 February): 58–74. Millerson, G. (1979), The Technique of Television Production, 10th ed., London: Focal Press. Newnham, B. (2010), Jim Atkinson. Available online: www.tech-ops.co.uk/page45.html (accessed 16 December 2010).

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Panos, L. (2015), ‘The Arrival of Colour in BBC Drama and Rudolph Cartier’s Colour Productions’, Critical Studies in Television, 10 (3): 101–20. Panos, L. and S. Lacey (2015), ‘Editorial: The Spaces of Television’, Critical Studies in Television, 10 (3): 1–4. Powell, J. (2009), Interview with author, 29 October 2009. Rakoff, A. (2010), Interview with author, 7 December 2010. Selby, K. and R. Cowdery (1995), How to Study Television, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press. Taylor, D. (1990), Days of Vision: Working with David Mercer: Television Drama Then and Now, London: Heinemann. Tucker, P. (2003), Secrets of Screen Acting, 2nd edn, London: Routledge. Wheatley, H. (2005), ‘Rooms within Rooms: Upstairs Downstairs and the Studio Costume Drama of the 1970s’, in C. Johnson and R. Turnock (eds), ITV Cultures: Independent Television over Fifty Years, 143–58, Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill Education/Open University Press. Wheatley, H. (2007), ‘ “And Now for Your Sunday Night Experimental Drama . . .”: Experimentation and Armchair Theatre’, in L. Mulvey and J. Sexton (eds), Experimental British Television, 31–47, Manchester: Manchester University Press. White, L. (2003), Armchair Theatre: The Lost Years, Tiverton, Devon: Kelly Publications. Williams, R. (1968), Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, London: Chatto and Windus. Wise, H. (2002), I, Claudius: Making of a Television Epic, [DVD] London: BBC. Wise, H. (2005), Drama Connections: I, Claudius. TX 9 Nov 2005, London: BBC. Wise, H. (2010), Interview with author, 2 November 2010. Zucker, C. (1999), ‘An Interview with Ian Richardson: Making Friends with the Camera’, in A. Lovell and P. Kramer (eds), Screen Acting, 152–64, London: Routledge.

Videography Doctor Who and the Silurians. (1970) [DVD]. Commentary track. Hedda Gabler. BBC 1972. I, Claudius. BBC 1976. Romeo and Juliet. BBC 1978.

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3 ‘NO-NONSENSE ROZZER’: PHILIP GLENISTER/GENE HUNT, LIFE ON MARS AND THE PARTICULARITY OF TELEVISION ACTING Stephen Lacey

As befits a collection that is concerned with acting on television, this chapter is interested primarily in some of the ways in which acting on television is a distinctive mode of performing. This is not only because television as a narrative art is different to both the cinema and the theatre, but also because the demands made on the actor are, in important ways, particular to the medium. There is, immediately, the question of what constitutes ‘acting’, and what kind of figure ‘the actor’ is. This may seem self-evident, but acting is one kind of performance on television, and the actor is often competing for attention on the screen with other professional and non-professional performers; presenters, comedians, newsreaders, participants in reality TV shows and historical documentary reality shows. Sometimes  – and this is part of the distinctiveness of the medium  – the actor him or herself will be performing these different roles, perhaps on the same night, in a particular construction of television ‘flow’:  for example, the omnipresent Stephen Fry may appear in a re-run of the drama series Kingdom (ITV 2007–9) on ITV3 (a channel devoted to ITV’s back catalogue of popular drama series); as quizmaster on BBC2’s comically erudite QI (BBC 2003–); and as a guest on Graham Norton’s celebrity chat show on BBC1 (2007–). Even when actors are unambiguously

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acting, television may bring their work in different dramatic genres into collision with each other on the same evening:  in Spring 2016, Tom Hollander could be seen on two terrestrial channels simultaneously in the UK – as the eponymous central character in Doctor Thorne (ITV 2016), an adaptation of a literary classic by Anthony Trollope, and as Corcoran, the vicious sidekick to the central villain in The Night Manager (BBC 2016), also an adaptation, this time from a John le Carré thriller.1 The exploration of the particularity of television acting in this chapter will involve, as it must, considering a lot of other things as well. It will be concerned with drama formats – especially the drama series – and with questions of method. Such matters are best analysed with concrete examples, and this chapter will focus on Life on Mars (BBC 2006–7) and, to a lesser extent, Ashes to Ashes (BBC 2008–10) and on the actor Philip Glenister, who played Detective Inspector Gene Hunt. In one sense, it does not matter which example is chosen, since many of the questions posed could be asked of any television programme. Life on Mars, however, was a major critical and popular success, and Glenister/Hunt escaped the bounds of the drama, just as the series escaped the confines of the cop-show genre. This allows for a consideration of the ways in which an actor/ character enters the public consciousness. Life on Mars centres on Sam Tyler (John Simm), a Detective Inspector in the Manchester police force in 2006, who is run down by a car in the course of an investigation and wakes up to find himself in 1973. The narrative arc, which is carried across both series, concerns his attempts to get back to 2006; the question posed at the beginning of each episode is ‘Am I mad, in a coma or back in time?’ and much of the narrative tension in the series derives from the interplay of these possibilities. The series is, therefore, a generic hybrid, part cop show and part sci-fi drama. Narratively, it is mostly the former, since each episode has its own story of a crime that must be solved, and both tension and humour arises from the clash between Sam’s 2006 policing methods and those of 1973, embodied in ‘the gov’, Gene Hunt and his sidekicks Chris and Ray (Marshall Lancaster and Dean Andrews respectively). There is also the possibility of a love interest provided by WPC Annie Cartwright (Liz White). The two series of Life on Mars ran over sixteen episodes (eight per series). Ashes to Ashes was a spin-off from Life on Mars, in which the core team of Gene, Chris and Ray move to London in 1981, and the time-travelling role is reprised by DCI Alex Drake (Keeley Hawes), who is sent back in time (from 2008) after being shot. The dilemma remains the same – how can Alex get back to the present – although the main character this time is Gene Hunt, the self-styled Sheriff, who provides the resolution to the enigma of both series (for the benefit of viewers who have not seen either programme, and might wish to, this will not be revealed here). Ashes to Ashes ran for three series of eight episodes per series.

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Series drama: Production, genre and format After a period of neglect, the need to establish a method, or methods, appropriate to the task of analysing television acting has received much more attention of late. Richard Hewett’s very helpful categories provide one framework in which an analysis might be conducted (Hewett 2015). Hewett is concerned with some of the factors that determine the work of the actor, traced across time: increased, and increasing, budgetary and scheduling constraints; changing camera and editing technologies, and the way these impact on production methods; actor training; and directing and supporting actors in the production process. Hewett reminds us that the contexts of television drama production are vital to an understanding of acting, as each performance, and each text, exists within a mode of production. These may be located at the macro or the micro level, although the division between the two is not fixed; it is best, perhaps, to think of micro and macro as two ends of a spectrum on which different elements of production might be placed, their positioning dependent on the purpose of the analysis. The macro context, briefly, takes us away from the individual actor on the screen and refers to the place of a particular programme in the wider ecology of broadcasting. It might include, though not exhaustively:  the demands of international co-production; the location of the programme in the schedules; the internal politics of the broadcaster and the commissioning process; the politics of casting (who is known in what markets) although this may also be considered as an element of the micro context. To take the example of Life on Mars, a full analysis of the macro production context would need to account for the fact that it was a series commissioned by BBC Wales, set and filmed in Manchester, made by an independent production company, Kudos, based in London, screened initially in the UK and marketed by BBC Worldwide and re-made in at least two national contexts (USA and Spain) where Philip Glenister and John Simm were largely unknown. The micro level in this context refers to the demands on the actor arising from the kind of format adopted – a one-off drama or mini-series or a long-running series, say – the technology used and the specific production process utilized, all of which will be experienced by actors as being different, necessitating varied approaches to matters of preparation (see Durham 2002). The advent of DVD extras gives us important information about the micro production context via interviews with actors, directors, writers and other production personnel. These are not disinterested sources, of course, but part of the promotional discourse surrounding the series: they often yield fascinating insights about process and method nonetheless. Questions of genre are important to any consideration of television acting, as well as to drama more generally (see especially Cornea (2010) for an eloquent

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and comprehensive account of genre and screen acting). In many ways, however, format is at least as, if not more, important to the work that a television actor does as genre. Given that genres are increasingly hybridized, with the walls between them regularly breached (as, indeed, happens in Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes), the fact that actors are working in series is of crucial importance. Series drama is extremely demanding, especially for actors in key roles, given the pressures of time, money and availability, and can lead to direct interventions to protect a star. The main character/actor in Life on Mars is Sam Tyler/John Simm (at least initially). Simm was heavily promoted and interviewed as part of the pretransmission publicity (Lacey and McElroy 2012: 2), and securing him in the lead role was seen as crucial to the success of the project. This meant, however, that he was in nearly every scene, and an entire sequence was invented to give him time off (for aficionados of British children’s television in the 1970s, this was a spoof version of the animated series Camberwick Green, which cast Hunt as a bent copper ‘beating up a nonce’) (Gardner and Parker 2012: 174). The pressures of shooting series drama are such that rehearsal is rare indeed (rehearsal, in the sense that it is understood in the theatre, and was practiced in television drama in the 1970s, is unknown in all drama formats now). It can be difficult for directors, often brought in to direct a limited number of episodes, to meet actors prior the shoot. One director of Life on Mars, Andrew Gunn, told Richard Hewett that he went to considerable lengths to arrange a meeting with Simm and Glenister so that he could establish a rapport before beginning work (Hewett 2015: 84). The shooting schedule of Life on Mars, in fact, was gruelling for everyone: each series of 8 episodes was shot in 4 blocks, with 2 episodes at a time shot in each block; shooting was not in sequence, and scenes were filmed out of order and across episodes. Actors only got their scripts for the particular block they were working on, and much of this arrived during shooting.2 They knew (especially as episode 1 might be twinned with episode 6) where their characters and the narrative were going, but not necessarily how they were going to get there. Also, they did not always know – according to Bharat Nalluri, who directed two episodes of the first series – what would work for the series as a whole, and choices had to be modified in the shooting process (Nalluri 2008). This might seem to treat actors as fodder in an industrial process, but it also gives them a power, especially if they are central, recurrent characters. They are, almost by default, responsible for maintaining a sense of character coherence, for tracking situation and relationships and noting anomalies and inconsistencies, even if – in a situation where time is more precious than money – their power to effect change is limited. This emerges with clarity from Roberta Pearson’s (2010) analysis of Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) (Paramount Television 1987–94) in which interviews with Patrick Stewart, who played Captain Picard, the man at the helm of the starship Enterprise, reveal both the possibilities and

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the frustrations for an actor who is on this particular treadmill. As a lead actor, Stewart was able to talk to the writers about his part, yet found it increasingly hard to introduce anything ‘new’ to the character (Pearson 2010: 168). As Pearson observes, one response to the pressures of series shooting is that actors in long-running series often maintain coherence by basing characters on themselves. This is one reason why there is always a level of what one might call everyday ‘realism’ in series acting, which is present no matter what the specific demands of the programme, or the register of acting styles associated with the genre. Another reason is the need to provide a point of identification for the viewer, who, if s/he is to return each week/episode, is required to invest in a series character. Brett Mills has argued, in relation to sitcom, that comedy requires a combination of acting styles: ‘we could distinguish, say, between expositional acting in sitcom and that required for punchlines’ (Mills 2005:  75). The point could be generalized, as no matter what kind of drama is being performed, actors often establish a base line of realism – ‘expositional acting’ – from which other modes of performance (melodrama or comedy, for example) can depart, providing a consistency that can be read as character.

Textual analysis: Meeting Gene Hunt The format of a programme provides the constraints that shape the performances that appear on screen, but analysing those constraints does not replace the need to consider the text itself, which in this case will be a scene from the first episode of Life on Mars. The analysis will raise some questions concerning method, but will also examine how character and narrative are established through the actors’ performances. At its most precise, the work of the actor is registered in her/his fleeting, moment-by-moment presence on the screen, what John Adams, drawing on Richard Dyer, calls ‘enactment’ (Adams 1999). This term captures the specific decisions (conscious and intuitive) made by the actor and registered in ways that include: gesture and movement within a given and constructed space; the use of the face (television’s use of the close-up has often been commented on); and the voice (timbre, delivery, accent, emphasis). It will also include an actor/character’s proxemic relationships to other actor/characters and to the physical and fictional spaces in which s/he is placed. There is a methodological question concerning authorship – who makes these decisions, the actor or director – that would be interesting to consider, although it will sidestepped here: no matter where such decisions originate, they are registered in the actor’s performance. Enactment is not normally experienced by viewers as a separate ‘moment’ in the narrative, although we may be aware of – and appreciate – particular decisions: a look, a vocal inflection, a gesture. For the most part, actors’ decisions

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are understood within a textual, stylistic and generic context: the immediate narrative premise  – part of which an actor might call the given circumstances  – which includes, in addition to essential plot information, what we already know of the character and his/her situation; the specific mise-en-scéne; a rhetoric of shot length, framing, lighting and so on, which will be dependent on  – or at least shaped by – the demands of genre, registered at the level of the shot or sequence. The enactments of both Simm/Tyler and Glenister/Hunt as well as their textual contexts will be important in what follows. The scene chosen for analysis is about fifteen minutes into the episode and is the first time we meet Gene Hunt, and the first time that the two protagonists, Hunt and Sam Tyler, encounter each other. Tyler, who has yet to make sense of his 1973 surroundings, finds his way to a police station, where he has been assigned. It is where, in 2006, he works, but it bears no resemblance to that familiar office space. The mise-en-scène offers a highly-structured contrast: in 2006, the office space is all glass and metal, brightly lit, its main colours grey, white and silver; in 1973, it is dark, smoky, dominated by browns and blacks, chipped, formica-covered furniture and venetian blinds that cast shadows across the space. This contrast is an important part of the immediate narrative premise. Tyler has been told, as have his new colleagues, that he is suffering from concussion. The strangeness of the situation is registered in Tyler’s entrance, which is shot from his point-of-view, slightly slowed down and with a muffled sound track, in which a ringing telephone dominates. Hunt is announced via a cough, a response to Tyler’s angry question: ‘This is my department. What have you done with it?’. The viewer knows, from the response of the other detectives, that this does not bode well. We first see Hunt framed in the doorway to his office, lit from below, cigarette in hand. From this point onwards, the scene establishes both the character of Hunt and his relationship to Tyler. The latter is pulled into the office and banged against a wall, and after a pithy and comic exchange – Hunt’s first line is ‘A word in your shell-like, pal’ – Hunt punches Tyler in the stomach, with the words: ‘Don’t ever waltz into my kingdom acting like you’re the king of the jungle’. This physical encounter is shot initially over Hunt’s shoulder, slightly from above – to emphasize his dominance – and as a head-and-shoulder shot (this is repeated at the end of the scene). When Tyler is punched, the viewpoint is reversed, with the camera slightly below and looking up towards Hunt. The framing reveals aspects of the mise-en-scène that place Hunt in his generic and cultural context:  Tyler is slammed into a dartboard, with a film poster of a cowboy to the top left of the screen (introducing Hunt by inference as ‘the Sheriff’). The use of close-up and a tight, head-and-shoulders two-shot mean that the actors are relying on facial expression and movements of the head to signify intention. Glenister invests Hunt with a facial impassivity and directness of gaze, here and throughout the series, which is matched by a stillness that is occasionally varied by a small look away from the person he is encountering.

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Simm, in contrast, has a mobile expression, by turns vulnerable and angry, and often does not maintain eye contact (although this less in evidence at other points). It is in many ways a classic dramatic situation, representing the competition for personal status between two high status players, a competition that will be enacted in different ways, and with different results, throughout both series of Life on Mars. It is partly about who controls the space, what Glenister/ Hunt and Simm/Tyler do, physically and vocally, to demonstrate command of that space: whatever Tyler’s authority in 2006, it is very much Hunt’s territory in 1973. In these ways, Hunt is established from the outset as Tyler’s antithesis. The opposition between them is essential to the narrative (although this is complicated as the series develops), but it is also present in their contrasting physicality as well as their acting choices: John Simm is slim, shortish, dark, younger, revealing an attractive 2006 vulnerability; Philip Glenister is taller, older, fairer and heavier built (there would seem to be no worry about his waistline) and was read easily in terms of a 1970s rough-and-ready sexuality. Perhaps surprisingly – to the series’ creators Matthew Graham and Ashley Pharaoh, at least – Glenister/ Hunt also became a ‘sex symbol’ to some (there was an online forum called Hunt’s Housewives (Wylie 2010)). In fact, Graham and Pharaoh were taken by surprise in a number of ways by Glenister/Hunt, not least by the power of Glenister’s performance in scenes such as the one described above. Given that the individual scripts for Life on Mars were being written as the series was being filmed (although the narrative trajectory of the series and Ashes to Ashes had already been conceived), they were able to respond to what they saw emerging onscreen, an indication of the way that series drama allows the writers and producers to respond to what actors do. Graham has described their changing attitude thus: Philip Glenister brought such amazing magnetism to it, that right from the first couple of days’ filming, we thought, ‘Oh bloody hell, this guy’s really good and this character could really catch fire. So let’s make sure we feed that character as much as we feed Sam.’ If the casting had been wrong, I think we would have probably focused much more heavily on Sam. It would have been much less a buddy show – we thought people would just hate him. That’s fine. You can hate him and love Sam. Sam’s the hero, you don’t have to love Gene. And then we thought, ‘Oh, actually, he’s a bit loveable or likeable, or something’s going on there we can’t quite explain.’ (Wylie 2008) One might argue that the way that the first meeting between Tyler and Hunt is established and shot, the lines Glenister is given and his physical domination of the space all give Glenister/Hunt prominence; perhaps the writers should not have been so surprised at the success of their creation.

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As Glenister/Hunt became increasingly popular with viewers, he became the central character of Ashes to Ashes. This put Glenister in a strong position to influence the direction of the series, as Graham has acknowledged: Phil wanted a very nice lunch to talk about it. Quite rightly, because he said. ‘Where do I go?’ It’s a very radical re-balance of the show too – there was a lot of pressure on Phil. I think if Ashes To Ashes had bombed it would have been hard on him, because it would have looked like, without John Simm . . . so he, rightly, made us really interrogate the idea. (Wylie 2008) There is an important point to make here about what character is in a longrunning series. Patrick Stewart may have been frustrated that he could not wring anything more out of Captain Picard in TNG (Pearson 2010: 168–9), which may be important if, as viewers, we have watched a character over a period of years (fans of Coronation Street (ITV 1960–present) have grown old in the company of William Roache who has played Ken Barlow since the very first episode and is still a regular). In one sense, however, series drama is not interested in character development so much as character revelation. That is, characters remain pretty much the same, though we may find out more about them. We discover in Ashes to Ashes, for example, that Gene Hunt is haunted by the death of his brother, although this does not change him significantly, only explains some of his attitudes and reactions, with which we are already familiar. Actors’ performances often circulate a given repertoire of character traits, some of which are present in this opening confrontation:  Hunt’s ready resort to violence and summary (in)justice; inscrutable facial expressions and occasional raised eyebrow; the elaborate verbal riffs, replete with the distinctly nonPC observations and put-downs that made him popular with sections of the audience and press, as we shall see below. Sometimes these are simply recognizable and repeated habits that enable viewers to ‘get the hang’ of a character and which offer the pleasure of the familiar, once the character has become established. This encourages a kind of behaviourism in acting and in reading the actor; that is, character is defined as a set of behavioural tics, which are sometimes reflected in an actor’s habitual delivery and gestures. There is a particularly cruel video compilation on YouTube that gathers together a series of enigmatic one-liners delivered by David Caruso playing Horatio Caine, the lead investigator in CSI: Miami (CBS 2002–12).3 Caine’s ironic summations of often grisly crime scenes became a recognizable character trope – usually accompanied by a flourish of his ubiquitous sunglasses – and were a means by which the actor established and differentiated the character for the viewer (even if en masse the effect is comic). If one looks for them, every recurrent character in a drama series is likely to have such behavioural identifiers, often the result of decisions made by the actor her/himself. Glenister invests Hunt with several more in the

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episode: returning a document to a fellow police officer by slamming it against his (and it is always his) chest; turning to a stunned member of the public (and Tyler) after a particularly baroque outburst with the single word ‘what?’. Matthew Graham, one of the main writers of Life on Mars, has commented on this type of characterization: You don’t have to take them [series characters] on a journey. They’re icons, they’re iconic. They just exist . . . they don’t change . . . you don’t evolve them, you can stretch them as long as they ping back to where they were at the start . . . This is the rule for series characters in general . . . They don’t evolve, but you know them better and have a shared history. (Graham 2010) The ability to understand how a character works in these terms, how to draw on and circulate a specific set of character traits, is part of the skill of being an actor in these kinds of role. It is frequently experienced as an unconscious understanding of what is required. Glenister has said that he knew instinctively how to play Gene Hunt from the very beginning:  ‘I picked up the script and knew immediately, it was one of those few times, you know immediately, I knew immediately, what I wanted to do with Gene, how it should be played . . . Just more of the same, less is more, keep it simple. Don’t try and complicate things’ (Glenister 2010).

Gene Hunt: 1970s man Life on Mars was a popular and critical success, achieving viewing figures of around 7.5 million for its first episode and retaining a loyal audience for the entire run of both series (Lacey and McElroy 2012:  1). The context of reception is important to the way that actors and their performances are understood, although there is no space to pursue this effectively here. For a programme with the visibility of Life on Mars – widely debated across the media and beyond the television pages – the reviewing context was also important, as was the responses of committed fans. Researchers now have access to the latter via web fan fora, whose posters frequently comment on actors and characters and engage in debate about them, often after the programme has been transmitted (Williams 2015). Fan sites for both Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes focused on both Simm/Tyler and Glenister/Hunt, moving between a consideration of actor and character and raising a wide range of issues about the politics of representation along the way (see Brett Mills’s (2012) exploration of one popular fan site, The Railway Arms, and the way in which the US remake of the series was received).4 The success of the series meant that its actors and characters (who were often conflated) had a public presence beyond the text  – indeed, beyond

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television itself. On the one hand, this was a manifestation of the way that television actors become celebrities, or ‘stars’, who find a place alongside other kinds of celebrities from other forms of television (and determining the next steps along the career path in the process). Actors may also find that the characters they play acquire distinct cultural or political resonances, over which they and their writers have no immediate control. There are several dimensions to this in the case of Glenister/Hunt, which raise questions about the role of the actor/character in relation to television and history (and television history). From the transmission of the first episode, Life on Mars was interpreted in the context of earlier police series – that is, it pointed towards television’s own history. Simultaneously, the series (and Gene Hunt especially) was read in terms of a particular view of the 1970s and its relevance to the 2000s – that is, it pointed towards a wider cultural history, in which the present also played a part. One reference point for the writers and, it seems, even more so for the audience, was The Sweeney (ITV 1975–8) with John Thaw in the role of D.I. Jack Regan, who was seen as a direct ancestor of Gene Hunt. The Sweeney occupies a distinctive place in the history of UK police drama. Shot entirely on film and mostly on location, The Sweeney, named after the cockney rhyming slang for the Flying Squad, brought a fast-paced, irreverent and action-oriented approach to representing the police, opening up new possibilities for series drama in the process (Cooke 2003: 115–17).5 The connection between Regan and Hunt circulated widely in the reviews of Life on Mars, and this was partly because Regan occupied a similar position as outsider in relation to the police hierarchy, the maverick, who was nevertheless motivated by a strong moral sense and a desire to protect his men, and who nearly always got the job done. It was also at the level of acting and characterization. Many of Thaw/Regan’s behavioural characteristics are almost identical to Glenister/Hunt’s, although the two actors are dissimilar in physical appearance: a reliance on the whisky bottle, cigarette smoking and acerbic one-liners amongst the most memorable. Although such characteristics might be seen as behavioural accretions, as noted above, they are not simply external to the character, but can be activated by the narrative, and inhabited by the actor, to reveal attitudes and inner flaws. The accretions noted here complicate the picture drawn earlier, suggesting that actors look beyond themselves when constructing a role, although the references that seem obvious to others are not always the ones that are important to actors. Glenister, although aware of Thaw/Regan, framed his performance in relation to football managers of the time – Brian Clough in his heyday in the 1970s in particular  – with a dash of a contemporary José Mourinho, then in his first period as manager of Chelsea FC (Glenister 2010). Julie Gardner, the executive producer of Life on Mars for BBC Cymru/Wales, observed that most of the team working on the series were too young to have seen The Sweeney when it first aired, and that it was not an immediate influence on the production

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(Gardner and Parker 2012: 175). More important to the general tone and visual appeal was the film Get Carter (1971), introduced to the production process by one of the main directors, Bharat Nalluri, who offered it as a way of avoiding cliché (ibid.). It was not, however, television’s own history alone that helped make sense of Life on Mars, but also the way that the series made sense of history, with different versions of Britain in the 1970s co-opted in the name of contemporary battles. Hunt was adopted by the tabloid press as the man who could say everything that could no longer be said, representing attitudes that seemed to chime with their own and offering a lament for conservative social values. There is only space to give a flavour of this: We don’t want our police forces run by lily-livered sociology graduates, banging on about ‘institutional racism’ and pretending crime is ‘society’s fault’. [ . . . ] What we want is the sort of old-fashioned, no-nonsense rozzer who solves the crime quickly, gets another bad guy, any bad guy, it doesn’t matter which – off the streets, and enables us to sleep that little bit more safely in our beds at night. What we want, in fact, is someone like DCI Gene Hunt. The problem with DCI Hunt, unfortunately, is that he doesn’t exist. (Dellingpole 2007) In accounts such as this, Glenister’s deadpan swagger allowed Hunt to be read in terms of contemporary anxieties about policing, political correctness  – and everything that that term hides – and masculinity. This was a reading of the character that eventually alarmed his creators, who argued, not entirely convincingly, that he was always intended ironically: If we met a real Gene Hunt, I don’t know if we would warm to him. At the same time, I think people have grabbed on to him not so much because of his views but because of his freedom. He doesn’t worry about his health. He doesn’t worry about what other people think of him. He doesn’t have any fear like you and I do and he’s liberated by that . . . The only time we got a bit worried . . . was when we got a sense he was becoming a poster boy for a sort of white van man mentality. You know, ‘Gene’s right, he would sort out immigration, he’d sort out single mothers’ and we started to say, ‘No, hang on, you’re missing the point’. You just have to hope most people get the irony of it. (Hendry 2010) Irony implies an observable distance between actor and character, as does most comedy, and is often the product of the narrative context and script as well as an actor’s performance. Glenister’s deadpan delivery and unapologetic presence in every situation  – ‘he doesn’t worry about what other people think of him’ – works to close any gap between him and Hunt, whilst the exuberance and

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inventiveness of Hunt’s lines often overwhelm their dramatic context. However, what Graham identifies as Hunt’s ‘freedom’, along with his fierce loyalty to his team, allows for other readings of the 1970s, as a time of security and autonomy in the workplace: [Hunt marked] the triumphant return of unreconstructed man. He is meant to show us what’s bad about 1973 but he also shows us the shortcomings of 2007 . . . In a world of short-term contracts, job insecurity and portfolio careers, Hunt’s undying loyalty to his squad (even while rabidly insulting them) makes us wistful for a time gone by when you had a job (and colleagues) for life. (Cooper 2007) When reviewers – along with viewers generally, not to mention academics – refer to actor/characters, the former is often effaced by the latter, unless a conscious decision is made to discuss the actor her/himself. It is a function of the general illusionism of television that actors should disappear inside the characters they play, visible only at certain moments in particular genres, such as comedy. This does not mean, of course, that the work actors do is not appreciated (although it is an indication that it is difficult to find the language to talk about this work). If one is in any doubt of just what Glenister brings to the role, then one need only apply the commutation test (Thompson 1978), mentally substituting another actor for him in the part (or swapping Glenister and Simm in their respective roles). The same test can be applied to specific textual details – what would Hunt mean for audiences if, say, his ubiquitous camel coat was a black raincoat? As Paul McDonald has argued, it is ‘possible to find in the very smallest of details the most significant of moments’ (McDonald 2004). As this analysis hopefully shows, it is the specificity of Philip Glenister’s performance as Gene Hunt that gave the character of Gene Hunt a resonance for viewers, and it is the particularity of the contexts in which television actors work that makes acting on television distinctive.

Notes 1 This synchronicity occasioned comment in the UK national media. See, for example, Kennedy (2016). 2 Production information is taken from interviews with production personnel on ‘Take a Look at the Lawman’, DVD extras, Life on Mars: Series 1 and 2, 2008, Contender Home Entertainment. 3 This can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sarYH0z948 (accessed 30 April 2016).

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4 The Railway Arms is a reference to the pub that Tyler, Hunt et al. frequent, which has an additional significance in the concluding episodes of Ashes to Ashes. The site is, as of February 2016, no longer available although it still has a presence on Twitter: http://www.domeofstars.com/forum/ (accessed 5 May 2016). You can, however, find an indication of the devotion the series attracted on the fan forum at the Life of Wylie website: see especially https://lifeofwylie.com/2007/04/13/life-onmars-the-afterlife/ (accessed 6 May 2016). 5 There are numerous clips from The Sweeney on YouTube; see, for example, http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaqruK6ydjo&feature=related (accessed 6 May 2016). This is from the final episode and shows Regan at his most disillusioned.

References Adams, J. (1999), ‘Screen Play: Elements of a Performance Aesthetic’, in J. Ridgman (ed.), Boxed Sets: Television Representations of Theatre, Luton: John Libby Media, Arts Council of England. Ashes to Ashes (2008–10), [TV programme] BBC. Cooke, L. (2003), Television Drama: A History, London: BFI Publishing. Cooper, G. (2007), ‘Why Women Love CDI Hunt’, Daily Telegraph, 13 April: 43. Cornea, C. (ed.) (2010), Genre and Performance: Film and Television, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Coronation Street (1960–present), [TV programme] ITV. CSI: Miami (2002–12) [TV programme] CBS. Dellingpole, J. (2007), ‘Oh for the 70s, When Real Men Ruled and Political Correctness Was Unknown’, Daily Mail, 15 February: 32. Doctor Thorne (2016), [TV programme] ITV. Durham, K. (2002), ‘Methodology and Praxis of the Actor within the Television Production Process: Facing the Camera in EastEnders and Inspector Morse’, Studies in Theatre and Performance, 22 (22): 82–94. Gardner, J. and C. Parker (2012), ‘In Conversation’, in S. Lacey and R. McElroy (eds), Life on Mars: From Manchester to New York, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Get Carter (1971), [Film] Dir. Mike Hodges, UK: MGM British Studios. Glenister, P. (2010), ‘Dust to Dust’, DVD extras, Ashes to Ashes: Series 1–2, EI Entertainment. Graham, M. (2010), ‘Dust to Dust’, DVD extras, Ashes to Ashes: Series 1–2, EI Entertainment. Graham Norton Show, The (2007–), [TV programme], BBC. Hendry, S. (2010), ‘TV Executives Think I’m Mad for Killing Off Ashes to Ashes Character Gene Hunt, Says Man Who Created Him’, Daily Record, 14 April. Available online: http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/entertainment/celebrity/tv-executives-think-immad-1056135#b153HGCYUXl55FRs.99 (accessed 11 May 2016). Hewett, R. (2015), ‘The Changing Determinants of UK Television Acting’, Critical Studies in Television, 10 (1): 73–90. Kennedy, M. (2016), ‘Hollander versus Hollander as BBC and ITV fight for Sunday night crown’, Guardian, 5 March: 3. Kingdom (2007–9), [TV programme] ITV.

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Lacey, S. and R. McElroy (eds) (2012), Life on Mars: From Manchester to New York, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Life on Mars (2006–7), [TV programme] BBC. McDonald, P. (2004), ‘Why Study Film Acting?’ in C. Baron, D. Carson and F. P. Tomasulo (eds), More Than a Method, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Mills, B. (2005), Television Sitcom, London: BFI Publishing. Mills, B. (2012), ‘American Remake – Shudder’, in S. Lacey and R. McElroy (eds), Life on Mars: From Manchester to New York, Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Nalluri, B. (2008), ‘Take a Look at the Lawman’, DVD extras, Life on Mars: Series 1–2, Contender Home Entertainment. Night Manager, The (2016), [TV programme], BBC. Pearson, R. (2010), ‘The Multiple Determinants of Television Acting’, in C. Cornea (ed.), Genre and Performance: Film and Television, Manchester: Manchester University Press. QI (2003–), [TV programme], BBC. Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) (1987–94), [TV programme] Paramount Television. Sweeney, The (1975–8), [TV programme] ITV. Thompson, J. O. (1978), ‘Screen Acting and the Commutation Test’, Screen, 19: 55–69. Williams, R. (2015), Post-Object Fandom: Television, Identity and Self-Narrative, London: Bloomsbury. Wylie, I. (2008), ‘Mars to Ashes: The Writers Talk’. Available online: https://lifeofwylie. com/2008/04/15/mars-to-ashes-the-writers-talk/ (accessed 5 May 2016). Wylie, I. (2010), ‘Ashes to Ashes: Co-creator Matthew Graham Says Goodbye to Gene Hunt’, Guardian, 21 May. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/ tvandradioblog/2010/may/21/ashes-to-ashes-final-episode (accessed 16 May 2016).

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PART TWO

TELEVISION ACTING: APPROACHES AND PERSPECTIVES

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4 ‘THE ORGANIC AND THE TECHNICAL’: A PSYCHOPHYSICAL APPROACH TO TELEVISION ACTING Tom Cantrell

Introduction Jason Watkins is a familiar face on British television and has been particularly associated with his comic roles in W1A (BBC 2014–), Trollied (Sky 2011–) and Love, Nina (BBC 2016). However, it was for his performance in a docudrama that he won the BAFTA Television Award for Best Actor in 2015. Watkins played the title role in The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies (ITV 2014), Peter Morgan’s twopart drama about the murder of Joanna Yeates in Bristol in 2010 and the wrongful arrest of Jefferies, a retired English teacher who had been Yeates’s landlord, in early 2011. The drama focuses on press intrusion, Jefferies’s plight to clear his name, and his subsequent campaigning for tighter press regulation, which culminated in giving testimony at the Leveson Inquiry into press standards in November 2011. This chapter uses new interview material with Watkins to analyse how he approached this role and, in doing so, situates Watkins’s process as an example of a psychophysical approach to character development on television. Much has been written about the interrelationship between the psychological and physical in preparation to play a role in theatre. However, little work has been done to explore how this relationship might function on television, in which (as has been well-documented elsewhere, see Hewett 2015 and Cantrell and Hogg 2016) formal rehearsal time is rare and it is the actor’s solo private work, rather than that shared in the rehearsal room, which becomes the primary site

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of character development. The portmanteau term ‘psychophysical’, a central element of actor-trainer Constantin Stanislavski’s work, will be scrutinized in the context of Watkins’s approach and the innovative process behind his portrayal will prompt a re-evaluation of how the two constituent parts of the term, the psychological and the physical, might function in the service of character development for television. This chapter is designed to demonstrate actors’ detailed, precise and innovative work that goes on away from formalized and observable spaces in the process of making television drama, and which can only be accessed via interview material with the actors themselves. This chapter is part of a wider project, exemplified in Acting in British Television, my book with Christopher Hogg in 2017, to position acting processes at the heart of analysis into television performance. Television Studies has a track record of detailed and precise analyses of end product and there is a great value in this form of textual analysis as it is, of course, the end-text that viewers see. This has been the modus operandi of choice when exploring performance. However, to focus purely on the end-text is to see only part of the picture. This chapter does not focus on Watkins’s final performance so much as analyse the journey by which he arrived at that performance. It locates television acting as a process which is worthy of exploration rather than as a product which is worthy of evaluation. This process is individual to each actor and is minutely calibrated to the task in hand. In my experience of interviewing around 100 actors for my research into theatre and television, it has become clear that each project necessitates actors to remodel, adapt and, occasionally, dismiss their previous approaches. Therefore, this chapter does not claim to provide a commentary on how actors (in a general sense) approach docudrama, nor how Jason Watkins approaches all of his television work; rather, it analyses how he worked on this particular (much lauded) project. In this light, it is the methodology of using detailed interview material from an actor to analyse a specific and unique acting process, rather than any generalizations about this genre or actor, which can then be more widely deployed.

Acting in docudrama As I argued in an article in the Journal of British Cinema and Television in 2017, acting in docudrama remains underexplored in the academy.1 This is surprising on two counts. Firstly, the site of collision between fictional drama and factual documentary appears to be a particularly fertile location in which to analyse how actors incorporate both elements (and all of the attendant complexities, contradictions and nuances which fall under these umbrella terms2) into their work, and secondly because commissioning high-budget projects which focus on a recognized actor playing a real person is notably in vogue within the television and film industries. In fact, since the start of this decade, Watkins has been in good

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company, as five of the seven BAFTA Television Awards for Best Actor have been awarded to actors playing real people. It is clearly an area in which the actor’s work is particularly highly prized. This is due, in part, to the presence of the real person, who immediately provides an audience with a tangible measurement of the actor’s skill. Indeed, when the actor is already known for their work on other roles (or via their own celebrity status), their characterization is all the more tangible. Put simply, an audience can measure not only the distance travelled from the actor’s previous roles and their own public status, but also the extent to which they successfully portray another known individual. This measurement, crude though it may be, is not available to actors playing fictional roles, and is a particular feature (and challenge) of playing a real person. The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies was written by Peter Morgan, produced by Gareth Neame for Carnival Films, and directed by Roger Michell. Michell was taught by Jefferies when he was a student at Clifton College and, as Watkins states, ‘the kernel of the story was his fascination about the transformation of Christopher Jefferies.’ Lambasted and defamed in the press at the time of his arrest (The Sun headline read ‘The Strange Mr Jefferies’ (31 December 2010) and The Mirror led with ‘Jo Suspect is Peeping Tom’ (31 December 2010)), Jefferies later received damages from the papers, an apology and compensation from Avon and Somerset Police, and his ‘transformation’ became complete when he became one of the most respected and influential campaigners for tighter press regulation, a role which he continues to this day. The drama follows Jefferies’s experiences from the disappearance of Yeates, the discovery of her body, through to his arrest and police interviews. The latter half of the drama charts his release without charge, and his growing determination and confidence to act as a spokesperson for press regulation, including a scene with Steve Coogan as the pair prepare to give evidence in the Leveson Inquiry. The film is dedicated to the memory of Joanna Yeates and was made with the permission of her family, but the focus is on Jefferies; it was, as Michell called it, his ‘love-letter to Christopher Jefferies’ (Howells 2014). In both content and form, The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies is a quite traditional docudrama. What distinguishes it is the quality of the writing, direction and performances rather than the innovations or experiments it makes to the field. It is a drama based on real events, most of the dialogue is invented, and Morgan’s script provides the viewer with privileged access to the unfolding story and private conversations which would have been impossible in a documentary. In this light, it occupies the complex terrain of docudrama, in which, according to Paget, the human agent [the actor] on screen is always both more and less than the real individual being impersonated. They are more in the sense that their body signifies an excess that is always fictional (as any acting is); they are less in the sense that this body emphasises the structuring absence of the Real Person Subject. (2011: 46)

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This combination of ‘dearth’ and ‘excess’ (Paget 2011: 56) is felt most keenly in The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies when the viewer is transported from the public to private sphere, and so from verbatim statements to invented dialogue. However, these different spheres highlighted either ‘dearth’ or ‘excess’, rather than the actor ‘always [being] both more and less than the real individual’ (2011: 46, my emphasis) as Paget asserts. For example, there are scenes which are likely to be familiar to the viewer from their repeated appearance on television news bulletins as the story broke. These scenes act as a ‘dearth’ as the viewer can identify Watkins standing in for Jefferies, in an act of re-performance of a particular well-documented moment which viewers are very likely to associate with Christopher Jefferies himself. In these scenes the absence of the real person, or dearth, is emphasized through Watkins’s presence. In this way they are a piece of reportage – a re-performance of what did happen. By contrast, the fictionalized, private moments, such as Jefferies’s conversations over dinner with his friends during his ordeal, operate as an ‘excess’ in that the viewer becomes reliant solely on the imagination of the film’s creators, in their act of ‘structuring absence’ of the real person; the viewer is aware that these scenes are invented and that they are watching a piece of conjecture – what might have happened. The distinction between these two qualities of dearth and excess was not lost on Watkins. Indeed, he identified that when he portrayed Jefferies in scenes with which the viewer might be familiar (and so his re-performance operated as a dearth) he employed a particularly forensic approach to recreation. Of his work on the most famous footage of Jefferies, in which he is door-stepped by Sky News cameras, he stated: One thing that I really worked on . . . was to nail the re-creation of the Sky TV footage. That was the most closely recreated work that I did. I watched that footage and matched the word to the movement. For example, the moment Christopher touches the gate. Moving the glove from one hand to the other. On which word he opens the gates. The bag went over that shoulder and he turns on that word. That scene was absolutely accurate. I felt that I had to recreate that moment, as it is one of the most widely recognised sections of news footage from the case. It was the fact that the scene was ‘widely recognised’ that prompted this approach. Watkins’s term ‘re-creation’ is key here. In my interview, his use of this term was reserved for scenes in which the original event involving Jefferies – what we might call the ‘creation’ of the scene – was already familiar to viewers. The care with which Watkins sought to match the physical and the verbal in his re-creation, and to replicate this timing precisely, was central to his work. His comments also prompt a closer analysis of what we mean by a psychophysical process. In Watkins’s analysis of his work on this scene, his focus is

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very much on the physical; there is little in the above statement about the psychology of the man. This was, however, not true of his work more widely, in which he embarked on a parallel process of developing the psychological aspects of character alongside the physical. As this chapter will go on to analyse, what was unusual in Watkins’s process was that these two elements remained distinct for a significant period of his preparation, which represents a marked contrast to existing literature on psychophysical acting processes.

Psychophysical acting ‘Psychophysical’ is a key term in Stanislavski’s writings, and a central tenet of his work. As Bella Merlin explains in her book Beyond Stanislavski: The Psycho-Physical Approach to Actor Training, ‘Psycho-physical training is one in which the body and psyche, outer expression and inner sensation, are integrated and inter-dependent’ (2001: 4). Stanislavski saw the connection between these two elements, the physical and the psychological, as being complex and multi-faceted. As Merlin outlines, The brain inspires the emotions, which then prompt the body into action and expression. Or the body arouses the imagination, which then activates the emotions. Or the emotions stir the brain to propel the body to work. (2001: 4) Bella Merlin’s comments are a useful reminder as they can be read against a backdrop in which different acting traditions have foregrounded certain elements in Stanislavski’s psychophysical training practices in order to more readily fit with the dominant political and cultural context. As Carnicke has noted, ‘In the United States, Stanislavsky’s work with emotion answered the American fascination with Freudian psychology. In the Soviet Union, Stanislavsky’s work with physical aspects of acting made his System better conform to the tenets of Marxist materialism’ (2010: 8). However, this was far from Stanislavski’s intention, as Carnicke argues, ‘This bifurcation of the System is mistaken . . . For Stanislavsky, the mental and the spiritual is always imbued with the physical and vice versa’ (2010:  8). Due to Russian censorship of his writings, his own difficulties in formulating a written guide to his work, and complications in his work with publishers, ‘for more than a decade half of the System appeared to be the whole’ (2009: 77).3 For many years within Western training cultures, Stanislavskian training has been predicated in large part on the principle that work on psychology and emotions prompts the body to respond, rather than vice-versa. That said, the work of Benedetti, Merlin, Carnicke and Zarrilli among others has meant that psychophysical approaches to characterization are now much more closely informed by Stanislavski’s original, multi-modal writings on the subject.4 Most relevant to this study is the fact that Stanislavski viewed the

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physical and psychological as being on a continuum in which, depending on the instigating physical action, thought, emotional response or feeling, the two combine in complex and nuanced ways.5 One of the unusual aspects of Watkins’s work was that he worked on these elements in isolation in his processes, only uniting them late on in his preparation for the role.

‘Impersonation’ Jason Watkins was very clear about how he approached his first involvement in the project. As he recalls, ‘The first thing that happened was that Roger [Michell] texted me and said “I’ve got an amazing script that you’d have for breakfast. Do you think that you can impersonate Christopher Jefferies?” End of message.’ Such a query is unusual in an actor’s work (which would more likely start with a script or a cold read of a passage for the cameras), and Watkins’s immediate task was to answer this question. I looked at the available footage. I  locked myself away for an hour. I  just watched him and did an old-fashioned impersonation. [This] was YouTube footage of him being door-stepped by the press. There were also some extracts from the Leveson Inquiry . . . Within about 20 minutes of sitting trying to do an impersonation of him, I thought to myself, I can do this. Just in pure impersonatory terms, I could capture him. At this point, the ‘text’ for his performance was found footage, not Morgan’s script. Watkins’s use of the term ‘impersonation’ and the notion of ‘capturing’ the man are central to our understanding of how he began his approach to this role. This was a technical process, which we can identify as the physical component in a psychophysical approach. Watkins’s emphasis on being able to impersonate Jefferies, rather than any concerns about the psycho – the emotional or psychological aspects of the man – continued as he prepared to read for the role and be recorded for the US producers of the film to watch him: I knew that when I went to the meeting I’d have to convince everyone involved that I could play Christopher . . . The morning before, I bought myself a rollneck jumper, I bought some stuff to darken for my eyebrows, and I bought some contact lenses so I wouldn’t wear my glasses. This was just a way of gesturing towards the character . . . I didn’t want there to be any doubt that they would look at it and think ‘God, yes that is like him; he can do this’. It is evident that the beginning of Watkins’s process was based on the external: on ‘capturing’ Jefferies’s way of talking, of looking like him for the cameras. Whilst this may be a comment on the lack of imagination on the part of the

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producers and executives, Watkins’s experience also suggests that he needed to convince himself that he could portray Jefferies. As he says, ‘that was the starting point. He asked me if I could impersonate. The whole thing started like that. It all grew out of an impersonatory start to the process.’ Watkins’s use of the term ‘impersonation’ prompts questions about how this relates to, and in Watkins’s mind was distinct from, acting. This is an area which I  have explored for my research into stage documentaries (verbatim and documentary theatre). In interviews for my 2013 book, Acting in Documentary Theatre, I  found actors to be at pains to distance their work from notions of ‘impersonation’, ‘imitation, ‘mimicry’ and doing an ‘impression’ of an individual.6 In their dismissal of these terms, most actors referenced comic performers. For example, Ken Drury, who appeared in Called to Account, a documentary play about the lead up to the Iraq War (Tricycle Theatre 2007), stated: Most actors are not like Rory Bremner, so you are not going to be able to give an absolute copy of what he did, but the DVD [recording of the interview he recreated] gives you a clearer picture of what the person’s behaviour and attitude is like . . . It wasn’t something I studied and tried to get every nuance, because that is not what we were trying to do really. (2009) Although Drury suggests that it was his lack of particular skills that precluded him from giving ‘an absolute copy’, his reference to Rory Bremner is telling. Bremner is particularly associated with his impersonations on programmes such as Bremner, Bird and Fortune, in which he satirizes contemporary politicians. One of the central concerns of the actors in political documentary plays was to distance their process from any notion of parody or satire. The slightest suggestion that by ‘impersonating’ the individual they might satirize them, clearly dissuaded many of the actors I spoke to from using the term in the context of their serious portrayals of real people. It is also true that there is a snobbery regarding impersonation, and that it is viewed as a less ‘noble’ art than acting. Actor Jan Ravens, celebrated for her impressions on comedy series such as Dead Ringers and The Big Impression, told Derek Paget that Michael Sheen or David Morrissey, Helen Mirren [are] all at great pains to say ‘Of course, I’m not doing an impersonation!’ . . . there seems to be a sort of an attitude where you don’t want to be seen to be doing an impersonation. (2008) Actors are frequently confronted with the challenge of finding an appropriate terminology to describe their work. When a portrayal is based on precise observation and recreation as is often the case in documentary theatre,

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it appears that these actors found the available vocabularies have been lionized by other forms of performance. Due to their satiric and potentially lowbrow connotations, the actors do not readily associate their work with these terms. However, in Jason Watkins’s use of the term, there is evidence that this snobbery and the comic connotations of this term might be changing. As this chapter will explore, Watkins provided a detailed and specific exploration of what constituted ‘impersonation’ for him in this process and his precision allows us to re-understand this term and to see it afresh, further removing it from these connotations. In my interview, Watkins identified the way in which ‘impersonation’ was central to his ‘technical’ work, and distinguished this from his ‘organic’ work on the role.

The ‘technical’: Physical approaches to characterization Watkins was cast as Jefferies over three months before the project began filming in late 2013 in Bristol and, though he was appearing in Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude at the National Theatre, ‘it meant my days were relatively free, so I had time to really study him and the script’. This long lead-in time afforded Watkins the opportunity to prepare for the role with a level of detail that is unusual in the late casting and rapid turnaround of television drama. It was during this time that Watkins worked on what he identified as two parallel areas: ‘There are two areas, the organic and the technical.’ The latter of these two areas, the technical, was what Watkins also referred to as ‘impersonation’. He was very clear about what constituted ‘the technical’ in his process: As part of this impersonation work, I  was researching where he grew up:  Where were his parents are from? What did they do? Where he was brought up? It was mostly about locating and recreating his accent really. He’s got some northern vowels from Humberside where his father ran a power station, he was educated on the Wirral, he lived in Northampton for a while, he did a postgraduate education course at Cambridge and before that read English at one of London’s universities. It was a very technical task trying to piece all of these elements of his accent together. Anyone who has heard Jefferies in interview or seen his evidence at the Leveson Inquiry will know that one of the most idiosyncratic and recognizable things about him is his accent and the way that he speaks. The detail with which Watkins approached capturing his voice is noteworthy and it is in relation to this component of his portrayal that he used a binary measure of success; he was either successful and so ‘in’, or something was wrong and he would ‘fall out of the impersonation’:

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Suddenly you feel that a sound is wrong, it is not him, and that you have fallen out of the impersonation. So you ask yourself ‘Why am I getting that wrong?’ and you locate which vowels sounds are wrong. He said becawse not becoz for example. You would very closely monitor and troubleshoot any sounds that you weren’t quite reproducing accurately. Watkins’s private, solo process of listening and repeating demonstrates the level of technical skill needed to successfully impersonate Jefferies. In my interview Watkins described this process as ‘external’ and ‘forensic’. Though the level at which they might deem their impersonation to be satisfactory inevitably differs from actor to actor, the fact that Watkins saw this as absolutely right or wrong, or ‘in’ or ‘out’ of the impersonation, suggests that at the centre of his work was a clear target and that falling short necessitated the technical exercise of locating which sound is wrong and correcting it. In a profession in which individual interpretation, variety and subjectivity is highly prized, this binary notion success – of being ‘in’ or ‘out’ of the impersonation – is unusual. However, Watkins’s work on his external, forensic impersonation not only responded to the challenge of playing a living person who is familiar to viewers, but was also a way of negotiating his own ethical anxieties about playing the role in such a sensitive and traumatic story. He stated: Impersonation is a tricky thing; it has to be excellent . . . I really felt this strongly, partly for Christopher’s sake and for the family of Joanna Yeates. Deep down, I thought that if I can impersonate him well enough, then everything else can lead from that. In this sense his impersonation was not purely technical, but rather it was this element which carried the ethical weight of the piece; it was this that had to be ‘excellent’. Across my interviews with actors on playing real people (Cantrell and Luckhurst 2010; Cantrell 2013) it is unusual to find an actor who reports that the technical aspects carried the ethical weight in their process, as these concerns are more commonly associated with the actor’s rendering of the individual’s emotional and psychological life. This also flies in the face of the actors’ experience above and their concern that using the term ‘impersonation’ connotes parody. For Watkins it was quite the reverse; his work to impersonate carried the burden of his ethical concerns, and the dedication to achieving precision on this front epitomized the concern he felt ‘not to mess it up for him’: You have to be ruthless about getting it accurate. This was all powered by a conscious and subconscious notion of impersonating well enough so that all the sensitivities around it would be catered for because the performance was so closely observed. I felt I had to achieve this to carry the sensitivities of this particular portrayal.

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It is evident that Watkins did not see ‘impersonation’ to be a lesser form of acting, but rather as a term which refers to a specific set of skills when playing a real person. Impersonation was technical and external; it was the skills he employed to accurately capture all the idiosyncrasies of Jefferies’s voice. His experiences demonstrate that ‘impersonation’ is a term which has tangible, concrete meaning and which is useful for both actors and researchers to use when discussing the many facets of an actor’s approach to a role. Clearly, there is some reclaiming of the term to be done, but Watkins’s use of it provides us with a blueprint for how we might understand it. In time, ‘impersonation’ might well prove to be a useful way to identify and group a particular set of acting skills. Impersonation was thus central to Watkins’s work on the physical side of character creation and ran alongside his work on psychology, or what Watkins calls ‘organic’.

The ‘organic’: Psychological approaches to the role This work was focused on Jefferies’s psychological motivators, his thought processes, and his emotional response to the unfolding action. Where the technical work was rooted in documentary sources, central to this aspect of Watkins’s work was Morgan’s script. Watkins states that ‘I was doing this intellectual, forensically detailed work on the script’. To this end, during the interview, Watkins showed me his script for the project, and the extensive notes that he made. These included detailed marginalia and also a series of short comments, all of which related to psychological elements of character creation: I did masses of prep. I went through every interview [that Jefferies had with the police] and précised each one. I put on the front of my script ‘thorough, methodical, self-disciplined’. ‘Disciplined in a religious sense, as well in the Christian sense’. ‘High culture, and the wonder of it’. His passion was for music and for literature. Passion is such an overused word, and you wouldn’t necessarily think that he is a passionate person because he’s such a cerebral person, but his passion was for those things. ‘Goodness of Christianity, and religion in general, his eagerness to listen’. I saw him as the ‘keeper of the keys to language’. So all of those things were crucial. The comments that Watkins made are evidently concerned with deeply-held beliefs and psychological aspects of his character. However, I  use the term ‘character’ advisedly here, as they may not represent Jefferies’s fundamental beliefs, indeed Jefferies might disagree with all of these observations, but rather these were elements that Watkins identified in Morgan’s script and, as this chapter will go on to explore, meetings with Jefferies himself. This parallel process to

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his technical work on impersonation was crucial to Watkins’s success in the role. As he notes, ‘Alongside this impersonation, I was working to understand how his brain was thinking. That’s a key part of my work as an actor.’ In Watkins’s articulation of his process, it was evident that this ‘organic’ work on the psychological elements of character, and the ‘technical’ work on the physical were distinct; they had different skill sets: one based on the ability to recreate precise sounds, rhythms and the structures of Jefferies’s vocal patterns, and the other on the skills of script analysis, in which identifying the psychological determinants of Morgan’s story was in the forefront of Watkins’s mind. As explored above, the emphasis in Stanislavski’s writing on psychophysical acting was on the inseparability of these two areas and the fundamental (and scientifically proven) belief that of psychology affects physicality and vice-versa. However, for Watkins, this was not the case: It is a mixture of working out the external things – those particular scientific vowel sounds – and this more organic process. Through this you begin to find the rhythm of his thoughts and these two areas, the organic and the technical, come together. For a long time, though, these two areas didn’t meet. I was doing this intellectual, forensically detailed work on the script, and working on him. I didn’t put them together at all at this stage. In Watkins’s process, it was the experience of meeting Jefferies face to face that was the catalyst for these two elements combining, and his process becoming psychophysical in the manner that Stanislavski and his later exponents identify.

Psychophysical acting: ‘The organic and the technical’ combine Jason Watkins met Christopher Jefferies twice in his preparation to play the role. Initially, he viewed the planned meetings with trepidation: ‘It was funny, I hesitated at first. I  thought that it was going quite well and I  really felt that I  had captured him, or was in the process of capturing him, and I wasn’t sure about it.’ Such concerns that meeting the real person might compromise the actor’s work on the role have been a repeated motif across my interviews with actors on documentary theatre and screen docudrama.7 However, for Watkins, the meeting galvanized his work on these two areas and brought them together in his process. He met Jefferies in Bristol with Roger Michell. As Michell led the conversation, Watkins was free to observe the man he was preparing to portray. I noticed during this interview that he would often get rather stuck in a pose which looked quite awkward, and I would wonder how he was holding that

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position. You see his mind is working and he isn’t very worried about what position his hands are in . . . Actually physically being in the room with him he was very different from watching footage. I watched his fingers moving; you realise that his finger movements were his mind working. In this way, Watkins was able to make a direct link between the precise verbal work that he had done on the character and the identification of particular psychological elements he’d gleaned from Morgan’s script. The key to this was the body, and witnessing Jefferies’s physicality firsthand provided the crucial psychophysical link between the verbal intricacies and the psychological determinants of the man. The complexities of this relationship became evident when Watkins discussed rhythm in television performance: Particularly on television and film, the crucial thing is the rhythm of their thoughts – not necessarily rhythm of the words – but of thoughts and how this transmits itself into the body. A lot of this is subliminal, but it is also an observation job. The ability to observe the particular ways in which thoughts ‘transmit’ themselves to the body was thus a specific product of his meeting with Jefferies. It was this element which Watkins prioritized in the meeting, to the extent that he found himself watching him speak rather than always listening to the content. He joked that ‘I accidentally asked him the same question again – “What did you study?” And he replied, “Well . . . English” because he’d already answered that. I was listening to how he answered you see, not always what I asked.’ One of the complexities for an actor in meeting the individual that they are to portray is that they must constantly balance the accuracy of their portrayal with the requirements of the medium in which the performance is to be given. To use Stanislavski’s phrase, the actor is aiming for a ‘scenic truth’ rather than the ‘actual truth’ (Stanislavski 1969: 20). Whilst the latter refers to what Stanislavski identifies as a misguided aim to ‘conduct yourself as you do in everyday life’, the former ‘reproduces . . . only what is essential’ (1969:  20). As actor and Stanislavski scholar Bella Merlin notes, in the service of playing a real person she had met, she would ‘[distill] “actual fact” into “scenic truth”. This distillation . . . was not the diminishment of truth, rather the condensation of “truth” into a palatable and manageable artistic form’ (2007: 42). The ‘palatable and manageable artistic form’ was, for Watkins, the need for his portrayal to be effective for the medium of television, and within the aesthetic style of the piece. Meeting the real person and finding that their mannerisms were not appropriate for the medium, thus might compromise this already complex negotiation. However, in this portrayal, Watkins found that the level of ‘distillation’ to create a ‘scenic truth’ was minimal:

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He had this way of pausing before he speaks. That’s all about shaping his answer in the clearest and most entertaining and most cross-referenced way. He speaks extremely eloquently; there is very little wastage. If he does hesitate, he is searching for the right word and when it comes, it comes beautifully formed. So there was the eloquence of it. As an actor I could use this . . . I didn’t need to do too much because he was dramatic in a way – the way he paused was rather theatrical. The fact that Watkins did not have to radically adapt the psychophysical elements that he had observed when he met Jefferies was a major boon to his work on the role: He fixes your gaze, and when he tells you something, you have a definite sense that you are being told something . . . He was very filmic simply by being the way he was, and that is gold-dust because you are still in character, you are still playing him, but at the same time you are going to satisfy the medium. If he was very flitting and moved around a lot, I would have to change that for the medium, I would have to contain it. But his traits were a natural fit for the medium in which we were telling his story. It meant that I was able to continue to study him and to work on him in a naturalistic way without having to adapt it for the medium. This again offset Watkins’s ethical concerns about playing Jefferies. He did not have to alter his portrayal away from the man he had met, but rather could continue his technical work on the impersonation and his thought processes and could unite these elements using his new observations about his physicality, eye-contact and gestural range. These findings informed the notes that Watkins wrote on his script. In addition to the character observations analysed earlier, he also made lists of character notes that were specifically designed to prepare him for the next day’s filming. It is evident that the experience of meeting Jefferies prompted him to use psychophysical reference points in this element of his work, as these notes would relate to his previous research and included specific links between his physical rendering of the role and with the emotional tone of the scene: Each evening I would work on the next day’s script, I’d excavate the work that I had previously done on that. On the A5 sides that we were given, I would make my notes for the next day that I wanted to remember . . . For example, I made a note to myself to ‘look at the latest video of him listening’ as there was something useful for the scene I was about to record in it. Another note here says to ‘cup my chin’. I saw him sit like this and I knew I wanted to use that particular physicality but I didn’t want to overuse it, so I made a note to

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myself that I should sit like that in the scene at New Year when he’s in the cell by himself as that way of sitting fitted the emotional tone of the scene. Using his experience of observing Christopher Jefferies in his meetings, Jason Watkins was able to chart his psychophysical progression through the play. It is testament to his detailed work on this aspect of his process that he reached this level of precision, and chose specific gestural choices that he had observed and mapped these onto his emotional journey of the character through the narrative.

Conclusion This chapter has analysed one of the stand-out television performances of recent years, which was rightly celebrated by critics and garnered a BAFTA for Watkins. Throughout my interview, which lasted over two hours, it was evident that Watkins is a particularly thoughtful and inquisitive actor who relished the opportunity to fully prepare to play the role. This allowed him to focus his attention on psychological and physical elements of the character. However, as this chapter has explored, these were distinct processes which called on different skills. It was not until he met the man that these elements combined into what we can recognize as a psychophysical approach. The rigour with which Watkins approached these two areas sheds light on how character-building functions for actors on television. None of the processes that I have analysed took place in the rehearsal room and few took place in the presence of the director; rather, they were products of the actor’s private work, away from formalized spaces in the project. Whether this was through script analysis, the formulation of notes for filming, or using online recordings of the individual, this was work conducted at home and in private. As such, interviewing the actor is the only way to bring these processes to light. This chapter has also probed the terminology that actors and researchers use to describe acting processes. ‘Impersonation’ has emerged as a term which has a real value to describe acting. For Watkins, the term related to the technical process of identifying all of the vocal features of the character. It was not concerned with psychology or what Watkins called ‘the organic’ but is clearly a central aspect of acting process, particularly when playing a real person. I hope his use of it here might begin the process of reclaiming this as a useable term which relates to a tangible set of skills by the actor, and distancing it from its current low-brow or comedic connotations. When acting in docudrama Watkins was, as the term ‘docudrama’ would suggest, working with dual concerns. The ‘docu’ component of his process was the range of real-life footage, interview material and meetings with the man himself. The ‘drama’ part was the invented script, the actor’s and director’s own

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decisions about mood, tone, tempo and emphasis. What was unusual in my interview with Jason Watkins was the extent to which the dual portmanteau terms, ‘docudrama’ and ‘psychophysical’ mapped onto each other. In Watkins’s process, the ‘documentary’ elements related specifically to the ‘physical’, whilst the ‘dramatic’ basis for his work was a product of the ‘psychological’. What made Watkins’s experience noteworthy was the way in which these two areas, the physical and the psychological, remained distinct in his process for a significant period of time; only when he met the man did the two elements meet to become a process that we can identify as ‘psychophysical’.

Notes 1 See Cantrell (2016). As I explored in this article, aside from a small group of researchers, including Heather Sutherland, John R. Cook, John Corner, Stephen Lacey and Ruth McElroy, most of whom were involved in Derek Paget’s AHRC project, ‘Acting with Facts’ (University of Reading 2007–10), little attention has been paid to actors’ work in this high-profile and popular form of television. 2 The director of The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies, Roger Michell, has identified that hard and fast definitions are not useful here: ‘ “Even a documentary is drama,” Michell argues, a form full of subjective, editorial choices’ (Howells 2014). 3 These very different interpretations as to how the term was interpreted were in part due to a quirk of publishing. Carnicke records that ‘Stanislavsky devoted almost half his life to writing a publishable acting manual’ (2009: 77), but it was not until a heart attack in 1928 that forced him to give up acting, that he focused on this task. Stanislavski planned to publish An Actor’s Work on Himself, which examined, in the first half, how emotion and psychological approaches to characterization can affect the body and the second, how physical action can prompted what he called ‘inner creative state’ (Stanislavski 1968: 270). However, though planned as one book, they were published as two volumes, separated by twelve years, and only the first part, An Actor Prepares, was published in his lifetime, and even then this was in a language he didn’t understand. This was a ‘significantly abridged’ version of his writings (Carnicke 2009: 78). Thankfully, the two halves of this planned work have been united in Jean Benedetti’s translation of his work, An Actor’s Work (2009). 4 These scholars have also used Stanislavski’s work to look at the myriad ways in which psychophysical acting has been taught around the world. See, for example, Zarrilli’s Psychophysical Acting: An Intercultural Approach After Stanislavski (2009). 5 As Merlin states, ‘there’s no divide between body and psychology, but rather a continuum; as we go about our daily lives, different experiences stimulate us at different points along that continuum, not simply at one end or the other’ (2001: 27). 6 For example, in my interviews for the Tricycle Theatre’s documentary play, Called to Account, actor William Hoyland stated that ‘The most important thing is that you don’t imitate’ (2009). Similarly, Terrence Hardiman said ‘the main problem was I didn’t want to do an imitation of him’ (2009). Shane Rimmer also stated that ‘Impersonation

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is not, I think, necessary here [ . . . ] that was one thing I didn’t make a stride towards at all’ (2009). 7 See Acting in Documentary Theatre (Cantrell 2013) and Playing for Real: Actors on Playing Real People (Cantrell and Luckhurst 2010).

References Cantrell, T. (2013), Acting in Documentary Theatre, Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Cantrell, T. (2016), ‘ “In the doc”: Acting Processes in Brian Hill’s Docudrama, Consent’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 13 (3): 351–67. Cantrell, T. and C. Hogg (2016), ‘Returning to an Old Question: What Do Television Actors Do When They Act?’, Critical Studies in Television, 11 (3): 283–98. Cantrell, T. and M. Luckhurst (2010), Playing for Real: Actors on Playing Real People, Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Carnicke, S. M. (2009), Stanislavsky in Focus: An Acting Master for the Twenty-First Century, 2nd edn, London: Routledge. Carnicke, S. M. (2010), ‘Stanislavsky’s System: Pathways for the Actor’, in A. Hodge (ed.), Actor Training, 2nd edn, 1–25, London: Routledge. Drury, K. (2009), Telephone interview with the author, 8 January. Hardiman, T. (2009), Telephone interview with the author, 12 March. Hewett, R. (2015), ‘The Changing Determinants of UK Television Acting’, Critical Studies in Television, 10 (1): 73–90. Howells, R. (2014), ‘The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies’, Times Higher Education, 27 November. Available online: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/ features/culture/the-lost-honour-of-christopher-jefferies/2017129 (accessed 10 November 2016). Hoyland, W. (2009), Telephone interview with the author, 20 January. Merlin, B. (2001), Beyond Stanislavski: The Psycho-Physical Approach to Actor Training, London: Nick Hern Books. Merlin, B. (2007), ‘The Permanent Way and the Impermanent Muse’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 17 (1): 41–9. Paget, D. (2011), No Other Way to Tell It: Docudrama on Film and Television, 2nd edn, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ravens, J. (2008), Interview with Derek Paget, 29 July. Available online: https:// www.reading.ac.uk/web/files/ftt/Jan_Ravens_29th_July_2008.pdf (accessed 12 December 2016). Rimmer, S. (2009), Telephone interview with the author, 7 April. Stanislavski, C. (1968), Building a Character, translated by E. R. Hapgood, London: Methuen. Stanislavski, C. (1969), Stanislavski’s Legacy, edited and translated by E. R. Hapgood, London: Methuen. Stanislavski, K. (2008), An Actor’s Work, translated by J. Benedetti, London: Routledge. Watkins, J. (2015), Interview with the author, London, 9 October. Zarrilli, P. (2009), Psychophysical Acting: An Intercultural Approach after Stanislavski, London: Routledge.

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5 VIOLA DAVIS: A CONTEXT FOR HER CRAFT AND SUCCESS IN SERIES TELEVISION Cynthia Baron

Viola Davis made media history at the 67th Primetime Emmy Awards on 28 October 2015 when she became the first black artist to win an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series for her portrayal of maverick law professor Annalise Keating in How to Get Away with Murder (ABC 2014–). Her acceptance speech garnered attention, because she connected her Emmy to African Americans’ efforts to overcome the effects of slavery. She told the audience: In my mind, I see a line. And over that line, I see green fields and lovely flowers and beautiful white women with their arms stretched out to me over that line. But I can’t seem to get there no how. I can’t seem to get over that line. That was Harriet Tubman in the 1800s. And let me tell you something: the only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity. You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there. So, here’s to all the writers, the awesome people that are Ben Sherwood, Paul Lee, Peter Nowalk, Shonda Rhimes. People who have redefined what it means to be beautiful, to be sexy, to be a leading woman, to be black. And to the Taraji P.  Hensons and Kerry Washingtons, the Halle Berrys, the Nicole Beharies, the Meagan Goods, to Gabrielle Union: Thank you for taking us over that line. Thank you to the Television Academy. Thank you. (quoted in Gold 2015) Thus, starting with Harriet Tubman, known for assisting other slaves seeking freedom through the Underground Railroad, Davis acknowledges people who made her award possible: Ben Sherwood, chairman of Disney-ABC Television

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Group; Paul Lee, president of ABC Television (2010–16), now replaced by Channing Dungey, the first black woman to lead an American network; Peter Nowalk, creator of How to Get Away with Murder; and Shonda Rhimes, one of the series’ executive producers, known for creating Grey’s Anatomy (ABC 2005–), Private Practice (ABC 2007–13) and Scandal (ABC 2012–). Her list of actresses also provides a window into contemporary American television. Kerry Washington had received Lead Actress Emmy nominations the two previous years for her role as Olivia Pope in Scandal. Film star Halle Berry had been the lead in the science fiction drama Extant (CBS 2014–15). Nicole Beharie, co-star on Sleepy Hollow (Fox 2013–), had received several NAACP Image Award nominations, including Entertainer of the Year in 2014. Meagan Good had appeared in various sitcoms and dramas including Minority Report (Fox 2015). Gabrielle Union, star of Being Mary Jane (BET 2013–), created by African American writer-producer Mara Brock Akil, had won an NAACP Image Award in 2014. At the 2015 Emmy Awards, Taraji P.  Henson was one of the women nominated for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama, in her case for portraying Cookie Lyon on Empire (Fox 2015–). Other black actresses honoured at the 2015 Emmy Awards include Uzo Abuba, named Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Dramatic Series for her role as ‘Crazy Eyes’ on Orange Is the New Black (Netflix 2013–), and Regina King, who won the Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited Series or Movie for American Crime (ABC 2015–16).1 Davis’s speech illustrates that How to Get Away with Murder belongs to its historical context. Her Emmy award also signifies colleagues’ professional respect for her ability to embody a complex character; it recognizes the quality of her portrayal of Annalise throughout the series’ first season, and specifically honours her performance in episode six (30 October 2014). Here, Annalise and the Keating Five, the ambitious group of law students under her tutelage, focus their efforts on an emergency hearing to save David Allen, a death row inmate wrongly convicted of murder twenty years earlier. While intercut with new developments in the story linking Annalise’s husband to the death of undergraduate student Lila Stangard, the episode features Davis’s riveting courtroom examination of a state senator, who in his former lucrative career as a property developer had bribed a witness to give false testimony in Allen’s trial. The fabricated testimony had led to Allen’s wrongful conviction and ensured there would be no investigation into the death of his girlfriend, who had been leading the local community’s growing opposition to the developer’s plan to displace low-income residents. The team’s investigative skills and Annalise’s masterful courtroom argumentation lead to justice; the innocent man is set free and the judge orders an investigation of the senator. Davis’s Emmy acknowledges the mesmerizing range and depth of her emotional expression in this episode’s performance. Her characterization

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communicates Annalise’s intelligence, determination and abiding desire to protect people left out of the American dream; it also reveals the pain and selfloathing that mars Annalise’s emotional bond with her husband. The episode illustrates the acting challenges that first made the role attractive to Davis, and that she has expanded during production as she and the writers strive to make audiences see that this African American woman is ‘multifaceted and complicated’ (Wallace 2014: 5). Davis speaks out on the need for equal opportunity, but she sees herself as an actor not an activist. Accepting her Screen Actors Guild Award in 2016, Davis explains: People are always saying, wow, you know Annalise is an anti-hero, and don’t you worry she’s not likeable? Don’t you worry that she’s not a mentor? And I always think, why do I have to be a hero? Why do you have to like me? And why do I have to be a mentor? My job as an actor is just to create a human being to the best of my ability, flawed, messy, maybe not always likeable; maybe not cute. It is my job, and I do it to the best of my ability, and I get so much joy out of being an actor. I thank all my fellow actors on How to Get Away with Murder. It is such a fabulous young cast. It has been the joy pleasure of my life. Thank you. (Davis 2016) As this speech reveals, Davis’s work in the ABC series has given her the opportunity to apply and demonstrate her craft. Moreover, her portrayal of Annalise signifies a break with a fraught cultural-aesthetic tradition in which ‘the physical body of black women has often been present, [but] her subjectivity has not’ (Gray 2005: 24). A look at American television’s troubled history of representation and at Davis’s creative labour makes her landmark characterization more legible.

A context for Davis and her role in How to Get Away with Murder Davis was born in 1965. She received a bachelor’s degree in theatre from Rhode Island College in 1988, then entered the prestigious programme at the Juilliard School of Performing Arts, graduating in 1993. She received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from Rhode Island College in 2002, and another from Juilliard in 2014. She garnered a Tony Award nomination for her supporting role in the 1996 production of August Wilson’s Seven Guitars and won a Tony for Best Featured Actress for her portrayal in the 2001 production of Wilson’s King Hedley II. The 2010 revival of August Wilson’s Fences led to Tony Awards for Viola Davis (Best Actress), Denzel Washington (Best Actor) and the production (Best Revival).

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Davis began working in film and television in 1996. She received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for Doubt (Shanley 2008); her compelling performance also led to nominations for Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Awards. Davis garnered a Best Actress Oscar nomination for The Help (Taylor 2011), and her nuanced portrayal of Aibileen Clark, a domestic worker in 1950s Mississippi, led to Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations and her first of four Screen Actor Guild Awards. She is one of ten African American women to receive a Best Actress Oscar nomination; the group includes Dorothy Dandridge, Diana Ross, Cicely Tyson, Diahann Carroll, Whoopi Goldberg, Angela Bassett, Halle Berry, Gabourey Sidibe and Quvenzhané Wallis. In 2012, Women in Film honoured Davis with its Crystal Award, given to women whose body of excellent work has contributed to women’s success in the entertainment industry. In 2017, her performance in the adaptation of August Wilson’s Fences (Washington 2016) led to Best Supporting Actress awards at the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild, BAFTA and Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She has received NAACP Image Awards for The Help, Won’t Back Down (Barnz 2012), and How to Get Away with Murder. Davis is thus one of several leading actors with careers in theatre, film and television. When asked about ‘television as a medium for actors’, Davis has said: I think TV is where it’s at. I think there are great opportunities for actors on TV – just the sheer number of stations and outlets like Netflix, Amazon. Especially for actresses of color, the writers are taking risks, more so than even in film. (quoted in King 2014) Nevertheless, opportunities for black actresses are a recent development. NBC aired The Ethel Waters Show once, on 14 June 1939, and a black woman would not be featured in a national programme until Amanda Randolph was cast as a maid on The Laytons (Dumont Network 1948; Hill et al. 1990: 3). In 1950, Ethel Waters became the first African American to star in a major network series, playing the wise and nurturing maid in the first year of Beulah (ABC 1950–2); ABC cast Hattie McDaniel and then Louise Beavers after Waters left the show. The Beulah Brown character had originated in a 1939 blackface radio appearance by Marlin Hurt, who voiced the character on various radio shows in the 1940s. In 1945, CBS radio created The Marlin Hurt and Beulah Show, which became The Beulah Show in 1946 when Hurt died and was replaced by another white actor, Bob Corley. Hattie McDaniel was cast as Beulah in 1947, followed by Lillian Randolph and Amanda Randolph; the show ended in 1954. The challenges black actresses have faced reflect the minstrelsy origins of this pivotal radio and TV show. As observers note, ‘most roles for African-American women (and men) on television [have] remained outside of drama and within situation

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comedy – making people laugh and perpetuating the image of Black women as sidekicks to leading men’ (Smith-Shomade 2002: 22). African American actresses received some acclaim in the 1960s. In 1962, Waters became the first black performer to receive an Emmy nomination for a guest appearance on Route 66 (CBS 1961–2 season). Diahann Carroll garnered a nomination for Naked City (ABC 1962–3 season). Ruby Dee and Claudia McNeil received Emmy nominations for The Nurses (CBS 1963–4 season), Diana Sands was nominated for East Side/West Side (CBS 1963–4 season) and Eartha Kitt was nominated for I Spy, which starred Bill Cosby and Robert Culp (NBC 1965–6 season). Gail Fisher became the first African American woman to win an Emmy Award for her supporting role in the detective drama Mannix (CBS 1969–70 season). I Spy led to Cosby’s Emmy for Outstanding Actor in a Drama Series (1965–6 season), and with American TV featuring black actors in two other series (Hari Rhodes in Daktari and Greg Morris on Mission: Impossible), ‘some critics called the 1966–7 television season the Year of the Negro’ (Bogle 2001:  125). Star Trek premiered on NBC in 1966; with communications officer Uhura portrayed by Nichelle Nichols, ‘an intelligent Black character [was] incorporated into the action, [was] a part of the very fiber of the series itself’, and a 1968 episode featured American TV’s first interracial kiss between Nichols and William Shatner (Bogle 2001: 135). Julia (NBC 1968–71), the first show starring an African American actress, featured Diahann Carroll as a middle-class nurse raising her son after her husband’s death in Vietnam. Despite Julia Baker being ‘the first Black nondomestic female character on television’ (Smith-Shomade 2002: 13), and Carroll’s efforts to provide ‘an African American cultural context for the Black characters’ (Bogle 2001:  146), because the show ignored the realities of racism, ‘no successful black series was more controversial’ (MacDonald 1992: 124). Still, some critics highlight that Carroll was ‘the first black woman on television to play an intelligent professional who functions as an independent agent’; they see her role as Dominique Deveraux on Dynasty from 1984 to 1987 as equally important because it showed ‘that black women’s reality in terms of beauty and economic power is equal to that of white women’ (Barr 2008: 19). After Julia, the networks returned to comedies like Sanford and Son (NBC 1972–7), Good Times (CBS 1974–9) and What’s Happening (ABC 1976–9). Given the troubled model set by Beulah and Amos ‘n’ Andy (CBS 1951–3), these sitcoms would lead to other shows in the 1980s and 1990s that ‘introduced a seemingly new crop of Black and female images’, but in reality ‘simply reconfigured previous offerings’ (Smith-Shomade 2002: 5). Outside that trend, Teresa Graves starred in Get Christy Love! (ABC 1974–5). The show’s Blaxploitation aesthetic allowed Graves to be ‘tough, smart, and sexy’, but her role offered just ‘a modicum of empowerment’ for people wanting to see ‘strong and attractive

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Black women in visual culture’ (Smith-Shomade 2002:  15). Significantly, a TV drama series would not have a black woman in a starring role again until Kerry Washington was featured in Scandal in 2012. There were other dramatic roles for black actresses:  Ester Rolle won a Supporting Actress Emmy for the TV movie Summer of My German Soldier (NBC 1978–9); as part of the acclaim for the 1977 ABC miniseries Roots, Olivia Cole received an Emmy for Outstanding Single Performance by a Supporting Actress in a Comedy or Drama Series. The 1970s were also enriched by the achievements of Cicely Tyson, who won the Emmy for Actress of the Year (1973–4) and the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in Drama Miniseries for Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (CBS 1973–4). Her work inspired Viola Davis, who recalls that as a child watching Tyson, ‘I saw [her] as very beautiful. She was darkskinned, she had full lips, she had high cheekbones, [and] she was a fantastic actress. I saw it’ (Heisler 2009). In the 1980s, while ‘few African-American women appeared in prime time outside of situation comedies’ (Smith-Shomade 2002: 194), their work was recognized:  Isabel Sanford won an Emmy for Outstanding Actress in a Comedy Series for The Jeffersons (CBS 1980–1 season); Jackée Harry received an Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for 227 (NBC 1986–7 season); and Beah Richards won an Emmy for Guest Performance in a Comedy Series for Frank’s Place (CBS 1986–7 season). In 1987, Oprah Winfrey received the first of many Daytime Emmy Awards. Anne-Marie Johnson and Denise Nichols were featured in the dramatic series In the Heat of the Night (NBC/CBS 1988–95). Alfre Woodard won an Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for Hill Street Blues (NBC 1983–4 season) and an Emmy for Guest Performer in a Drama Series for L.A. Law (NBC 1986–7 season). Fred MacDonald argues that ‘the most authoritative role for a black actress [in the 1980s] was Holly Robinson’s enactment of the savvy police investigator Judy Hoffs on the Fox series 21 Jump Street’ (1987–91) (1992: 263–4). During the 1980s, ‘white audiences began to replace standard network viewing with cable subscriptions and videocassette recorders’, but ‘working-class African American and Latino audiences . . . continued to rely on the “free” networks – NBC, CBS, and ABC’ (Zook 1999: 3). NBC secured a substantial share of this market with The Cosby Show (1984–92), A Different World (1987–93) and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (1990–6). Fox TV, established in 1986, featured In Living Color (1990–4), Martin (1992–7) and Living Single (1993–8), which featured Queen Latifah in its ensemble cast and broke new ground, for the ‘black female sexual subject had not existed on television in a fully imagined way before Living Single’ (Guerrero 2013: 189). The show was created by Yvette Lee Bower, the first African American woman to launch a primetime series. The 1990s ‘was the first decade in which Blacks produced their own television shows en masse’ as cable expanded, UPN and the WB (both established

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in 1995)  used black programmes to attract audiences, and hip-hop became part of American popular culture (Adamo 2010:  5). HBO aired The Josephine Baker Story (1991), which led to Lynn Whitfield’s Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or Special, and Miss Evers’ Boys (1997), which led to Alfre Woodard’s Lead Actress Emmy Award. Black actresses in leading roles included Regina Taylor in I’ll Fly Away (NBC/PBS 1991–3), Lisa Nicole Carson in Ally McBeal (1997–2002), Lisa Gay Hamilton in The Practice (ABC 1997–2003) and Lorraine Toussaint in Any Day Now (Lifetime 1998–2002). Despite these gains, in 1999 the Los Angeles Time revealed that ‘almost thirty network shows had no minorities in leading roles’ (Adamo 2010: 15–6). A 2000 report by the Screen Actors Guild showed that the ‘overrepresentation’ of blacks (‘16.0  percent of the characters . . . compared to the group’s 12.2  percent of the U.S. population’) was due to the ‘shunting of African Americans to “ghetto” networks (the WB and UPN), “ghetto” genres (sitcoms rather than dramas), and “ghetto” scheduling (the less-viewed Monday and Friday nights)’ (Brook 2009: 340). A study by Children Now revealed that shows with black characters depicted ‘them disproportionately as vagrants, dopers, gangbangers, and sundry predatory criminals’ (Brook 2009: 340). To counter these racist representations, the networks turned to multiracial casting in dramatic series. This approach had started in the 1990s with Law and Order (NBC 1990–2010), Homicide: Life on the Street (NBC 1993–9) and ER (NBC 1994–2009). It continued with CSI: Miami (CBS 2002–12), Without a Trace (CBS 2002–9), Person of Interest (CBS 2011–16), Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice, Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder. Soul Food (Showtime 2000–4), based on the 1997 film, featured Vanessa Williams, Nicole Ari Parker, Malinda Williams and Irma P. Hall; the series was created by Felicia D. Henderson, writerproducer for several shows including Sister, Sister (ABC/WB 1994–9). Vivica A. Fox, Viola Davis, Maya Rudolph and Gabrielle Union were featured in City of Angels (CBS 2000–1), the first hospital drama with a predominately black cast. After City of Angels was cancelled, ‘a drama with two lead actors of color’ did not appear again until Undercovers (NBC 2010) with Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Boris Kodjoe (Warner 2012:  58). As highlighted in a 2008 NAACP report, the merger of UPN and the WB to create the CW ‘decreased minority representation and employment’ (Adamo 128). Despite multi-racial casting in dramatic series, in 2011 ‘none of the five broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, CW, FOX, NBC) featured a scripted series with an African American actress in a leading role’, and programming was shaped by ‘the ubiquity of filmmakers Tyler Perry and Ice Cube, who created four of the seven sitcoms (For Better or Worse, House of Payne and Meet the Browns by Perry and Are We There Yet? by Ice Cube, all spin-offs from their feature films)’ (Cunningham 2013: 404). Given the model established by the Cosby sitcoms and shows like The Parent ‘Hood (WB 1995–9), programmes such as Blackish (ABC 2014–) would also centre on male protagonists.

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Yet, there have been exceptions, as several twenty-first-century sitcoms have continued Living Single’s pioneering work of offering narratives that explore the subjectivity of black women. These programmes include Eve (UPN 2003–6), created by African American writer-producer Meg DeLoatch, Girlfriends (UPN/ CW 2000–8) created by Mara Brook Akil and The Game (CW/BET 2006–15), another show created by Akil. American TV has also featured the actresses Davis acknowledges in her 2015 acceptance speech and, like Davis’s performances in How to Get Away with Murder, their portrayals have helped make the subjectivity of African American women visible.2

Viola Davis and her approach to acting Davis’s approach to creating performances that reveal a character’s rich inner life are suggested by her comments on Newsweek’s Annual Oscar Roundtable (2012), broadcast after she received the Oscar nomination for The Help. The discussion includes George Clooney, nominated for The Descendants (Payne 2011), Christopher Plummer, nominated for Beginners (Mills 2010), and Golden Globe-nominated actors Charlize Theron, for Young Adult (Reitman 2011), Michael Fassbender, for Shame (McQueen 2011)  and Tilda Swinton, for We Need to Talk about Kevin (Ramsay 2011). Inviting Davis to discuss her acting process, host David Ansen notes that articles about her performance in Doubt discuss the fifty-page biography she wrote for her character. In her response, Davis suggests that her preparation for this film was especially thorough, because she would be working with acclaimed actress Meryl Streep and knew that she had just one scene to create an empathetic, three-dimensional character for Mrs Miller, whose son is the first black student admitted to a parochial school in the Bronx. In the scene, Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep), who believes the young man has been molested by Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), argues that the situation must be made public. However, Davis brings the backstory of Mrs Miller, her son and her husband to life with such emotional sincerity that it is clear that her loving respect for her son, and desire for his safe and successful future, give her good reason to oppose the sister’s attempt to entangle the vulnerable young black man in her efforts to remove the priest from the parish. Touching on John Patrick Shanley’s celebrated script, Davis suggests that it makes actors search for clues about characters’ beliefs, experiences and motivations. She explains, at first ‘I just didn’t understand the character, and I  just always find that when you don’t understand your character, you do more to try to do that investigative work, because acting is about problem solving’ (Newsweek 2012). Discussing other ways to prepare, Davis explains that spending a month in Mississippi contributed to her characterization in The Help, a story about black

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maids who disturb social norms by talking about their work caring for white families. She explains: If you’ve ever been in Mississippi, you know that you have to be in Mississippi to shoot that movie; it’s a character in and of itself. There’s the rest of America and then there’s Mississippi. So, as soon as you arrive there, [if you’re African American] your head goes down . . . the past has arrived . . . it was less work [to create Aibileen] in terms of writing things down and it was much more about feeling the environment. (Newsweek 2012) While in this case she spent less time writing a character biography, Davis again ‘spent months conceiving an intricate back story to enliven Aibileen Clark’ (Wallace 2014: 1). Roundtable colleague Michael Fassbender echoes the idea that research and exhaustive script analysis are crucial; Charlize Theron confirms the observations of Davis and Fassbender by explaining that preparation is the key for creating seemingly spontaneous performances. Noting another complication of acting, Theron explains that in performance actors must be prepared enough to risk leaving their homework behind. Davis elaborates on this by saying: The discomfort is the comfort . . . when you kind of allow yourself to be in the moment and be surprised. Because there’s no way you can predict who your character is, just like you can’t predict who you are at any time . . . you don’t know how you’re going to react to any given circumstance. But in order to be in the moment and let yourself be loose, you have to be brave enough to be uncomfortable and not judge a moment. (Newsweek 2012) Davis discovered acting early in life. When she was eight, she and her sisters created a short play with costumes, music and characters drawn from 1970s sitcoms and game shows, which won a contest in their home town (Heisler 2009). Describing herself as ‘a theater geek’, Davis was involved in high-school theatre competitions at the Rhode Island Drama Festival (quoted in Heisler 2009). Participating in the Upward Bound educational programme, she met Ron Stetson.3 Describing him as ‘her first acting coach’, Davis observes: ‘He left an indelible mark on me. He had a gift for instilling in his students the cold, harsh reality of having a career in the performing arts, but also inspiring and encouraging their dreams’ (quoted in LaBalle 2002). These experiences led her to pursue a degree in theatre at Rhode Island College. Davis recalls, ‘Rhode Island College is where I  found myself’ (quoted in ‘Actress Viola Davis’ 2013). Its theatre programme emphasizes creativity, dedication and preparation. The performance concentration gives students ‘practice in a great variety of acting styles’; students have the chance to ‘work alongside

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actors, directors and managers of companies such as the Trinity Repertory Company and the Looking Glass Theatre’ (‘Theatre Program’ 2016). The current curriculum must differ from the one in place when Davis attended in the 1980s, yet it is likely that her training was also grounded in the holistic and sequenced plan that characterizes today’s programme. Students start with ‘Introduction to Theatre’ to learn foundational principles in playwriting, acting and directing. Actors explore the physical dimension of characterization in ‘Movement for the Actor’; they develop ways to free themselves physically, vocally and emotionally in ‘The Actor’s Self:  Improvisation and Technique’. ‘Character Study’ courses provide opportunities to work in contemporary styles; period courses offer the experience of performing in Greek tragedies, Elizabethan dramas and more. Davis learned that actors must know their characters’ entire history. She explains: ‘They tell you in acting school, “Arm yourself with as much information as you can” ’; to locate information, ‘you read the script a million times. Because what the script gives are the given circumstances. Given circumstances are all the facts of your character’ (quoted in Heisler 2009). From there, actors should explore parallels with other stories, events, or personal experiences, with the characterization eventually created through imaginative construction of a unique but recognizable fictional character (Heisler 2009). Davis always aims to ‘connect the role to someone real because that’s [what creates] the element of surprise’ in a performance; to prepare for the role of a mother seeking justice for her murdered son in Lila and Eve (Stone 2015) she ‘interviewed a friend who had a child who was murdered’ (quoted in King 2014). She also ‘read the script [to find] all the things you can’t change about the character, all the facts’ (quoted in King 2014). Noting that discussions with directors help actors construct characters, Davis observes that her process of preparation also involves letting herself ‘to be in the moment, memorizing the context of the scene instead of the lines’ (quoted in King 2014). Preparing for roles, Davis uses ‘everything  – especially my training from Juilliard’ (quoted in King 2014). Commenting on its ‘classical training’, she notes that Juilliard does not ‘focus on what you do well – that’s what got you into the school’, but on things that might ‘not come easily to you’; it is ‘like any great medicine that works. It tastes absolutely lousy going down, but ultimately helps and heals you’ (quoted in Heisler 2009). The classical nature of Juilliard’s programme makes its present curriculum a window into Davis’s training in the 1990s. The current programme highlights actors’ need to have ‘courage, playfulness, self-discipline, and the willingness not to know’ (‘Acting Programs’ 2016). Firstyear courses include:  Stanislavsky-based script analysis (to approach scenes through given circumstances, problems and actions); ballroom dancing (to foster grace and mind–body connection); improvization (to increase ‘students’ powers of concentration and relaxation’); rehearsal techniques (that frame plays as ‘sophisticated games’); and masks (‘to release imaginative impulses’) (‘Drama,

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M.F.A.’ 2016). There are also courses in: vocal technique (to develop articulation); movement (informed by ‘Laban effort shaping’); Alexander Technique (to eliminate tension and develop ‘an awareness of oneself in movement’); and speech (to explore ‘the attributes of pitch, duration, and intensity’) (‘Drama, M.F.A.’ 2016). In the second year, students discover that ‘technique serves the imagination and imaginative choices begin to demand greater skills’; through work on rehearsal projects, they learn that ‘the cohesion of the ensemble grows stronger’ as they find what makes them unique as actors (‘Acting Program’ 2016). In the third year, students focus on Shakespeare productions and have master classes with guest artists. In the fourth year, students develop a showcase scene, attend audition workshops, continue courses in voice and body work and participate in three productions presented in repertory (in rotation) to the public (‘Drama, M.F.A. 2016). In addition to ‘meetings with activists, politicians, and artists’, students take ‘a four-year course of study’ that encourages them ‘to understand the social, historical, and artistic context of their work’ (‘Acting Program’ 2016). Given her Juilliard training, it is not surprising Davis believes that it is ‘a privilege to be an actor because we celebrate what it ultimately means to be human’, which involves being ‘putrid and sick and beautiful . . . if you filter it, you’re not telling the truth’ (quoted in King 2015). Although Davis studied at Julliard two decades ago, the way that she describes her work strongly reflects the core components of the Julliard curriculum, then and now, and the training she received seems to facilitate her portrayal of a multi-layered character like Annalise, who ‘has many roles to play at once – she is a courtroom lawyer, law professor and owns a law office; she is a mentor, mistress and wife. She is also a master manipulator’ and someone with intelligence and the ‘ability to intimidate’ (Damico and Quay 2016: 78). The role gives Davis the chance to contribute to work that breaks with the past, for as scholars have noted, the ‘objectification of Black women exists yet can be undercut by showing moments of subjectivity’ (Smith-Shomade 2002: 23). Season one, episode four (16 October 2014) features the oft-noted moment when Davis slowly takes off her wig, revealing her natural hair for the first time in the series. She also removes her cosmetic eyelashes, and with laboured gestures that convey Annalise’s anguish and emotional exhaustion, wipes off her makeup. A daily routine in African American life long ignored by television, Davis makes this symbolic moment generate compassion for Annalise. How to Get Away with Murder combines various elements. Like Grey’s Anatomy, its episodes explore the competition, friendship and sexual attractions that fuel interactions among the junior characters: assistants Bonnie (Liza Weil) and Frank (Charlie Weber), and students Asher (Matt McGorry), Connor (Jack Falahee), Laurel (Karla Souza), Michela (Aja Naomi King) and Wes (Alfred Enoch). Like The Sopranos (HBO 1997–2009), the show’s ‘serial form – which could be used to gradually uncover and reveal character – is used instead to continually

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confound a settled view’ of Annalise in particular (Jacobs 2005: 143); for instance, her distrust of men activated by the infidelity of husband (Tom Verica) contrasts with the trust she places in Nate (Billy Brown), her friend and lover. Like ER, the show’s visual design, marked by zip-pans and rapid editing, and its narrative design, with constant shifts between present and flashback scenes, generate ‘a sense of dramatic urgency and information overload’ that makes audiences ‘keep coming back to decipher meaning’ (McCabe 2005: 219). Davis’s presence and ability to convey complexity are visible at the start of the series’ pilot (25 September 2014). The pre-credit sequence shows the Middleton College celebratory bonfire and quickly introduces the different temperaments of the Keating Five. Then Annalise enters the lecture hall and addresses students in ‘Criminal Law 100’ for the first time. Striding to the blackboard, she warns the students that their ‘karma must be out of balance’ because they have landed in her class; her voice is strong and direct; her words come out in a clipped even rhythm; there is harsh but controlled timbre to her voice. Finally she turns, lowers her chin and raises her eyes to look out at the class; saying that she prefers to call the class ‘how to get away with murder’, Davis drops the volume and pitch of her voice, then tops the surprising moment with a mischievous grin and glint in her eye. Her variation in vocal and physical expression generates interest in the narrative and the character’s personality In her Emmy award-winning performance in season one, episode six, Davis conveys Annalise’s complex subjectivity in a series of what Stanislavsky has termed ‘events’; as Sharon Carnicke explains, in Stanislavsky’s Active Analysis approach an event is ‘anything that happens within the play brought about through the actions of the characters’, and it involves characters charming, belittling, soothing, etc. one another (2009: 217). In this framework, action-based events are distinct from plot points, because they refer to character interactions rather than unfolding plot details. In the first flashback, in terms of plot, Wes confronts Annalise about evidence in the Lila Stangard case, but from an Active Analysis standpoint, the episode’s first event is distinguished by the dramatic fact that Wes breaks free of Annalise’s control. This character-action event is conveyed to audiences when Annalise freezes at the start of a lecture as she remembers Wes shaming her for protecting her adulterous husband; in the flashback, Davis’s weak, quivering body shows that Annalise is shaken to core; her tight, wringing gestures and loud tearful cries convey her frantic urgency to regain Wes’s subservient respect. A character-action event is akin to the familiar idea of beat (or bit or unit of action), which changes ‘whenever an action or counteraction shifts in manner of execution or in strategy based on the mutual interaction of the scene’s partners’ (Carnicke 2009: 214). However, multiple beats can lead to an event. For instance, Annalise employs various tactics to create the second event of successfully seducing her team into fighting her battle. Moments after her vulnerable, distracted reverie in the lecture hall, Annalise dismisses the class, orders the Keating Five to

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stay, and establishes that she is back in charge as she discusses the David Allen case. Leaning forward and lowering the volume and pitch of her voice, Davis uses an urgent, quickening rhythm in her delivery and a melodic timbre in her voice to frame the case as a mystery that must be solved. Raising her volume to state facts and lowering it to discuss the wrongful conviction, Davis uses short, choppy line readings to convey Annalise’s righteous anger. Finally, she employs softer vocal expression to elicit the students’ selfless commitment. By bringing the Keating Five in on a secret and inspiring them to make justice happen, Annalise moves to regain her dominance; communicating Annalise’s passion to win the case (and regain her power), as Davis outlines the case so much energy flows through her body and voice that she seems to tremble with intensity. The next two character-action events present audiences with another paired contrast of character action and emotion. In one scene, Annalise is in complete command, shouting at her husband and demeaning him as he worries about ways to save himself. In the next, Annalise visits Wes’s apartment in an attempt to regain her power over him. However, Wes soundly defeats Annalise as she tries first to flirt and then reason with him; at the scene’s end, Davis’s tilted, wavering body shows that Annalise is exhausted by losing this battle for control. Events five and six also illustrate the range of Annalise’s goal-driven actions and emotional experiences. When news that Judge Millstone, Asher’s father, continued the David Allen trial despite the perjured testimony, Annalise goes on the attack in steely fashion; her voice strong and direct, Davis announces that the judge is ‘the next target’; dropping her voice and squeezing the words out in one breath, she crushes Asher’s futile objections by saying, ‘you won’t be the first person disappointed by your father’. However, Annalise is soon thrown off balance when Bonnie tells her the only person able to corroborate Allen’s story has died months earlier; embodying the shock and worry Annalise feels, Davis’s body goes slack, she wavers, her breathing quickens. Alone at her desk moments later, Davis clasps her hands together and then shuffles through case files with increased agitation as tears stream down her face; in the next beat, Davis conveys Annalise’s resolve to find the strength to overcome impossible odds as she presses her hands together and brings them to her lips; the moment of fear passes and Annalise arrives at a ‘solution’ to keep her husband from being implicated in the murder of Lila Stangard. Character-action events seven and eight occur in the courtroom as Annalise fights to win the David Allen case. In the first scene, Annalise crafts questions that allow her to demand that the State Supreme Court put the senator on the stand. Davis conveys Annalise’s desire to be heard, to change history as she quakes with intensity when she ultimately shouts the question, ‘would the court like to be put on record for refusing to hear [the senator’s] testimony? . . . Please, your honor’. In the second scene, Davis’s shifting and escalating tactics create

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the scene’s rapidly building momentum. She first uses low volume, a higher pitch and a melodious timbre in her voice as she strategically introduces evidence that implicates the senator in the death of Allen’s girlfriend. This acting choice sets up the surprise when she hardens and raises her voice to question the senator, ‘did you have Trisha Stanley murdered?’ Then, speaking louder and more quickly, Davis fires ever more damning questions at the senator, ignoring the objections of the opposing attorney and the chief justice’s calls for silence. Her eyes glistening with rage, Davis roars at the senator, ‘you tore a community apart, you tore families apart, you destroyed people’s lives’. In terms of the plot, in this scene Annalise wins the case; in terms of Active Analysis, here Annalise conquers the forces against her  – by using weapons in her arsenal that range from gently taunting the developer/senator to mounting a furious verbal attack on him. The last two character-action events in the episode involve a pair of contrasting actions and emotional moments for Annalise. Event nine takes place in the courtroom as the chief justice renders the court’s decision. Hearing that Allen’s conviction is vacated (overturned), Annalise is measured and warmly supportive of her client; only Davis’s discreet fist-grip and private smile as she watches Allen join his family convey her pleasure in her victory. However, Annalise’s humiliating acceptance of personal defeat soon follows. Sitting at her dressing table as she tells her husband why she is working so hard to protect him, Annalise breaks down; momentarily angry, Davis is soon crying with her head bowed, shame and self-loathing colouring her words; her voice choked with tears and reduced to a whisper, she admits that she needs and loves him. After a lifetime of seeing herself as having no value, Annalise is easily cowed by her husband’s infidelity and potential role in a murder, for in her mind this simply confirms her unworthiness. As in other episodes in the series, Annalise’s multifaceted subjectivity becomes legible through Davis’s portrayal of her radically different dimensions. Davis’s ability to seamlessly embody each moment in Annalise’s changing circumstances, plans and responses allows her to create a character of great depth, who possesses enduring qualities that exist alongside newly visible traits. From the outset, series creator Peter Nowalk wanted Davis to play Annalise because she has ‘the presence to make the character fearsome’ and ‘the range to telegraph her many complexities “in a look” ’ (quoted in Wallace 2014: 3). The skill and bravura with which Davis has crafted her performances throughout the series confirm Nowalk’s expectations, and her portrayal of Annalise Keating contributes to new representations in American television.

Notes 1 A list of black women with historical significance in American TV would include: Helen Thompson, the first black member of the Writer’s Guild of America (1953); Debbie

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Allen, the choreographer, actor-director-producer whose national recognition goes back to Fame (NBC 1982–7); Darlene Hayes, Emmy-winning producer of Donohue and precursor to Oprah Winfrey; Winifred Hervey-Stalworth, producer and Emmy winner for Golden Girls (1985–6 season). Recognition would also go to hyphenates Maya Angelou and Marla Gibbs, directors Helaine Head, Neema Barnett and Dee Rees, and producers Sara Finney-Johnson and Vida Spears who created Moesha (UPN 1996–2001) starring Brandy Norwood. 2 Shows with women of color that fall outside the scope of my discussion include: The Mindy Project (Fox/Hulu 2012–), Jane the Virgin (CW 2014–), Fresh off the Boat (ABC 2015–), Master of None (Netflix 2015–) and Quantico (ABC 2015–). 3 Upward Bound works with colleges ‘and under-resourced high schools’; students between ‘13 and 18 receive instruction in college readiness, literature, composition, mathematics, and science on college campuses, after school, on Saturdays and during the summer’ (Council for Opportunity in Education n.d.). Ron Stetson received his bachelor’s degree at Rhode Island College and trained at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theatre. He has been teaching at the Neighborhood Playhouse since 1987, and has a long career as an actor and director.

References ‘Acting Programs’ (2016), ‘Juilliard School of the Arts: Dance, Drama, Music’. Available online: http://www.juilliard.edu/degrees-programs/drama/acting-programs (accessed 17 July 2016). ‘Actress Viola Davis ‘88 Honored for “Making a Difference” ’ (2013), Rhode Island College: RIC News 8 May. Available online: http://www.ric.edu/news/details. php?News_ID=2205 (accessed 31 July 2016). Adamo, G. (2010), African Americans in Television: Behind the Scenes, New York: Peter Lang. Barr, M. S. (2008), ‘ “On the Other Side of the Glass”: The Television Roots of Black Science Fiction’, in M. S. Barr (ed.), Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction’s Newest New-Wave Trajectory, 14–27, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Bogle, D. (2001), Primetime Blues: African Americans on Network Television, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Brook, V. (2009), ‘Convergent Ethnicity and the Neo-platoon Show: Recombining Difference in the Postnetwork Era’, Television and New Media, 10 (4): 331–53. Carnicke, S. M. (2009), Stanislavsky in Focus: An Acting Master for the Twenty-First Century, 2nd edn, New York: Routledge. Council for Opportunity in Education (n.d.), ‘Upward Bound 50th Anniversary’. Available online: http://www.coenet.us/COE_Prod_ Imis/COE/NAV_ Events/Upward_ Bound_50th_ Anniversary.aspx?Tabs=4 (accessed 31 July 2016). Cunningham, P. L. (2013), ‘ “Get a Crew . . . And Make It Happen”: The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl and New Media’s Potential for Self-Definition’, in D. J. Leonard and L. A. Guerrero (eds), African Americans on Television: Race-ing for Ratings, 402–13, Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Damico, A. M. and S. E. Quay (2016), 21st-Century TV Dramas: Exploring the New Golden Age, Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.

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Davis, V. (2016), ‘Viola Davis Acceptance Speech: 22nd SAG Awards’, 30 January. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jH2Vx4JkjU (accessed 31 July 2016). Drama, M. F. A. (2016), ‘Juilliard School of the Arts: Dance, Drama, Music’. Available online: http://catalog.juilliard.edu/preview_program.php?catoid=25&poid=2783 (accessed 17 July 2016). Gold, M. (2015), ‘Viola Davis’s Emmy Speech’, The New York Times, 20 September. Available online: http://www.nytimes.com/live/emmys-2015/viola-daviss-emotionalemmys-acceptance-speech/ (accessed 31 July 2016). Gray, H. S. (2005), Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation, Berkeley: University of California. Guerrero, L. A. (2013), ‘Single Black Female: Representing the Modern Black Woman in Living Single’, in D. J. Leonard and L. A. Guerrero (eds), African Americans on Television: Race-ing for Ratings, 177–90, Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Heisler, S. (2009), ‘Viola Davis’, The A. V. Club, 18 February. Available online: http://www. avclub.com/article/viola-davis-23955 (accessed 17 July 2016). Hill, G., L. Raglin and C. F. Johnson (1990), Black Women in Television: An Illustrated History and Bibliography, New York: Garland. Jacobs, J. (2005), ‘Violence and Therapy in The Sopranos’, in M. Hammond and L. Mazdon (eds), The Contemporary Television Series, 139–58, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. King, L. (2014), ‘ “The Help” Star Viola Davis Gives Students the Script on Being an Actor’, Emory Report, 25 February. Available online: http://news.emory.edu/stories/ 2014/02/er_viola_davis_shares_acting_advice/campus.html (accessed 17 July 2016). LaBalle, C. (2002), ‘Davis, Viola 1965–’, Contemporary Black Biography, Encyclopedia. com. Available online: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-2873600020.html (accessed 17 July 2016). MacDonald, J. F. (1992), Blacks and White TV: African Americans in Television since 1948, Chicago: Nelson-Hall Publishers. McCabe, J. (2005), ‘Creating “Quality” Audiences for ER on Channel Four’, in M. Hammond and L. Mazdon (eds), The Contemporary Television Series, 207–23, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Newsweek’s Annual Oscar Roundtable (2012), [TV programme] The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC, 23 January. Smith-Shomade, B. E. (2002), Shaded Lives: African-American Women and Television, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. ‘Theatre Program’ (2016), Rhode Island College: Music, Theatre, and Dance Department. Available online: http://www.ric.edu/mtd/theatreProgram.php (accessed 17 July 2016). Wallace, A. (2014), ‘Viola Davis as You’ve Never Seen Her Before: Leading Lady!’, The New York Times Magazine, 12 September. Available online: http://www.nytimes.com/ 2014/09/14/magazine/viola-davis.html?_r=0 (accessed 28 April 2016). Warner, K. J. (2012), ‘A Black Cast Doesn’t Make a Black Show: City of Angels and the Plausible Deniability of Color-Blindness’, in Beretta E. Smith-Shomade (ed.), Watching While Black: Centering the Television of Black Audiences, 49–62, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Zook, K. B. (1999), Color by Fox: The Fox Network and the Revolution in Black Television, New York: Oxford University Press.

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6 ‘I’M GOING IN THERE GC STYLE’: PERFORMANCE AND PERFORMATIVE CONTRACTS WITHIN A CROSSOVER OF REALITY TELEVISION ENVIRONMENTS Louise Cope

Introduction: Reality television’s ‘performative contracts’ The impact that reality television has had on television production and consumption, both in the UK and internationally, over the last two decades has been remarkable. The number of reality television programmes (re)created and (re)produced (many reality television programmes being copies or adaptations of others), as well as the various hybrid sub-genres and formats to stem from reality television, indicates the popularity of these formats. Reality programming has become a consistent fixture on our screens: often one series succeeding another within a matter of weeks or even days. For example, in Summer 2016, the seventeenth series of Big Brother (Channel 4 2000–2010; C5 2011–) was broadcast from 17 June until 26 July. Two days after the final show, series eighteen of Celebrity Big Brother (Channel 4 2000–2010; C5 2011–) was aired. Similarly, in Spring 2017, season six of Ex on the Beach (MTV 2014–) was broadcast over a ten-week period between 17 January and 21 March, closely followed by the fourteenth

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season of Geordie Shore (MTV 2011–), which was aired on 28 March 2017. There is rarely a scheduling gap, broadcast or narrowcast, that reality television does not fill. Thus, within the contemporary media sphere, there is a continuous procession of reality television ‘performances’ for audiences to consume and cultural commentators to scrutinize. From the outset, reality variants (constructed reality shows, in particular) establish ‘performative contracts’ to which viewers  – as ‘stakeholders’ of the show  – must subscribe. This is made clear upfront in The Only Way Is Essex (TOWIE, ITV 2010–), in which the viewer is presented with a disclaimer within the opening credits of each episode: ‘while the tans you see might be fake the people are all real although some of what they do has been set up purely for your entertainment’ (TOWIE:  S1E5). In each episode, this statement varies slightly, often depending on the content of the episode (see Kidd 2016; Woods 2016). However, the message is clear: the people are ‘real’ but parts of the show have been manipulated or constructed for entertainment purposes, with clear performance implications. Hill (2005) discusses the process of negotiation that audience members go through when engaging with factual television, arguing that there are certain types of factual genres whereby real people perform for the cameras, and their performance is taken as evidence of the truthfulness of the programme itself. However, in terms of reality TV, many programmes are judged by viewers as unreal precisely because of the performance of nonprofessional actors. (2005: 64) Here, Hill suggests that not only are audiences aware of the performance aspects within reality television, but they actively critique the genre based on its performative credibility. However, within constructed reality shows such as TOWIE, a more explicit ‘performative contract’ between the players and the audience is initiated. Viewers are aware that situations are constructed and performed but suspend disbelief for the sake of entertainment because those are the pre-established conditions of the format (this assumption will be interrogated throughout the chapter). The opening disclaimer ensures that the viewer is under no illusions regarding what they are about to observe. As this chapter will explore, these performative contracts allow the stars of such shows to construct and perform larger-than-life characters, or exaggerated versions of themselves, whilst still adhering to the semi-authentic premise of the programmes. Furthermore, whilst less explicitly stated, these performative contracts are evident within other reality formats. For example, on reality game shows such as Big Brother, it is assumed that the contestants are ‘real’ people. However, viewers are aware that there is a vigorous casting process beforehand to ensure that those entering the house carry high entertainment capital. Again, the results of this are often exaggerated or otherwise manipulated (in the performance and

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the edit) versions of self, performed in order to emphasize entertainment value and, most importantly, to gain public support. Within celebrity versions of reality game shows, such as Celebrity Big Brother and I’m a Celebrity . . .Get Me Out of Here!, the performative contracts are more multifaceted. The player with an already-established public persona must negotiate and regulate their performance wisely to maximize appeal within the established parameters of the format. Often, a celebrity attempts to maintain their public image whilst also being aware that they must adhere to the performative contract (of Celebrity Big Brother, for example), as the viewer is expecting dramatic and hysterical performances. However, due to the performative codes of the programme, the player must also appear to present a more ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ version of themselves than is offered elsewhere. Failure to negotiate these performances most often results in unpopularity and eviction. An increasingly prevalent trend within reality programming is participation and performance in a ‘crossover’ of reality television environments. Over the past ten years especially, reality stars who have carved out fame on constructed/scripted reality shows (often gaining popularity due to their ability to perform an entertaining and/or aspirational version of themselves) have been participating in celebrity versions of reality game shows, particularly Celebrity Big Brother. This crossover of reality environments is important with regard to exploring reality performance, as it highlights how players negotiate the performance of self within the genre, as well as being self-aware of their performances and the need to maintain a sense of ‘authenticity’. This chapter will explore this notion with reference to performance within constructed reality shows and reality game shows, as well as considering the crossover of these particular reality television environments. To explore this in more depth, a performative case study will be presented, in which the performance of reality star Gemma Collins within two reality programmes (The Only Way Is Essex and Celebrity Big Brother) shall be analysed.

Negotiating reality environments: Performing the (extra)ordinary self Firstly, it is important to recognize the hybrid nature of reality television. As Hill argues, reality television ‘is a catch-all category that includes a wide range of entertainment programmes about real people . . . reality TV is located in border territories, between information and entertainment, documentary and drama’ (2005: 2). The notion of ‘border territories’ is important when considering questions of performance within reality television. If reality television combines fact and fiction, as Hill suggests, the boundaries of what constitutes ‘performance’ in this context are sure to become blurred. The ‘performance’ of the actor is paralleled with the ‘performance’ of everyday life. Although reality television

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claims to document the ‘real’ – in particular to document the ‘real’ lives of ‘ordinary’ people – the situations within these ‘real’ lives are heavily constructed and manipulated. Therefore, what reality television portrays, in fact, are the constructed or performed lives of real people. Thus, the boundaries between fact and fiction are ambiguous, which has significant implications for notions of performance within the genre. Reality television saw a boom during the late 1990s and early 2000s due in no small part to the impact of the Big Brother format, which combined the specialliving-conditions aspect of previous shows with a game show element: housemates would compete for popularity and a cash prize whilst living together, with no contact from the outside world. What was originally presented as a largescale social experiment proved to be something far more commercially driven. Big Brother is mass-appeal entertainment (Endemol [2015] states that it is now produced in 46 countries), successfully packaging the experiences of ‘ordinary’ and ‘normal’ people, their journeys, challenges and conflicts, into an entertainment commodity. However, within the constructed realm of reality television, Big Brother works to convert the ‘ordinary’ into the ‘extraordinary’, as housemates increasingly performed and ‘played’ to the cameras in a bid to win popularity and fame post-house, presenting heightened performative caricatures rather than normalcy. Such a process of evolution towards more self-conscious modes of performance fed the subsequent rise of the ‘docusoap’ as a prominent reality sub-genre. From a performance perspective, constructed reality formats such as docusoaps traverse the ‘border territories’ of factual and fictional entertainment (Hill 2005). The breakdown of the word docusoap itself carries ambivalent connotations of performance, constituting an uneasy amalgamation of observational documentary practices and the structuring of stylized popular soap-opera characters and storylines (Kilborn 2003), combining notions of the ‘real’ with the traditions of a genre associated with heightened performance. With regard to broadcasting, constructed reality shows have had a significant impact on contemporary television schedules. In October 2014, TOWIE helped the ITV sister channel, ITVBe, achieve the highest launch figures for a new digital channel in over a decade (Lime Pictures 2014), by peaking at 92,000 viewers (Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board 2014). Indeed, before the launch of the channel, ITV stated that ITVBe ‘will be dedicated to lifestyle and entertainment programming celebrating real life and real people’ (ITV 2014). Again, it is evident that broadcasters are intent on cashing in on this penchant for performances of the supposedly real, authentic and ordinary. Like documentary, constructed reality shows supposedly follow the daily lives and routines of real people and actual events (see Tsay-Vogel and Krakowiak 2017; Riddle and De-Simone 2013 for more detailed explorations of docusoap and surveillance shows, respectively). However, these daily lives and routines are

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constructed via heavily manipulated situations. For example, Geordie Shore follows the lives of a group of ‘housemates’, previously unknown to each other (in the first series, at least), who live together for a number of weeks. The house that they inhabit is established as the main stage for their performance. Although they are allowed (and presumably encouraged) to leave the house for several drunken nights out a week and engage in regular sexual promiscuity, there are still codes of behaviour that they must adhere to, put in place by Anna the landlord (e.g. violent or threatening behaviour is not tolerated and usually results in the housemate being made to leave the house on a temporary basis). It is important to note that there are variations on the Anna ‘character’ in the series filmed abroad (Cancun Chris appears in series three when the cast is sent to Mexico). This suggests that, within this constructed performative arena, the landlord becomes a stock character used to monitor and regulate the housemates’ behaviour and in turn their performances of self within the format’s established parameters. The situations that the cast find themselves in, whether at work or play, are deemed normal, ‘real’ social situations in which most twenty-somethings might find themselves, but there are no illusions that character and action serve anything other than, first and foremost, the entertainment demands of the show. Therefore, the show’s ‘players’ are aware that the production of an entertaining television show is what is at stake: a heightened performance of self is what will make the show a success, as well as establishing a popular ‘celebrity’ persona for their own personal career development. As the series goes on, participants become increasingly conscious of the performative rules for success, both within the format and beyond. Within constructed reality formats, the participants’ success can be attributed to effectively negotiating the particular performative contract in place. With all reality formats, there is a casting process to ensure that the people chosen will fit with a show’s contracted commitment to drama and entertainment. Moreover, the ‘legitimacy’ of constructed reality shows is critiqued not just by audiences but also by the stars of the shows themselves. In an article in The Sun (Allen 2016), Gary Beadle of Geordie Shore criticized TOWIE for being ‘fake’ and as scripted as a soap opera, whilst maintaining that Geordie Shore is ‘real’. Reacting to this, a TOWIE spokesperson commented, ‘as the show disclaimer states, TOWIE follows the real lives of its cast and while certain situations might be constructed, all of the interactions, reactions and emotions are completely genuine’ (Allen 2016). Here, a participant from one constructed reality show is attempting to undermine another by highlighting performative elements, thus presenting their own performance of self as more ‘authentic’ by comparison. Similarly, Alex Worrall (2013), an ex-writer on Made in Chelsea (Channel 4 2011–), discusses the ‘secrets’ of scripted reality: ‘Everyone always asks if it’s real? The truth is, it is and it isn’t . . . Characters don’t just bump into each other and I think most people know that. However, the emotions and the dynamics are real. It

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can’t be faked, largely because none of them can act’. Again, Worrall suggests that an audience has already subscribed to the performative contract of these shows: they know that the situations are heavily constructed. However, as long as they remain entertained, they will continue to consume the shows and their performances. Furthermore, Worrall’s position prompts questions regarding what ‘acting’ means within a reality television context. Whilst the cast of constructed reality shows may not have any professional acting training, they have some skill in being able to perform their ‘authentic’ self. Orbe stresses the very ‘coached’ and ‘manipulated’ nature of reality television, arguing that ‘participants are oftentimes coached or directed by producers and what is seen by viewers is manipulated through various postproduction editing techniques that maximize the intensity of the product’ (2008: 346). Here, Orbe argues that not only does reality television construct situations and heavily edit footage, the participants within these programmes are primed in certain ways. Indeed, in an article for Back Stage magazine, Hortwitch reports on the New York Reality TV School, founded in order to ‘help actors and non-actors catapult themselves to reality-show fame’ (2008:  4). Acting teacher Robert Galinsky trains reality television hopefuls in areas such as ‘improv, auditioning techniques, and how to cope with reality shows’ grueling schedules’ (2008: 4). Thus, potential participants of reality television can even be trained in what they must do to be successful: not only how to secure a ‘role’ in reality television but also how they maintain popularity once they are involved in a production. When discussing performance in reality television, terms typically relevant to traditional acting practices, such as ‘role’, ‘auditions’ and ‘cast’ become readily appropriate, further suggesting parallels with more traditional performative modes. Nevertheless, Dowd (2006) suggests that in order for reality television to work, the viewers must believe that the participants on the shows are not professional actors. Hence, the participants or ‘cast’ must perform a certain level of ‘ordinariness’, producing a paradox whereby real people are expected to perform or act at being ‘real’. Indeed, Hill (2005) suggests that there is a contradiction between reality television contestants being themselves and performance of self. Hortwitch states that the training ‘focuses on how to be oneself rather than “act” ’ (2008:  4). This is suggestive of the performance paradox:  an individual being themselves but having to be taught how to ‘package’ this effectively. How ‘effective’ this performance of the self is, however, largely depends on what is marketable within the context of a particular television format. Hortwitch explains that reality television casting director Sheila Conlin ‘doubted a school could teach anyone how to land a gig on a reality show or to be a better contestant’ and that she ‘looks for “the ordinary person who has an extraordinary personality or just something about them” ’. Furthermore, ‘ “It’s a naturalness. You cannot teach that. You cannot teach someone how to be themselves” ’ (2008: 4). Conlin’s industry perspective is in conflict with Hill (2005)

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and Orbe (2008), as she claims that reality television producers cast real people (not taught performers) and that it is impossible for individuals to perform ‘themselves’. Arguably, Conlin has to take this position because, as Dowd (2006) suggests, it is fundamental to the continued specificity, appeal and viability of the genre that the individuals presented in reality television are non-actors. Any claim working against this notion (at least from someone working within the industry) would shatter an extremely profitable illusion. Indeed, in a contemporary setting, ‘ordinariness’ has now become a key component in the manufacturing of celebrity. Turner uses the phrase ‘demotic turn’ to explain ‘the increasing visibility of the “ordinary person” as they turn themselves into media content’ (2006: 153). The rise of the ‘ordinary’-person-turned ‘celebrity’ can be correlated with the increased popularity of reality television. In this context, ordinary people can be seen to perform in certain ways in order to make themselves visible. Indeed, Turner suggests that ‘whole media formats’ – one may assume that reality television texts are applicable here – are now dedicated to the process of transforming the ‘ordinary’ person into a celebrity persona. Arguably, this process is largely dependent on how successful the ‘ordinary’ person is at self-performance: it is not merely chance that only certain individuals enjoy stardom and celebrity post their reality experience; they must subscribe to clear, familiar and marketable notions of gender, sexuality and social identity, and also have the ‘likeability’ factor. Mastering the performance of the self via one reality platform – and in turn, entering the realm of ‘celebrity’ – enables the ‘ordinary’ person then to negotiate different reality environments and thus become a ‘reality star’. Several celebrity versions of reality formats now feature so-called ‘reality stars’ as contestants. Here, the crossover of reality television environments becomes evident. For instance, both I’m a Celebrity . . .Get Me Out of Here! and Celebrity Big Brother have featured contestants who have gained fame and notoriety by starring in other reality variants, mainly constructed reality shows. Since 2010, there has been a steady increase in the number of ‘reality TV star’ contestants to appear on both of these programmes; interestingly, this is paralleled with the move of Celebrity Big Brother from Channel 4 to Channel 5. Also, one could argue that this is due to the ‘stars’ becoming increasingly familiar with the performative rules of the reality game. For example, the fifteenth series of I’m a Celebrity . . . featured a final comprised entirely of reality television personalities. With regard to Celebrity Big Brother, five out of the eleven series that have aired since 2011 have had winners from a reality television background. Arguably, this is due to their ability to construct recognizable and likeable personalities that become popular within the public arena; or, if they were not already well-known, they were able to successfully perform a version of themselves, as an ‘ordinary’, likeable person. Nevertheless, reality stars are clearly on the rise, and on the move. Between them, Vicky Pattison, Scott Timlin, Megan McKenna and Gemma Collins

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have fourteen reality appearances, spanning five reality shows (Geordie Shore, TOWIE, Ex on the Beach, Celebrity Big Brother and I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!). This group of people have gone from being ‘ordinary’ participants, unknown to the public, launching their careers in constructed reality shows, to becoming reality ‘stars’ and household names.

‘I am actually a nice person’: Performing authenticity Performing ‘authenticity’ is essential for an individual when trying to navigate and negotiate the various performative platforms of reality television. Vannini and Franzese explore the notion of authenticity as a ‘social psychological phenomenon’ that ‘refers to such different things as sincerity, truthfulness, originality, and the feeling and practice of being true to one’s self or others’ (2008:  1621). Vannini and Franzese suggest that there are various aspects that make up the self or our sense of who we are. One of these aspects is the ‘me’, which Vannini and Franzese argue has a social component and which is ‘directly relevant to authenticity and concerns the human need for recognition, as well as the idea that we present ourselves differently to different audiences’ (2008: 1622). Although Vannini and Franzese make reference to this in a social context, one can equally apply this notion to reality television. This becomes more evident when constructed reality ‘stars’ enter a different reality environment and, again, have to renegotiate the performance of a different version of themselves. Hill (2005: 69) suggests that when celebrities enter the Big Brother house as contestants, the viewer knows their personalities whereas ordinary people are strangers and so have to perform their ‘true’ selves. However, even ‘ordinary’ people offer a performance that may not reflect the ‘real’ them outside of the house; it is instead a portrayal of a personality that they feel will become popular with an audience or generate an appropriate impact to leave a mark. Within reality television, there are established character archetypes which contestants gravitate towards in constructing their performance of self, many of which are tied to specific formats (see Bignell 2002, 2005). On Big Brother, for example, it is common for characters to be signalled before the contestant even enters the house, both in their audition tape and their piece to camera (or VT). Common character types include the ‘villain’ (Bignell 2002:  152; 2005:  97), ‘promiscuous womanizer’ and the ‘bitch who causes trouble’, offering clear melodramatic value. An article by The Daily Star offers the potential Big Brother applicant advice: Work on your image just as a celebrity would. Are you going to be the joker, the dizzy one or the sexpot? Play to your strengths though: no-one likes a

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phoney. Think about how you will be seen by viewers but don’t just invent a persona. It still has to be you. (James 2014) Here, the tensions in performing the self are revealed. The potential participant must work on their image and construct a character yet are advised that they must stay true to themselves. Hence, the individual must perform a cleverly devised version of themselves:  ‘authentic’ and ‘ordinary’, their ‘true’ self, but equally a version of this self that is entertaining and marketable. Reflecting such tensions, a prevalent theme in contemporary celebrity game shows is celebrity contestants wanting to show an audience the ‘real’ them or a different version of themselves that may not have been seen before. This tantalizingly suggests that there is a more ‘authentic’ version of the self that they wish to reveal. This is particularly true when reality ‘stars’ have already constructed a certain persona or built up a reputation on a constructed reality show. For example, in her piece to camera before entering the Celebrity Big Brother house, Megan McKenna states: ‘people probably just remember me from Ex On The Beach as the one that screamed all the time and looked like an absolute psychopath . . . That’s me, I can’t help it. I’ve got a short fuse, I’m always gonna be the same’ (S17 E1). However, the following exchange between presenter Emma Willis and Megan suggests that the ‘psychopath’ persona is not one which she wishes to portray on Celebrity Big Brother: Emma: How are you feeling about entering the house and how are you feeling about keeping that inner psycho in check? Megan: (Laughs) I just wanna show people my nice side! That’s all . . . You know what people need to just get to know me cus people think I row all the time about silly things but I am actually a nice person, just don’t give me too many Jägerbombs! (S17 E1) Here, a conscious and calculated negotiation of performance in different reality environments becomes evident. Whilst Megan seems eager to reveal the ‘real’ her – the ‘nice person’ – in the house, she is also teasing her audience by suggesting that in certain circumstances (i.e. where alcohol is involved), they may witness her ‘psychopath’ persona, a persona which an audience may very well already be aware of and indeed enjoy watching. Hence, Megan is successfully navigating her performance across two reality environments: by keeping within the performance expectations of Celebrity Big Brother, promising to offer an ‘authentic’ and ‘real’ version of herself, as well as guaranteeing glimpses of the often over-the-top and caricatured personality as showcased with success on Ex on the Beach. When an individual enters a reality environment, especially a game-based format, their sincerity comes into question (Ellis 2009). Since they have actively

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volunteered to participate (in celebrity versions they get paid a considerable amount), ‘they are to a significant degree performing a version of themselves, or even trying to get away with a constructed persona’ (Ellis 2009: 10). In celebrity reality formats, not only are the contestants trying to remodel themselves into a more appealing constructed persona, as Ellis suggests, they may also be trying to distance themselves from or even emphasize aspects of an already prominent persona familiar to some viewers. This is evident in another Celebrity Big Brother interview, after Scott Timlin, or Scotty T (as he is known on Geordie Shore), was crowned the winner. Emma states that ‘we’ are aware of his Geordie Shore persona, yet throughout his time in the house, Scott has portrayed himself as surprisingly ‘level-headed and rational’ (S17 E36). Emma’s assertion of ‘we’ suggests that we as an audience are already familiar with Scott’s partying, promiscuous reality persona, with many of us willingly subscribing to this through the performative contract of Geordie Shore. However, the performance that manifested on Celebrity Big Brother was Scott the ‘lovely lad’, a less caricatured, more ‘ordinary’ individual. Indeed, when asked if his intention was to show a ‘different’ side to himself, Scott contends that he is ‘just a nice kid’ (S17 E36). Emma’s questions and comments suggest that Scott’s performance of the nice person, his ‘real’ self, has been a major contributing factor to his victory. This exchange is indicative of Scott successfully constructing, and differentiating between, two reality personas: one being the booze-fuelled ‘tearaway’ from Geordie Shore and the other an all-round ‘nice kid’ who is, despite expectations accrued previously, level-headed and intelligent. By conveying his normalcy with occasional glimpses of his party boy persona, Scott successfully modulates his performance across reality environments, combining the tried-and-tested with the novelty of the new. By virtue of the fact that the viewers voted Scott the winner, one may argue that they deemed his performance as authentic. Within the realm of reality television, both contestants and audience ‘are involved in and move skillfully from one reality to another, forming a continuous play between authenticity/reality and staged role playing/staged reality’ (Aslama and Pantti 2006: 171).

From Gemma Collins to ‘the GC’: A performative case study The complex nature of performance within reality television is embodied by one of the most notorious British reality stars of recent years, Gemma Collins. Having appeared on TOWIE, I’m a Celebrity . . ., Celebrity Big Brother and Splash (ITV 2013–14), a reality sports competition hybrid, Gemma has consistently been in the public eye, offering multiple performative variants of her reality persona for audiences to consume. She also has a Sunday Times bestselling book and an

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award-winning fashion range, suggesting that not only has she marketed her reality persona, but has established herself as a reality brand in her own right. Throughout her time on TOWIE, Gemma constructed an alter-ego called ‘the GC’, which has become embedded into the narrative of the show itself. The ‘GC’ is Gemma in her extreme ‘diva’ mode and regularly becomes the scapegoat for Gemma’s verbally aggressive behaviour. Gemma refers to this ‘character’ in the third person, as if it is another entity separate from her performed self on TOWIE. The ‘personality’ of the GC has caused friction within TOWIE, providing many storylines of arguments and fallouts, aiding the narrative greatly – even so far as Gemma getting ‘suspended’ from the show for the GC’s bad behaviour. In one particular episode (S15 E6), Gemma is ‘allowed to return’ to the show. She has the following exchange with Ferne McCann: Ferne: Sometimes when someone has this perception of you, you almost have to live up to that. Gemma: Yeah and it’s tiring. Ferne: I think that’s what you’ve done for a very long time. Like, who is GC? Gemma: Right, I never even created GC. People started calling me GC so you know like there was Beyoncé and then she become Sasha Fierce and there was Puff Daddy and then he become Pimp Daddy, well there was Gemma Collins and now there’s the GC and it’s been so much pressure. GC is a bit of a prick really, she’s jumped-up, she don’t really care about anything or anyone, she’s loud, she’s brash. Ferne: She’s your alter-ego that actually – Gemma: Stinks. Ferne: – isn’t a very nice person. Gemma: No, I know. This dialogue suggests that Gemma is aware that the GC is a performance tool used to facilitate and satisfy the narrative expectations of the show, as a catalyst for shock, conflict and resultant drama in TOWIE. During the same episode, Gemma and her friends hold a ceremony where they reveal the traits of the GC that they dislike, then burn them. Thus, Gemma’s alter-ego is symbolically destroyed. This could threaten to undermine the premise that the show’s participants are ‘real’, yet it is instead used to the premise’s advantage. By symbolically destroying the GC, what is supposedly left is the ‘authentic’ Gemma, again harking back to the ‘realness’ at the heart of TOWIE’s players. This ‘real’ Gemma is, of course, yet another performance. During Gemma’s stint on Celebrity Big Brother, the GC was revived. In the piece to camera before entering the house, Gemma states, ‘I’m going in there GC style like at the end of the day, GC can handle anyone’ (S17 E1). Unlike other contestants who claim to be presenting their ‘real’ selves throughout the show,

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Gemma is explicitly referencing her intended performance of the GC. However, upon entering the house, in a conversation with fellow contestant Christopher Maloney, Gemma states, ‘I’m scared. I’m coming in here as Gemma, not GC and I’m petrified’ (S17 E1). Thus, by making reference to the GC, yet claiming the ‘real’ her is petrified, Gemma is exhibiting a considered negotiation of performance to best fulfil the performative contract of Celebrity Big Brother: her audience are guaranteed the familiar appeal of the GC persona but additionally a less ‘performed’ version of self than has ever been offered on TOWIE. Interestingly, in her youth, Gemma attended the Sylvia Young Theatre School, suggesting that she has some formalized acting training and experience. Thus, she is aware of how characters are assumed and sustained, perhaps contributing to her construction of the GC. Indeed, Vannini and Franzese state that ‘Goffman (1959) suggests that individuals naturally move between sincere performances in which individuals feel a sense of belief in their own performance, and cynical performances in which the individuals have a level of self-knowledge that they are putting on a front’ (2008: 1628). Given Gemma’s theatre school training, it can be argued that she fully comprehends of when she is performing and that every separate television appearance is a conscious recalibration of a previously performed self. Throughout the series of Celebrity Big Brother in which she participated, up until her departure, Gemma was consistently referring to her ‘performance’ within the show and how she was consciously providing ‘entertainment’ for the producers to exploit in the edit: ‘I’m here to make a TV show to be honest’ (S17 E14); ‘They’re gonna use all of this, they love it. I’m the most dramatic person in this house that’s giving them entertainment’ (S17 E14). In one particular episode (S17 E32), Gemma’s performative consciousness is made notably apparent. In this episode, it is Gemma’s birthday. The housemates are all in a celebratory mood until Big Brother announces that the hot water will be turned off due to them discussing nominations, a breach of the Big Brother rules. Gemma tells Stephanie that she is going to sit in the toilet (the only area of the house that is free from cameras): ‘I don’t wanna be on the cameras . . . I will not be giving them entertainment.’ In the next scene, Daniella enters the toilet to speak to Gemma, who whispers, ‘[I]f you think I’m making a TV show and I can’t have a fucking shower.’ After a long dialogue between herself, Daniella, and Stephanie, Gemma exclaims ‘who the fuck says “you are not going to have electrical appliances and water”? Well you ain’t gunna have a TV show cus I won’t perform for you’. Here, Gemma is explicitly stating her awareness of her performance for the cameras and is threatening to discontinue this desirable performance until she gets what she wants. However, this in itself becomes a performance which acts as a dramatic catalyst for the episode. Gemma has already confessed that she knows how to perform for the cameras in order to provide entertainment and in

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this scene is performing yet another extension of herself and the GC, portraying diva-like tendencies. Claiming her performance is over in fact works to heighten entertainment value for the show, of which Gemma is fully aware. Contrastingly, when in the diary room nominating Gemma for eviction, Scott maintains that no one is ‘performing’. Scott: My first nomination is gonna be Gemma. Cus the hot water was off today, she wanted to sit in the bathroom, like and not perform. But what’s performing really though like you know what I  mean? Like, perform? Everyone’s just themselves in this house like, you don’t need to perform at all and like she was just threatening to sit in the bathroom and stuff and not move for three days and that and it’s like well why? Like there’s no reason to. And she doesn’t need to be like that and for that I just, it just annoys us sometimes it’s just like howey Gemma man, just get involved. Either Scott is genuinely unaware of his own performance or he believes that to admit to the show’s performative demands would be damaging to his own performance of authenticity, thus breaking the format’s performative contract with its audience. Furthermore, Scott utilizes Gemma’s explicit expression of performance as a means of heightening his own display of authenticity. Contrasting Gemma’s stressed performance with his own normalcy clearly works as a strategy, as Scott is later crowned the winner of the game. In Gemma’s eviction interview, Emma invites her to discuss her two personas. Emma: Erm you’ve just said that you know who you are as a person but in that house you told us that there is two people. There is Gemma and there is GC. Who’s here with me now? Gemma: Gemma. Gemma’s here. Emma: Who have we been seeing most of in the house? Gemma: Erm, well do you know what, as I  say, it is a bit confusing cus obviously. . . Emma: It’s really confusing, it’s really really confusing. Gemma: I confuse myself. Emma: I think that if you had been Gemma, not that I really know what the two people are, but if we had seen Gemma, maybe you would be in the final. Maybe it’s the GC stuff that has brought you out before the final. Gemma: Yeah I’m cool with that. Listen, some days I’m Gemma, some days I’m GC. That’s just, you know, I’ve been on a reality show for 4 years, erm but – Emma: Is GC the one who turns it on for the cameras? Gemma: Yeah definitely.

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Whilst Gemma’s explicit reference to the GC may work within the performative contract of TOWIE, as a means of creating drama and entertainment, it breaks the different performative contract of Celebrity Big Brother, which requires a more foregrounded performance of authenticity. The above dialogue suggests that Gemma’s failure to perform an ‘authentic’ version of herself cost her a place in the final. Ironically, what Gemma claims is the GC, a huge, over-the-top performance of tantrums and the creation of tension between fellow housemates, is perhaps her most authentic performance of all. The GC is repeatedly mobilized by Gemma as a performative scapegoat for her behaviour, a way to attribute the unlikeable aspects of her personality to a performance. By claiming this position, Gemma can maintain that the ‘real’ her is a nice, normal person only truly known to her close friends and family. Ultimately, however, this is another self-conscious negotiation of the broader performative traversals of reality television: Gemma is implying that there is still a ‘real’ version of herself to be uncovered, further marketing the longer-term performance of self.

Conclusion: Self-conscious performance A number of reality television stars are able to successfully negotiate and modulate self-conscious performance within a crossover of reality environments. The performances played out across constructed reality shows and celebrity game shows are largely reliant upon the careful alternation between different personas, which reality stars utilize effectively within different reality contexts. Celebrity contestants often claim that whilst participating in game-based formats, namely Celebrity Big Brother, they will offer viewers access to greater authenticity. This, in itself, is a performance that complies with the pre-established performative contract of Celebrity Big Brother. The individual’s ability to perform a likeable, palatable version of self via the platform of Celebrity Big Brother is often a contributing factor to their subsequent broader popularity with the public and access to the realm of marketable reality ‘celebrity’. Although an audience may be aware that reality programmes are constructed, as are their performances, for an individual to admit that they are indeed performing threatens to shatter the conditions of a show’s performative contract. Within the negotiated contexts of the reality television form, both in constructed reality and game shows, the participant ceases to exist on screen, replaced by a characterization of a more marketable self who adheres to pre-established performative conditions for success.

References Allen, K. (2016), ‘Geordie Shore Star Gaz Beadle Blasts Towie Stars as “Idiots” Adding Show “as Scripted as F*****g Coronation Street” ’, The Sun, 7 March.

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Aslama, M. and M. Pantti (2006), Talking Alone: Reality TV, Emotions and Authenticity, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 9 (2): 167–84. Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board (2014), Weekly Top 10 Programmes. Available online: http://www.barb.co.uk/viewing-data/weekly-top-10/ (accessed 5 December 2016). Bignell, J. (2002), Media Semiotics: An Introduction, 2nd edn, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bignell, J. (2005), Big Brother: Reality TV in the Twenty-First Century, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Ellis, J. (2009), ‘The Performance on Television of Sincerely Felt Emotion’, The Annals of the American Academy, AAPSS, 625, September. Endemol (2015), Big Brother – Formats. Available online: http://www. endemolshinedistribution.com/big-brother-formats/ (accessed 5 December 2016). Hill, A. (2005), Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television, London: Routledge. Hortwitch, L. (2008), ‘The Art of Getting Real’, Backstage Magazine, 49 (34), 21–27 August. ITV (2014), ITVBE. Available online: http://www.itv.com/be (accessed 5 December 2016). James, J. (2014), ‘The 10 Top Tips on How to Be a Big Brother Housemate’, The Daily Star. Available online: https://www.dailystar.co.uk/tv/big-brother/360747/The-10-toptips-on-how-to-be-a-Big-Brother-housemate 16 January. Kidd, J. (2016), Representation: Key Ideas in Media & Cultural Studies, Abingdon: Routledge. Kilborn, R. (2003), Staging the Real: Factual Programming in the Age of Big Brother, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lime Pictures (2014), ‘TOWIE Helps ITV Be Achieve Highest Channel Launch Figures in Over a Decade’. 13 October. Available online: http://www.limepictures.com/ news/towie-helps-itvbe-achieve-highest-channel-launch-figures-in-over-a-decade/ (accessed 13 September 2016). Orbe, M. (2008), ‘Representations of Race in Reality TV: Watch and Discuss’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 25 (4): 345–52. Riddle, K. and J. J. De-Sinome (2013), ‘A Snooki Effect? An Exploration of the Surveillance Subgenre of Reality TV and Viewers’ Beliefs about the “Real” Real World’, Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 2 (4): 237–50. Tsay-Vogel, M. and K. M. Krakowiak (2017), ‘Exploring Viewers’ Responses to Nine Reality TV Subgenres’, Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 6 (4), 348–60. Turner, G. (2006), ‘The Mass Production of Celebrity: “Celetoids”, Reality TV and the “Demotic Turn” ’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 9 (2): 153–65. Vannini, P. and A. Franzese (2008), ‘The Authenticity of Self: Conceptualization, Personal Experience, and Practice’, Sociology Compass, 2 (5): 1621–37. Woods, F. (2016), British Youth Television: Transnational Teens, Industry, Genre, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Worrall, A. (2013), ‘Guest Blog: Alex Worrall on “The Secrets of Scripted Reality” ’, Freeview, [Online] 2 August. https://www.freeview.co.uk/news-and-blog/blogposts/guest-blog-alex-worrall-on-the-secrets-of-scripted-reality.html (accessed 13 September 2016).

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7 TRUTH AND ‘TRUTHINESS’ IN ACTING THE REAL Derek Paget

Introduction – ‘the documentary moment’ From 2007 to 2010, I was Principal Investigator for the University of Reading/ AHRC project, ‘Acting with Facts’.1 The research team interviewed British actors about the joys and terrors of pretending not only to be someone else (the actor’s habitual work situation) but also someone who really existed and was still alive, or who really had existed, but was now dead. The project’s subtitle, ‘Actors Performing the Real in British Theatre and Television since 1990’, partly acknowledged the rise of a theatrical form badged variously as ‘documentary’, ‘verbatim’, ‘tribunal’ and ‘testimony’. The shared element that plays in this form had and have is a reliance on edited selections of the recollections, commentaries and official witness statements of real people – as those locutions exist in visual, aural and written documentation. However labelled or defined, Verbatim Theatre is the modern variant and development of Documentary Theatre, a ‘parent form’ with a longer theatrical history rooted in a post-Enlightenment faith in facts – as I have argued in other work.2 Concurrent with the rise of Verbatim Theatre the TV and film docudrama also burgeoned, indeed positively flowered. The period around the millennium was nothing less than the moment docudrama – broadly defined  – and documentary arts in general achieved a new prominence and respectability. Culture in Britain and beyond was in a ‘documentary moment’ unsurpassed since the 1930s. Post-1990, the status being awarded to documentary speech acts was perhaps higher culturally – and specifically in television – than it had ever been.3 The Reading project was part of this ‘Documentary Moment’, as was Mary Luckhurst and Tom Cantrell’s work at the University of York. In Playing for Real, the York project’s book of actor interviews, Luckhurst could have been speaking for both research teams when observing:

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Despite the explosion of interest in representing persons of historical and contemporary significance on stage and on screen, there has been virtually no attempt to examine this phenomenon from an actor’s perspective. (2010: 1)4 Research directly involving professional actors is still something of a lacuna. More needs to be done to take account not just of the creative contribution of the actor, but more particularly of actors’ reflections on their work. It has always been easier to ascribe primary creativity to writers, directors, even to ‘show-runner’ producers. Actors are interpreters, and therefore (strictly speaking) secondary to processes that begin elsewhere. However, in such an essentially collective activity as making drama, it is often difficult to see where primary input ends and secondary begins. Part of the problem for academic researchers is that the artistic contributions made by creatives who are, as it were, at the head of production hierarchies are more readily described, accounted for and (most importantly for the academic) analysed than are those of an actor – even a lead actor. As long ago as 1998, John Caughie asked the fundamental question: ‘What do actors do when they act?’5 Of course, there are plenty of actor interviews in newspapers and magazines, but such copy is always partly tainted by the fact that actors talk to journalists mainly when promoting a product. There is a use for material accessed by this route, but it is inevitably limited by its interpellation into the work of publicity not analysis. Academic analysis, promising qualitatively different material, has been slow to address Caughie’s question.6 One problem when talking to actors is their understandable reluctance to be explicitly critical about colleagues, or about those who might employ them. In a work environment that can still resemble a medieval hiring fair, criticism that might appear negative is often avoided for fear of giving offence. Like politicians, actors veil thoughts and feelings when expedient to do so. Also like politicians, their career memoirs may contain judicious criticism of others, and may even give vent to the irritations and annoyances suffered in any workplace. But such commentary is more usually ‘not for publication’, or framed as non-attributable Green Room gossip. In this example from ‘Acting with Facts’, the actor was warning of the danger of inaccuracy, irrelevance and self-indulgence when ‘acting with facts’: The dangerous thing about actor research, I think, is that it’s . . . If you ever find yourself slipping into sentimentality you’re on a no-goer, you know? [. . .] X, who I love and respect, but X had a tendency, sometimes, to construct, you know? And would have to be questioned after the improvisation: ‘Was that actually what happened?’ [. . .] [he/she] was sort of play-writing in [his/ her] head sometimes!

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The dual anonymity rendered here marks the price necessary (indeed the price agreed) for publication. A further, key, concern identified by both projects is the issue of a language through which the complexities of acting can be accounted for, shared between very different communities (academics, actors, their respective audiences) and analysed. Academics use vocabularies markedly different from actors trying to describe ‘what it is that they do when they act’. The problems are exacerbated even more when distinctions between screen and stage acting are discussed, as they were during all the Reading interviews.

Technique and the screen On the whole, the actors we interviewed were well-established, but mostly from generations trained when drama schools focused on the stage.7 That fine television actor Anne Reid pointed out:  ‘[RADA] only taught us about theatre acting, y’know, in those days. I mean, this was the fifties!’ Following training, the assumption for many years was that young actors would get further ‘on-the-job’ training in the Repertory system. Fast-forward thirty years, Rep had dwindled and television was more prominent but things were much the same at RADA in the late 1980s for Lloyd Hutchinson: No, no TV [training]. No. At RADA? No. You’re trained for the stage there. Or at least you were then. I don’t know what happens now. [. . .] We had a little bit of radio training and, but you really learn on the job, you know? Ian McNeice at LAMDA, at about this time, did get ‘training’: Oh, the TV work! I’ll give you the TV at LAMDA, right. OK, so very excited in the final year at LAMDA, up on the notice board went, ‘There are going to be TV classes.’ Great, we thought, that’s wonderful! So, TV classes. So we went to the first TV class. [. . .] So we went into this room – nothing in there! There was no video, there was nothing at all, it was just [an ex-producer] talking about working on television. And the thing that I take back from that class is what he said, which is this:  ‘When you’re thinking on camera, when the camera’s . . . just move your eyes in a triangle.’ And he said it for absolute real. From that moment . . . I will cherish that moment. That was acting for television at the London Academy of Drama! Naturally, actors had problems when they first found themselves in front of a camera. In Hugh Quarshie’s words: ‘If you want a film career, it can be a powerful disadvantage to train as a classical actor’ (Luckhurst and Veltman 2001: 108).

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For those attending the major drama schools, a shift took place eventually, circumstances determining that work in TV had become so much more likely to be actors’ first work when new to the profession.8 By the mid-1990s, television was on RADA’s curriculum, but it was still secondary to theatre, as Maxine Peake explained: DP: Did RADA give you lots of preparation for work on screen? MP: Not when I  was there. I  know it did change. No, we used to have TV classes and it was basically [. . .] two old directors from the BBC who were absolutely lovely. But all they had was a video camera, and [the class was] in a room, and we had to play scripts. And we just had to do it. They were awful [classes], I remember they were. I remember I did a scene from The Crying Game and actually I was distraught when I acted it. I was like, ‘I’ll never work on screen!’ It was horrendous! DP: In what way was it horrendous? MP: Just because we were so big and, you know, fussy and busy. And it is about a stillness, I suppose. I’m still learning it now . . . Learning through experience, learning ‘on the job’ was something the Reading team heard a lot about. Lloyd Hutchinson, in a TV Studio for the first time, was no better than Peake: ‘Oh, that was . . . I was huge! I was massive! “Just bring it right down, you don’t need to be so operatic!” [the director said].’ Christopher Ettridge (Drama Centre trained) also acknowledged the stagey ‘size’ of his first television performances: Well, in my early years of doing television I would constantly get the note from directors:  ‘Just take it down a bit, Chris, it’s too big  – it’s too stagey.’ And I think . . . [. . .] in the early years, I hadn’t quite cracked [it]. You don’t have to sell it quite so much.9 Acting on screen, as they all found, often requires underplaying. For Harriet Walter, this has ‘something to do with naturalism’: Something to do with, in inverted commas. ‘natural behaviour’. So that you try, I think on screen you . . . I try to not look like I’m acting, y’know. I try to sort of do non-acting, which is almost impossible. But . . . you want that kind of feeling that people are eavesdropping on you or just, y’know, spying on you. [. . .] I can put it very, very simply: on stage you reach out to the audience, on camera you invite the audience in. The appearance of actors, their very likeness to their real-world character, has even more importance in screen docudrama, ratcheting up the expectation of

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‘natural behaviour’. In Playing for Real, Matthew Marsh says, ‘if you come on in a film and you are nothing like [your character], then you’ve got a problem’ (Cantrell and Luckhurst 2010:  95); Michael Pennington notes, ‘I suspect more people come out of a film prepared to be openly critical if someone doesn’t look like the person he or she is playing’ (Cantrell and Luckhurst 2010: 129). Reduced ‘size’ of performance and close resemblance, then, are prime requirements for the docudramatic space created by camera and microphone. Played into a necessarily intimate audience space, this is what produces that sense of eavesdropping. Acting the real on screen creates high stakes, especially if the audience has prior knowledge of the character. As more than one actor told us, if you were portraying Churchill, an element of the ‘lookalike’ – and the ‘sound-alike’ – was mandatory.10

Working in TV The actors interviewed for the Reading project mostly declared a preference for theatre, seeing television more as economic necessity (Lloyd Hutchinson: ‘nobody can just be a theatre actor’). Hugh Bonneville explained: Why actors love acting on stage is because they have complete control over their performance. Acting on screen you have absolutely no control over your performance because it may not even be in the film at the end. [. . .] if you’re in a bigger movie . . . you might not, however historically accurate you’re character etc., you may not even be there because it may be a whole storyline that’s not relevant in the final edit so, no, you have no control over your performance on camera apart from what you give the camera. There may be ten takes, you may think take number ten is the best thing you’ve ever done in your life, they’ll use take one, y’know, if at all! You may not even be in that scene, you may not even be in the movie. On stage no one can stop you apart from, y’know, a mad assassin or a power cut. For Maxine Peake,  ‘you get four to six weeks [in theatre] to rehearse before you show anybody anything. And you get to create a character, you know?’ The contrasting lack of rehearsal in television work was often a concern. William Hoyland, for example, lamented what he called ‘a big change in the last ten years [. . .] most television dramas are not rehearsed at all’. Shortness of rehearsal time in the screen industry has had a major impact on actors. The sense of togetherness, the collective and continuous nature of the endeavour so enjoyed in theatre rehearsal room is often lacking in the world of the screen. For Lloyd Hutchinson, ‘rehearsal and working on a play is a very comfortable environment. TV studios and locations aren’t’. Lack of rehearsal,

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endless waiting around, ‘out of order’ scene filming: these were the common complaints. However, there are obvious challenges to actors’ working strategies presented by television work, which actors did find creatively stimulating. Christopher Ettridge stated: With acting for a camera, [it] has its own difficulties because your mind has to be alive, you really have . . . If you have a camera on you, it’s no good having a, you can kind of, you can get away with it on the stage. People would shoot me down for saying that, but you can as long as you, you, you’ve got the thought in your head but you really have to have your mind very, very alive. [. . .] And that’s the exciting thing about acting for a camera.11 More preparation must occur in private for screen acting, preparation both conceptual (finding the character) and practical (learning the lines). As McNeice remarked, ‘acting-wise you’re left very much on your own to create what you’re doing’. It is an advantage to know who you are and what you have to say before coming into the studio and ‘hitting your mark’ for the camera. Anne Reid pointed out, however, that beyond this level of efficiency, the skill of listening becomes even more important: It’s no good half knowing it because then you can’t listen to what somebody else is saying. [. . .] And that’s what sorts the sheep out from the goats. Actors who sit and wait for the next line, they’re not listening to you. Robin Soans concurred:  ‘There’s a difference in acting between listening and really listening. And staring in the eyes of another actor doesn’t mean you’re listening. [.  . .] looking at the floor or your shoelace probably means you are listening, because that’s what we do in real life.’ The skill of listening is such a significant one in all acting, but especially in the hard industrial environment that creates modern television drama. Maxine Peake observed that instinct can compensate for lack of rehearsal: You do just have to jump in and go, ‘OK, I’ll just react to what I’m given.’ And let’s just trust your instincts and work with the actor you’re with. Sometimes that can be absolutely brilliant, you know. When money is no object, the preparation is more akin to theatre. Ian McNeice played one of the Nazi organizers of the Final Solution in the 2001 BBC/HBO film Conspiracy; ‘it was HBO so there was quite a bit of money’: And so actually we had quite a decent rehearsal time and we actually did quite a lot of research. I think we went into . . . we had a good, sort of week

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sitting round a table just talking about various things and we had . . . people came in and gave talks as well. [. . .] a good eighty per cent of it was transcript from the original meeting. [. . .] There was an energy in that room which was amazing and the subject matter was so grim, and so it was like it was a really . . . It was quite exhausting to do because it was like you’d do seven pages at a time and that’s a lot in TV terms. You normally do about a page, two pages in a take, we were doing, like, seven pages on the run. Artistry in television is linked, as all artistry must inevitably be, to finance and resources, and to the level of compromise required. Resource issues are, perhaps, just more obvious in television than in film and theatre owing to the huge output of the industry.12 Practice, if not making exactly perfect, was seen by many actors as the only way to improve television performance. Lloyd Hutchinson: ‘I’m getting better at it, you know? The more I do, I’m getting better at it.’ And Christopher Ettridge was not alone in seeing productive relationships with other members of the studio team as a bonus: . . . you become aware of what’s in shot and what’s not in shot so, yes, in latter years, as I’ve become more experienced with it, I will often say to the cameraman, ‘What’s the shot?’ and . . . DP: You know what bits to act with . . . CE: Yes. Because it’s a waste of time doing a lot of impressive things with your feet! With vocal performance, too, as I’ve become more experienced I’m more ready to say to the sound man, for example, ‘What do you need me to do here?’ And, ‘Am I  too loud/too quiet?’ So I’ve often done that, yes. So often you can be very, very quiet. Again depending on what the dynamic of the scene is.13

Truth and ghosts – finding a common language A major difficulty when trying to analyse actors’ talk about their work is their frequent recourse to words academics avoid: words like ‘truth’, ‘belief’, ‘trust’, ‘honesty’, ‘essence’ (and/or ‘essential’) and ‘universal’. For actors, these words are markers of a kind of ‘end point’ in discussion. Whether stage or screen acting, Anne Reid told us, ‘It’s all [about] truth!’ Harriet Walter asserted, ‘The truth is

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the truth is the truth!’ For Anna Deavere Smith, acting ‘creat[es] a fiction to illuminate a truth’ (Luckhurst and Veltman 2001: 134). These mantra-like appeals to ‘truth’ were often introduced at the very point in an interview where an academic might seek more theoretical explanation. It should be said that the thirty-odd top-level actors interviewed by the Reading and York teams are all well enough able to describe what they do when they act, and to differentiate between stage and screen acting. They are also well able to account for the differences that obtain when the job in hand is acting the part of a real person. They are highly articulate and intelligent people. But they mostly speak in a language that academics schooled in ‘new theory’ over more than a quarter of a century find problematical, even inimical. The revolt against ‘humanist criticism’ that took place in universities’ humanities departments in the final quarter of the twentieth century was in many ways an ethical stand against questionable critical positions. The turn to theory sought to root out and condemn the racist, sexist, class-ist and elitist assumptions in which much humanist criticism was grounded. But the result is that certain concepts, characteristic of ‘old school’ criticism, became unusable. This was especially the case as courses were remodelled on the lines of psychoanalysis, structuralism and cultural theory deriving from New Left politics. For the actor being trained in the same period in a drama school or ‘on the job’, a similar shift in operational vocabulary did not, on the whole, occur. Even actors like Hugh Bonneville and Roger Allam, who came into the profession from universities, tend to use that same string of ‘old-fashioned’ terms. It is actually hard to imagine why an actor would want to engage in the mostly fairly abstruse reasoning of modern critical theory, especially when they have a whole assortment of their own bespoke theorists  – the likes of Constantin Stanislavski, Michael Chekhov, Lee Strasberg. For Lieve Schreiber, for example, the Method was Lee Strasberg’s way of helping actors to find a certain kind of emotional truth and source memory with which to inform text. (Luckhurst and Veltman 2001: 111 – my italics) Simon Callow drew inspiration from Michael Chekhov’s notion of the ‘psychological gesture’ (‘a gesture which crystallises the central essence of a character’; Luckhurst and Cantrell 2010: 46 – my italics). For Callow, this touchstone element helped in particular when playing real people (such as Dickens). As Callow remarked about Drama Centre: We were given ways of thinking about character in terms of time (intuition), space (intellect), flow (emotion) and weight (physicality). I work out which element predominates [in a character] and what the balance of the elements might be [in each case]. (Luckhurst and Veltman 2001: 11)

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Ettridge, another Drama Centre graduate, observed that ‘you’ve still got to play the inner life of the character. For which the training that I  had is very good’. Maxine Peake, too, was conscious that the insecurity felt by all actors could be controlled through faith in her training: I’ve still got my old, sort of, acting folder and acting book from RADA that I still always go back to. I mean, sometimes you get a minute, you get . . . I have got lazy and I’ve sort of gone, ‘Oh no!’ Not that I know what I’m doing, but sometimes I have to stop and go, ‘Right!’ Because I think the thing that happens, that’s why I got Bella’s book recently, because I thought I need to start going back. I mean part of me was like, ‘I think I need to start going back to classes again.’ Because I think people take acting, they go, ‘Oh well I’m an actress now, I’m an actor now, so I do it.’ And I think you can never stop learning.14 These actors’ training, even if focused originally on the stage, still constitutes a technical and theoretical resource. Of all the words actors use to reach to the heart of what they do when they are acting, ‘truth’ is probably the most used and therefore the most important, irrespective of its actual philosophical slipperiness. Interviewed in 2001, William H. Macy held that emotion was ‘where the truth lies’ and that ‘it’s an actor’s job to find his or her action and tell the truth moment to moment’ (Luckhurst and Veltman 2001: 62). Robin Soans, arguing that acting is ‘accurate’ rather than a kind of fuzzy ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ confidence trick, told me: Acting is very accurate, if it’s any good. If a line is said just ‘off’, you kill it. If it hasn’t got real truthfulness and intent behind it, if it’s got spuriousness or bullshit anywhere near it, it will show. Good acting is really, really accurate. ‘Real truthfulness’ for an academic is, perhaps, about as problematical as it gets. Soans recognized the philosophical difficulties involved, but his pride in his Verbatim work hinged upon its access to a new kind of truth-in-drama, an access located in what I have characterized as the ‘Documentary Moment’: You see, that’s quite a rare trait but you find that coming up in all sorts of ways with actors and directors and artists and photographers, is that the very thing that makes them want to be, to attempt to find the truth, will also make themselves very honest about themselves. I’m not saying this is universal truth, you know. But it is an attempt, in the light of so much public dishonesty these days, it is an attempt to get somewhere. I mean the truth is such an arbitrary idea, but it’s, you know, it does . . . there is probably no truth, as with philosophy there’s no absolute good or absolute evil . . . Do you know what I mean? There is an idea of it which you can work towards.

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The ‘idea of it that you can work towards’, the quest for truth, is both necessary and sufficient for the actor. And perhaps it is time to point out its usefulness as an ideal concept – without a sense of what might be ‘truth’ it is impossible to detect ‘lies’, after all. Timothy West is guided by three key questions: I ask myself: Is it true? [. . .] If I’ve convinced myself that it’s all ‘true’ – a word I use a lot – I read it again, asking myself if it is clear.[. . .] If I’m convinced on a second reading that it is both true and clear, I read the script again and ask myself is it interesting. [. . .] Is it true? Is it clear? Is it interesting? In that order. When I’ve satisfied myself on all these counts, I go on. (Cantrell and Luckhurst 2010: 157)15 To borrow an idea from television theory, the actor works via an ‘etic’; the academic works through an ‘emic’ approach. The former is a generalized, nonstructural mode of description and argument; the latter seeks ‘structure in a particular language or culture, in terms of its internal elements and their functioning’.16 On rare occasions, there can be a meeting between the emic and the etic, and here lies hope for the meeting of the academic and the actor. The following example shows what happened when Roger Allam and I tackled a fundamental problem in acting the real. What, if anything, is the difference between doing an impersonation or impression of a real historical individual, and acting? The very nature of the discussion that follows led to consideration of the academic concept ‘ghosting’.17 I reproduce our exchange in full: RA: Well, I suppose in the end, you see, you’re doing the play, you know. You’re not coming out and doing what Rory Bremner does, which is doing a brilliant kind of instant cartoon. You’re doing a play in which the character will appear in various different moods, hopefully, throughout the play  . . . You . . . A certain . . . It’s difficult to find the words, but I mean a certain level of impersonation is useful. If I’d come on as Hitler and not been at all like people’s experience of Hitler it would have been wilful, you know, so . . . And not very good. So you’ve got to do enough, you’ve got to . . . As I say, hopefully, people have got to think, ‘Oh, yes, he’s Hitler!’ And kind of relax with that, and think and believe that you’re who you say you are. But, and, you know, certain aspects of his physicality and things like that were very, very useful to see . . . The fact that he often stood like that [he demonstrates – hands over crutch.]. Apparently it hides some unconscious fear of the Desmond Morris kind of way. It highlights some fear of . . . I can’t remember now, of course, one forgets all this stuff, but there’s some sort of fear of . . . . DP: Castration?

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RA: Yes, sort of castration fear or infertility. But, of course, he only had one, didn’t he? [laughs] But it is a covering, a protective thing. Quite interesting, you know, how people stand, and what they and their facial expressions and things like that, tiny things like that can be tremendously useful. I remember seeing one picture of Hitler sitting in an armchair like that [again, he demonstrates] and I thought, ‘Oh! Great! I’ve got to get that in!’, you know. DP: So does a phrase like ‘pointing towards’ the historical character work for you? Or the idea of ‘ghosting’? Academic acting theory’s played with that idea of actors being like ghosts. RA: Ghosting? DP: Yes. RA: Haunting the character. DP: Haunting, yes. RA & DP [together]: Or the character haunting you. This long quotation shows the actuality, the ebb and flow, of the interview process, and the way in which a common understanding – here of several concepts – can be reached between an actor and an academic. There is the discussion of impersonation and acting; there is a consideration of character research, and its operationalization; but most important is that reaching towards a difficult concept  – that of ‘haunting/ghosting’. This originates in academic discourse, reaches towards the vocabulary of the actor and to an audience beyond. This is a term that may well lead us to the heart (if not the truth) of what it is that actors do when they act real people.

‘Truthiness’ and the ‘documentary moment’ In 2005 Stephen Colbert coined the word ‘truthiness’ on his American TV show The Colbert Report. Truthiness is that ‘quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true’ (Oxford Dictionaries n.d.).18 Colbert identified its use in public situations when something was asserted strongly enough to counter the fact there was little or no real evidence to back it up. His satirical purpose was to expose the reliance of contemporary politicians – and specifically George W. Bush – on cynical appeals to public ‘gut instincts’ in order to blindside judicious appraisal of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Truthiness works, if it works, through arguments that ‘feel right’. It demands apprehension before comprehension  – and here is the bind that separates the actor and the academic. I want to use the word outside its original satirical context in order to illuminate the Documentary Moment’s fundamental reliance on the mystery of acting.

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The difficulty of analysing acting is that something that can seem so very believable-as-real (or, as an actor might say, ‘true’) always will be totally un‘real’, un-‘true’ in existential terms. The sense that something is ‘believableas-real’ is vital to all performance on screen, precisely because it is, was, and always has been ‘what people expect on telly’ (as Harriet Walter noted). The concepts and thought processes that actors deploy in order to ‘do what they do’ very frequently lead to responses in audiences that rely on ‘truthiness’. If the appeal to a ‘truth’ felt emotionally constitutes the bedrock of the performance dynamic, the ‘truthiness’ of performing the real points to a different order of magnitude, for the believable is even more crucial to the docudrama. If an audience can be persuaded to believe in the ‘ghost’ of a real person presented by the actor, some access to inconvenient truths behind public events or situations becomes available (and can be chased further through what I  have characterized elsewhere as ‘extra-textual’ elements; see Paget 2011). The actor’s work in performance, their ‘truthiness’, enables secondorder experience of the public sphere in the audience. And in the current Documentary Moment the docudrama is one of society’s dwindling means to the end of better understanding both of issues and of the people who wield power over those issues.

Notes 1 All quotations from ‘Acting with Facts’ interviews used in this chapter, along with an Introduction to the project’s background and methodology, can be found at: https:// www.reading.ac.uk/ftt/research/ftt-actingwithfacts-interviews.aspx. 2 See my 1987 New Theatre Quarterly article on Verbatim Theatre for more on its links with Documentary Theatre, and see Cantrell (2013) on acting in Documentary Theatre. Direct address, the principal technical requirement in most theatre of this kind, is something rarely required in TV or film drama. 3 Actors tend not to differentiate between what is required on film and television (see website ‘Introduction’). For more on the ‘broad definitions’ of docudrama, see Paget (2011). 4 Luckhurst has been making this point more generally for some time (see Luckhurst and Veltman 2001). 5 This 1998 University of Reading conference culminated in the publication of Bignell et al. (2000). 6 See Cantrell and Hogg (2016) for a timely return to Caughie’s question. They remark: ‘it is only recently that sustained energy has been applied to moving Caughie’s reflections forward’ (14). 7 Many actors, of course, enter the profession via means other than drama school. Philip Davis became a professional actor via the National Youth Theatre: ‘I never had any training. I didn’t go to drama school but, y’know, I’ve been an actor

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for thirty-six years, that’s a sort of training!’ Many actors come from university backgrounds (Hugh Bonneville and Roger Allam, for example). 8 See Trevor Rawlins’s 2012 University of Reading PhD thesis,’ ‘Contemporary Actor Training for Television in the UK’. 9 Ettridge added an important qualification: ‘That’s a generality which is not always true. I’ve played characters on screen which are very large, and the one that springs to mind, I did film for Disney called The Old Curiosity Shop where I played Samson Brass [ . . . ] it was quite big, you know, and that was alright because that was the style of the piece.’ 10 See, for example, Timothy West’s interview on the Reading website. 11 I quote this with all its hesitations, parentheses and concern for reputation (‘people would shoot me down’) because it typifies Verbatim Theatre’s own ‘unique selling point’ – the eloquence of the unprepared speech act. 12 Once again, much remains to be done to analyse the effects of industrial factors on the work, particularly of the television actor. 13 Yet again, more research is needed – especially on the way microphone technology has enhanced screen naturalism. 14 Peake had just bought Bella Merlin’s The Complete Stanislavsky Tool-Kit (2007). 15 West, of course, responded to Caughie’s foundational question at the 1998 Reading conference (see Bignell et al. 2000: 170–73). 16 See Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. 1, pp. 807 and 855. The words were given their theoretical baptism, so to speak, in Caldwell (1995). 17 On ‘ghosting’, the foundational text is Carlson (2001). 18 The show ran between 2005 and 2014 on Comedy Central and was a spin-off from The Daily Show.

References Bignell, J., S. Lacey and M. Macmurragh-Kavanagh (eds) (2000), British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. Caldwell, J. T. (1995), Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Cantrell, T. (2013), Acting in Documentary Theatre, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cantrell, T. (2016), ‘ “In the doc”: Acting Processes in Brian Hill’s Docudrama’, Consent, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 13 (3): 351–67. Cantrell, T. and C. Hogg (2016), ‘Returning to an Old Question: What Do Actors Do When They Act?’, Critical Studies in Television, 11 (3): 283–98. Cantrell, T. and M. Luckhurst (eds) (2010), Playing for Real: Actors on Playing Real People, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Carlson, M. (2001), The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Caughie, J. (2000), ‘What Do Actors Do When They Act?’, in J. Bignell et al. (eds), British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future, 162–74, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave.

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Luckhurst, M. and C. Veltman (eds) (2001), On Acting: Interviews with Actors, London and New York: Faber. Merlin, B. (2007), The Complete Stanislavsky Tool-Kit, London: Nick Hern Books. Oxford Dictionaries (n.d.), ‘Truthiness’. Available online: www.oxforddictionaries.com/ definition/english/truthiness (accessed 9 February 2016). Paget, D. (1987), “Verbatim Theatre”: Oral History and Documentary Techniques’, New Theatre Quarterly, 3 (12): 317–36. Paget, D. (2011), No Other Way to Tell It: Docudrama on Film and Television, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Rawlins, T. (2012), ‘Contemporary Actor Training for Television in the UK’, PhD thesis, University of Reading.

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TELEVISION ACTING: TRAINING AND INDUSTRY

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8 EXPLORING ACTOR TRAINING FOR TELEVISION Trevor Rawlins

I have run the BA (Hons) Acting programme at Guildford School of Acting (GSA) since 2012. GSA was founded in 1936 to provide vocational training for professional actors. In 2012, GSA merged formally with the University of Surrey, where we now have a dedicated, state-of-the-art, purpose-built home. Prior to 2012, I had been an actor/director, after leaving drama school myself in 1989. Since the late 1990s, I had also begun teaching acting, firstly at my alma mater, East 15 Acting School, and then at a range of other drama schools and universities, including for international organizations – principally North American. When I  came to take up my post as Head of Acting at GSA, I  had firmly formed the opinion that actor training in the UK had not found a way to respond to many of the major changes to the nature of being an actor that have happened over the last twenty years or so. Those changes have a great deal to do with the world of television, but in turn relate to the growth of the new internet platforms and new media. This has become an area of research for me, both in practical terms within GSA, and in the ways in which others in the actor training field have addressed the same questions of how best to develop traditional professional actor training in this radically altered new world. In thinking about the shifts and developments in the ways professional actors are required to work, I  have found some of the ideas of Raymond Williams extremely useful. In his book Marxism and Literature, Williams proposes an ‘epochal’ analysis that breaks cultural developments into the categories of ‘Dominant, Residual and Emergent’ (Williams 1977: 121). In simple terms, the ‘dominant’ in culture refers to that which is both strong and current, the ‘residual’ to that which is relatively weak and out of fashion, and the ‘emergent’ to that which is new and potentially influential as culture develops. I  have found this to be a helpful way of thinking about both the development of actor training in the UK, and the wider cultural shift associated with the rise and expansion first of television and then, more recently, of new media. Whilst screen work has

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become the dominant area of work for the actor, training institutions still exhibit much of a residual theatrical culture in their approach. Meanwhile, during the latter part of the twentieth century television and film can still be seen as emergent cultural forces. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, the distribution and consumption of both media is in a period of drastic change, as the development of the internet and digital technologies continues, with attendant changes in the way audiences receive ‘content’. Indeed, forms of television could be seen as on the one hand dominant, whilst on the other emergent. The BBC serial EastEnders is part of the dominant form of popular entertainment drama, but the method by which it is viewed by audiences may well now be emergent platforms provided via the internet. Quite what effects these emergent methods of distribution are going to have on television drama is, of course, unclear at present. As Marxist-derived, cultural materialist Williams points out, no one ‘mode of production’ is ever totally dominant (1977: 125). Traditional (for want of a better word) actor training in the UK has grown from the experience of working in theatre. When GSA was founded in 1936, the film industry was only just emerging, and television was barely in its infancy. Theatre was the only game in town. As television drama emerged, it tended to be rehearsed and presented in very much the same way as theatre, with many programmes broadcast live. In the 1960s that began to change, as the technologies and deregulated marketplace with which we have now become familiar developed. But the theatre working processes that television aped for much of the latter part of the twentieth century are very different from modern television and film practices, and it is those practices that are prevalent now in any new media context. Theatre tends towards a lengthy rehearsal process during which discoveries are made by the actors working together with a director. Contemporary television and film often has no real rehearsal period at all, with the actors mostly working in isolation and only coming together for the actual filming process. The actors and director often do not even meet until filming starts. In theatre working practices, the director will usually be the person who leads the whole rehearsal process. In ways that many professional actors can find frustrating (usually privately, for obvious professional reasons), the actor’s views must usually be subordinate to the director’s vision. In training, the teacher will, most often, also be in the role of director. Graduates of training institutions who have trained largely on a theatre model, and with a teacher who is often also fulfilling the role of director in a theatrical context, will discover when they enter the profession that a professional television director is a very different entity. In training, the actor is always at the centre of the experience. Indeed, the primary focus of actor training in a culture that prizes the ‘student learning experience’ above almost anything else is, by definition, going to be the actor. The experience of being an actor in a television production often leads one to the conclusion that not only is the actor not central, she or he is not even a particularly important aspect.

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Everything that an actor working in theatre could use a rehearsal period to explore, which would happen in collaboration with the other actors and the director over an extended period, has to be achieved in isolation, sometimes without even meeting the cast or director until the moment of shooting. If the actor’s training has been wholly or largely based on a theatre model, as it currently tends to be in the UK, then it will not directly prepare the student appropriately for the reality of a large and vital part of their professional life. In an interview, the actor Gary Oldman described all the preparation work that he does before arriving on set as his ‘kitchen work’, because that is where he does it, alone (The South Bank Show 1998). There is, of course, always an amount of outside rehearsal preparation for an actor working in theatre. However, it is usually undertaken by the actor in order to be able to freely explore the text and role in the rehearsal room, where the eventual performance will be arrived at by a process of trial and error and, ideally, in a spirit of collaboration. Roberta Pearson (2010) records that both William Shatner and Patrick Stewart relied heavily on their experience gained working professionally in the theatre when working on the Star Trek franchise. The central dichotomy of the working processes of contemporary television is that the actor must be fully prepared and ready, yet fully flexible and open to any changes that must be incorporated immediately into a finished performance. British actors, typically, have hitherto relied on a craft-based approach to acting with skills honed during an apprenticeship in the theatre, with training designed to lead into that apprenticeship. The fast moving processes of television and the breakdown of the repertory system in UK theatre have fundamentally changed the nature of the early career of the professional actor. This experience is very similar in other Western theatrical culture. In his PhD thesis ‘Longing to Belong: Trained Actors’ Attempts to Enter the Profession’ (2004), Paul Moore examines, via a theoretical framework drawn principally from Pierre Bourdieu, how newly trained actors are coping with the television age in Australia. As such, and as his title implies, he examines how trained actors adapt to joining a world very different from the one they have got used to during training. [In training] outright gain was frowned upon, along with the corruptive influence of popular success and associated commercial practice. I was fully prepared, and fully expected, to join a profession in which the principles I had embodied would gain me respect and inclusion. (Moore 2004: 72) Moore encounters some of the same issues that I have identified. Theatre operates as a group activity and tends towards the egalitarian and the supportive:  television production tends to favour the individual. Theatre training tends to place the director in the role of teacher, leading the actor: television practice does not. Theatre tends to value and encourage the development of craft and

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technique: television tends not to. If professional actor training remains based in theatre practice, can it, Moore asks, still claim relevance as preparation for contemporary television working practices? If, in television, the actor is divorced from his or her fellow actors for almost the entire preparation period, how can that actor operate as anything other than a largely self-interested individual? These questions imply a position that is at odds with a training based on a theatre model, and also at odds with most notions of theatre practice. I have observed these changes myself in the UK. One of the emergent changes in the culture is the different role of the television director. Any good director will still see their work with the actors as critical, but a television director also has a critical relationship to the technology and industrial processes involved. There is an issue here for actor training, because in much television production the director will not be as involved in the development of the actor’s performance, as Moore also notes: The relationship between the teacher/mentor and the student/novice generates a disposition towards submission which, contrary to the often vocal protestations of actors concerning their ‘empowerment’ continues to encourage behaviours that reinforce domination. Having been instructed on how to behave, having absorbed into the body the ways of knowing and responding in order to gain acceptance and approval, the trained actor requires a dominant other (an agent, director, producer, critic, audience) to approve of their actions and is condemned to seek out and to recreate this relationship throughout their career. (Moore 2004: 71) Moore identifies some of the sociological implications of training and the power relationships in the working life of the actor. Training on a theatre model, with the teacher occupying the role of director, tends, as Moore points out, to lead the student actor to assume that any director that they encounter in the professional world will be able, qualified and comfortable occupying the role of teacher. In television, that is very rarely the case. In the contemporary environment, this begins to look like a weakness in the actor training model, regardless of the medium that the graduate actor works in. Not all professional theatre directors are disposed, or able, to take on the role of teacher, any more than is the typical contemporary television director. The key point for actor training is that the age of television has disempowered the actor to such an extent that someone, or something, else is almost always ‘dominant’, and that traditional training, combined with the realities of working life in the contemporary industrial context, reinforces and extends that tendency. The disempowerment of actors as creative beings, increased by the working practices of, and influenced by, television, has been addressed by Peter Reynolds in his 1998 essay ‘Actors and Television’. Reynolds gives examples of television

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documentaries about theatre in the 1990s, where the interviews with actors tend to frame the subjects as lightweight and un-intellectual (essentially infantilizing the actors), whereas directors are framed as serious and weighty. Actors are shown as doers and feelers: directors as thinkers and speakers. Reynolds also undertakes a close analysis of the 1993 BBC2 series Theatre School, a fly-onthe-wall style documentary about a London drama school, Drama Centre. In it he comes to similar conclusions as Moore about the relationship of teacher and student, and on the dichotomy between a theatre-dominated training and a television-dominated working environment: In the late 1990s, despite the virtual demise of regular theatre going in Britain, actors have never been more subject to public scrutiny. [. . .] The television industry is the largest employer of actors in Britain. (Reynolds 1998: 159) As Moore and Reynolds both point out, this represents a seismic shift in the role of being an actor, Reynolds going on to explicitly say that television radically alters what an actor, in fact, is. This is the main importance of the shift in dominance from theatre to television. In altering the dominant working practices of the professional actor, these wider cultural shifts challenge the whole nature of being a professional actor. For actor training, this implies that a re-assessment of training methods must be essential. This has more far-reaching implications for actor training than just the processes of acting. It also has huge implications for the way professional actors go about gaining employment. Traditionally, theatre production has often put a premium on actors being able to play a range of characters, and even a range of ages. Physical and vocal transformation have been seen as key skills for the professional actor. Modern screen-based media operate in a very different way. Laurence Olivier, who few would accuse of being the most understated and naturally filmic actor, in many ways embodies the more theatrical tradition to which I refer. Olivier put the difference between theatre and screen actors like this: I think personally that most film actors are interior people. It is necessary for them to be so truthful under the extraordinary microscopic perception of the camera; it’s very seldom that you get a film actor who dares to characterize very thickly. (Olivier in Cole and Chinoy [1949] 1970: 411) It is, of course, possible to quibble over Olivier’s terms. But the central point is that Olivier’s phrase ‘to characterize very thickly’ describes the difference between skills that have been traditionally valued in the theatre, but are rarely seen as useful (or even desirable) in a screen-based medium. This cultural shift has implications for the processes of acting, but it also means that the way actors are assessed by those seeking to employ them has

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changed. As an actor’s first want is to work, for financial and artistic reasons, this is another area that is crucial to the development of contemporary actor training. Reflecting on his own experiences as a recently graduated actor, Moore makes this point about the disconnection between traditional theatre-based training methods and the reality of television work, in a description of the casting process: My initial response to television and film auditions was to dismiss the casters I  was introduced to as incompetent. They appeared to be half-hearted, to know nothing about technique and the practices they encouraged actively denied the possibility of applying what I regarded to be the fundamentals of sound practice [. . .] [.] I failed to recognise that my approach was actively disadvantaging me. It was inappropriate to mediums in which rehearsal and gradual character development through experimentation are rarities rather than rules. Applying such an approach led to misunderstandings and unnecessary stress. (Moore 2004: 73) This is another important provocation for contemporary professional actor training. According to Moore (and his own personal reflections are backed up by a wider survey of recent graduates, conducted as research for his thesis), not only does theatre-based training not provide the specific skills and expertise required for the dominant employer (television), but a focus on the priorities appropriate to theatre work may actively disadvantage the trained actor, potentially over one with no training at all. If training is not just irrelevant but, in fact, counterproductive, then what future can it have? As Lissa Tyler Renaud puts it, from an American perspective: [. . .] Today, for many actors, [the] old world has been swallowed up in new technologies, media and globalization. [. . .] Having grown up with TV and the Movies, they may never have been in a theatre. Today, knowing what an actor does is as complex as making sense of our new world. (Renaud 2010: 79) As Renaud points out, this is a generational cultural shift. The rise to dominance of television from the postwar period has now been accelerated by new media, but that cultural shift has been clear for some time. As Michael Sanderson has argued: ‘The great engine of change has, of course, been television. Its impact has been crucial in reshaping and contracting the live theatre’ (1984: 279). This wider cultural shift has been noted, but little work has been done on the impact it has made on the training of professional actors for the industrial context. As American acting teacher Leigh Woods puts it: The fact that acting is taught, by and large, using methods friendly to, if not derivative of, the stage, lets us celebrate, and our students sample, the power

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of live performance. Our allegiance to the living theatre is expressed in the ways we organize our classes and in the priorities we assign there. (Woods 2010: 63) Moore reiterates this point by this statement, which echoes not only my own experience, but also that of many of both my contemporaries and my own recently graduated students: Very few in film or television comprehend or value contemporary acting technique. Conversely, few graduate actors feel ‘at home’ in the world of film and television. (Moore 2004: 79) There are a series of assumptions made within acting and professional actor training which have failed to fully recognize this shifting ground, and which are often revealed in the language used to describe the working environment of the contemporary actor. That language contains, to draw again on Raymond Williams’s term, evidence of the ‘residual’ culture, in this case that of theatre (as Woods points out). Actors, writers and, latterly, directors have used the word ‘theatre’ to describe not only the act of theatre, or the place where it occurs, but also a title for the business that they work in. Until the twentieth century, theatre was their only medium. There is no word yet that replaces what ‘theatre’ means, in this sense, for describing the career or business of the actor, and that encompasses all the other media in operation from the second half of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Although ‘entertainment industry’ or, perhaps, ‘show business’ may be used, these are terms that encompass the whole business rather than the specific parts that involve actors. In rather the same way, in the United States, ‘Hollywood’ is both a physical place and a name for the movie and television business, but as the latter it describes many functions that may have little to do with actors. So, particularly in the UK, ‘theatre’ is often used as a generic term for the business of being an actor, when it is really only one aspect of that business, and an increasingly minor one. An example of what I  mean by this is this quotation from the writer Roy Williams: When I started out in theatre, it was not as a writer, but as an actor. I was 18, playing the mouthy rioter on The Bill, or the suspected rapist on Crimewatch UK. (Williams 2009) Firstly, Roy Williams uses the word ‘theatre’, but then uses examples that are, in fact, television. When he says ‘theatre’, Roy Williams does not mean a theatre building, live performance or anything specifically related to a theatrical experience. He means the business of being an actor and, later, a writer. ‘Theatre’

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stands for ‘show business’ or the ‘entertainment industry’, whilst at the same time drawing on evaluative hierarchies that place the theatre above ‘show business’, the ‘entertainment industry’ and television. Those terms encompass many aspects of the contemporary ‘entertainment industry’, including new roles and priorities unnecessary (historically) in the theatre. Roy Williams chooses to use the word ‘theatre’ probably because he refers to the two traditional major, or perhaps only, creative roles that have historically existed within theatre, and, possibly, to link himself to a certain position within the existing evaluative hierarchies. But he is not, in fact, talking about theatre at all. There are residual implications in the word ‘theatre’, of the kind of working environment and experience akin to traditional theatre practices, when, in fact, Roy Williams is referring to the world of television. This specific example illustrates more general cultural shifts and an (as yet) unresolved slippage in the terms used to describe what an actor is; the slippage referred to by Reynolds and illuminated by Raymond Williams’s theory, and the difficulty that Renaud identifies in defining what an actor actually is today. Secondly, Roy Williams says he was 18 years old when he started as a professional actor. He could not, at that age, have had any recognized training, on a traditional drama school model, as he was too young. In other words, he did not need any of the skills that a theatre-based training traditionally values to make a successful start as a professional actor in the theatre, when theatre is, in fact, a virtual term that really means television and all other contemporary media. He was cast, as he puts it in his own terms, to a type that (at least to the people casting him) he physically represented. There are clear issues of politics here associated with the assumption that Roy Williams, as a young black man, is obvious casting for a ‘rioter’ and a ‘rapist’, but they are different arguments. For now, this assumption is another important aspect of variance in the priorities of theatre and screen: In television drama, viewers are offered a diet of actors who have usually been cast because of their physical suitability, especially facially, to fit the specifications demanded by the script or the casting director. Any ability that they might have physically to transform themselves into someone else is largely irrelevant [. . .] [.] This is especially so in an arena which employs the majority of British actors – low budget, mass-marketed soaps such as EastEnders, and drama series typified by The Bill. In these dramas, if the script requires an ‘ugly’, short, working-class young male, an actor who is ‘ugly’, short male and working-class is chosen to play him. (Reynolds 1998: 161) The crucial difference is that in actual theatre, and therefore inherent in contemporary actor training, the transformative skills to which Reynolds refers are vital; they are a part of the ‘fundamentals of sound practice’ to which Moore, in turn, refers. In the virtual ‘theatre’ to which Roy Williams refers, they become

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irrelevant. The word ‘theatre’, and the traditional skills of the theatre actor on which contemporary professional actor training is based, can therefore be seen to be problematic.1 However, it is the screen that is new, in relative terms. Moore points out the gap between this new world of professional work and the traditional theatre world of actor training; Reynolds points out some of the effects of television working practices on what it means to be an actor. As a counterpoint, the traditions of theatre acting undoubtedly contain many treasured skills that have been passed down from actor to actor through the centuries, which makes many acting teachers function as ‘loyalists to the stage’ (Woods 2010: 63). This is an oral tradition, linking back through theatre history, in professional actor training. For now, it is important to note that, for all the holes that can be picked in the way professional actor training has, perhaps, failed to adapt itself to the needs of the screen, it could equally well be argued that the screen is an inappropriate medium for acting. Moore argues that: The danger of moving towards pragmatism (in actor training), a move which may involve greater commercial orientation, is that we might lose altogether the deep experiential phenomenon (of actor training) and upset the delicate processes whereby the doxa shared by trained actors and their mentors are nurtured. (Moore 2004: 252) In part this is an articulation of the tension between experiential education and industry lead training. It is also an important balance to the provocations set up by Moore. Reynolds’s point about casting, which is essentially the same as Moore’s, is that there is a limited amount of skill (in the sense that traditional theatre-based professional actor training would define the transformative skills involved in acting) in successfully attaining paid work in television. Reynolds uses notions of the transformative powers of the actor, which in actor training would be characterized as the ability to play a range of characters, as an example of a skill not particularly relevant in the television casting process. To that one could add such sacred cows of theatre training as: voice production (not really necessary, or indeed useful, when a microphone is needed to record the voice anyway), movement training (if all the actor is required to do is move like him/herself and not to physically transform), classical texts (if all television requires is pieces written by contemporary writers),2 clowning, period dance and sword fighting. All of these areas have, to a greater or lesser extent, been seen in the past as key skills in the training of the professional actor. All these areas, some to a greater extent than others, could clearly be argued to be unnecessary in a dominant industrial environment where ‘the television industry is the largest employer of actors’ (Reynolds 1998: 159). All of these areas, it could be argued, to a greater or lesser extent represent the traditions of Western acting that go back hundreds of years and are essential, at least, for maintaining theatrical

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traditions. The risk of losing those skills, in a rush to service relatively new media, may well constrain the development of traditional training practices. All of this leads to the dilemma of what actor training is really for anymore. On the one hand, senior actors, whose entry into the profession was via what has now become the ‘residual’ culture, often bemoan the lack of traditional skills in young actors, most usually vocal skills. As Judi Dench puts it: ‘I think that drama schools don’t teach actors to project any more, and of course in a lot of theatres now you get a mic. We never did’ (Desert Island Discs 2015). At GSA, and at every other drama school I  know, voice projection is absolutely still taught. What barely exists anymore is the chance for young actors to practice that skill by working in theatres immediately after training, and the theatre spaces that students experience during training are often relatively small. It’s the equivalent of learning to drive in a car, and then being asked to drive an HGV with no further training. It is also a skill that, unfortunately, is no longer relevant to the majority of the work an actor is likely to be asked to do. However, there are few actors whose work I  personally respect more than Judi Dench’s, in any and all media. I share her disappointment that the skills that have been highly valued for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, are potentially being lost. In Leigh Woods’s terms, I still feel a massive ‘allegiance’ to the theatre. I could organize the course I run to spend more hours working on voice production. I could ensure that the students perform in the biggest possible venues during training. But to do so would push all the resources I have available to ways of working that will not give today’s young actor the chance to compete for the work that is really out there. Alongside our ‘allegiance’ to theatre, contemporary actor training therefore has to devote time, energy, imagination and resources to how we train young actors for the current dominant and most obviously predictable emergent cultures. Therein lies the real dilemma for actor training today: How do we adapt our long-standing approaches to prepare for this altered and altering world, without completely losing sight of the values of many hundreds of years of Western theatrical tradition? One of the reasons it has always been challenging to work as effectively on a screen acting–based approach is that it simply is much more difficult to do that. In our work at GSA, we can replicate the environment of a professional theatre company extremely closely. When we put student actors in a full production, typically in a final year, we can set up casting, rehearsal and production processes that very closely map onto the way things would be done professionally. When it comes to television and film, that is just not the case. So innovation is required. Innovation is also required in the ways we train actors to approach the task of gaining employment. Alongside the traditional skills that respected actors like Judi Dench hold dear, we also have to respond to the new cultural forces that have and will continue to revolutionize our theatrical world in ways unimaginable until very recently.

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At GSA, this has led to two key areas of innovation, both inspired by the question that Lissa Tyler Renaud raises about what it means to be an actor in this ‘new world’. We have been working on ways that actors can feel comfortable and, when the circumstances allow, in control of their work on camera, and on how the actor works with emergent technologies (and the implications of those technologies) to be best positioned to get work. One of the strengths of the trained actor is (or at least should be) a good understanding of narrative. At GSA, we have put an even greater focus on this aspect of training, building from storytelling projects, through devising work in small groups, to short film script writing and production. Actors have always been able to own their work in a theatrical setting by forming companies and producing that work themselves. One of the great opportunities of recent technological innovations is the increased affordability and functionality of cameras and editing processes. Now, for similar (or even less) investment to that needed to stage a fringe production, it is perfectly possible to make a short film, or potentially a feature or web-series. With a fairly modest amount of technical training, combined with a solid grasp of narrative structure, students and young actors can now create and control their own work on screen. There are then all the new and emerging platforms that can be used to distribute that work, via the internet, that can give direct access to audiences hitherto only available via broadcast television or major film distribution. The second approach is to the area identified by Paul Moore and Peter Reynolds – the changed nature of what is typically required of actors in this changed world. At GSA we call this work ‘Professional Development’ (not that I  make any claim to innovation with the title). What is clear when we bring current television actors in to teach masterclasses, is how closely related the skills involved in getting a job in screen media are to the skills needed to act in screen media. In other words, the actor more than ever has to be able to demonstrate what their eventual performance will be like in their audition, in great detail. For example, we currently spend a great deal of time in our Professional Development classes working on what is called ‘self-tape’. Although the traditional audition still exists, and further physical meetings are still very much the norm, much of the initial round of a casting process happens in this still quite new way. The real advent of self-tape has happened as the Smartphone has risen to dominance, because now it is possible for anyone to record themselves quickly and easily in High Definition, perform a simple edit and transfer a file via the internet in seconds to a casting director who may be on the other side of the world (or most likely on the West coast of North America). However, to prepare, record and disseminate a good quality self-tape still takes a lot of skill, both technical and artistic. It is helping young actors develop skills like these that is, in the emergent cultural environment, as important, or possibly more so, than teaching actors to reach the back row

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of a 1,000+ seat theatre, however much Judi Dench, many others, and I might wish it were not so. Just as the culture of television itself is continually evolving, so is the nature of being an actor. Television rose to a position of dominance in the life of the professional actor in the last part of the twentieth century. But as the twenty-first century unfolds, new technologies are emerging that challenge the nature of television, and the nature of what it means to be an actor on screen. The relationship of the actor to the camera is broadly the same in any media, and has now been for some time. It is the way that emerging technologies are providing new opportunities and challenges to the notion of what it means to be an actor to which professional actor training really needs to respond, to both prepare young actors for the world as it is, and for the world that is yet to emerge. It is a truly exciting time to be working on the nature of acting and the way stories are communicated to audiences.

Notes 1 As a further complication it should be noted that Roy Williams’s subsequent career as a writer has been largely in the theatre, by which I do mean the actual ‘theatre’. 2 ‘Costume dramas’ may be set in a historical period and, perhaps, based on a novel written some time ago, but a contemporary writer will have written the screenplay, using language likely to be made more accessible to the audience.

References Cole, T. and H. Krich Chinoy (eds) ([1949] 1970), Actors on Acting: The Theories, Techniques and Practices of the Great Actors of All Times as Told in Their Own Words, New York: Crown. Desert Island Discs (2015), [Radio programme], BBC Radio 4, 25 September. Moore, P. (2004), ‘Longing to Belong: Trained Actors’ Attempts to Enter the Profession’, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, Australia. Pearson, R. (2010), ‘The Multiple Determinants of Television Acting’, in C. Cornea (ed.), Genre and Performance: Film and Television, 166–83, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Renaud, L. (2010), ‘Training Artists or Consumers? Commentary on American Actor Training’, in E. Margolis and L. Renaud (eds), The Politics of American Actor Training, 76–93, London: Routledge. Reynolds, P. (1998), ‘Actors and Television’, in J. Ridgman (ed.) Boxed Sets: Television Representations of Theatre, 159–72, Luton: Luton University Press. Sanderson, M. (1984), From Irving to Olivier: A Social History of the Acting Profession 1880–1983, London: Athlone Press. Theatre School (1993), [TV programme] BBC2, 14 November–5 December. The South Bank Show (1998), [TV programme] ITV, 15 March.

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Williams, R. (1977), Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, R. (2009), ‘Black Theatre’s Big Breakout’, The Guardian, 28 September. http:// www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/sep/27/black-theatre-roy-williams (accessed 23 August 2016). Woods, L. (2010), ‘Degrees of Choice’, in E. Margolis and L. Renaud (eds), The Politics of American Actor Training, 62–75, London: Routledge.

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9 ACCENT ON TALENT: THE VALORIZATION OF BRITISH ACTORS ON AMERICAN QUALITY TELEVISION Christine Becker

A comedic YouTube video titled ‘All Good TV Is Actually British’ (Slacktory 2013) presents an American querying a Briton about why there are so many British actors on American TV shows. The latter proposes that you can’t make television without a Brit, so the former challenges that premise by trying to name American shows without a British actor. He fails repeatedly until they both agree that Breaking Bad (AMC 2008–13) lacks a British actor. But Breaking Bad did have British representation; Scottish actress Laura Fraser played the American Lydia in the show’s final two seasons. The trend of British actors appearing on American TV has become so pervasive that even when you’re looking  – and listening – for it, you can still miss it. In fact, nearly every American Quality Drama series features a British actor, often one masquerading as an American, and this circumstance calls for further analysis. The assumption that all good TV is actually British contains a related belief that all good actors are actually British, and the prevalence of this attitude in the United States plays into larger debates about cultural legitimation that influence the casting, marketing and reception of these series and their stars. This legitimation also has consequences for representational and identity issues. The pair in the YouTube video ends up naming twelve British men performing on US TV, but only two women. As Simone Knox establishes elsewhere in this collection, there is a burgeoning flow of performers from the UK to the United States today, but it is important to note additionally that the majority making this move are men. While Knox’s chapter explores the labour issues underlying the westward flow, this chapter will analyse the cultural rhetoric offered by journalistic coverage that helps to perpetuate the familiar axiom that British television actors are more talented and better trained than

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their American counterparts and thus better suited to adapt to the challenges of American Quality Drama. In doing so, the essay will shed light on how an actor’s star image can be framed by broader cultural suppositions that reach well beyond that person’s individual skills and in ways that can perpetuate gender inequality in television.

Framing the trend Despite their Breaking Bad error, the stars of ‘All Good TV Is Actually British’ are otherwise accurate in their perception that the 2000s brought a noticeable rise in the number of British actors on American television, and journalists have taken note. The Guardian’s Vanessa Thorpe (2015) identified 2011 as the year that the entertainment press began to cover this as a verifiable phenomenon and included a repeatedly cited statistic that the US Department of Homeland Security reported a 500  per cent rise in visas approved for British actors and directors to work in the United States in 2014 (Llewellyn-Smith 2015). Thorpe noted in 2015 that this was finally viewed stateside as a problem that needed to be addressed:  ‘[in  2011] the trend was initially dismissed as a novelty:  an interesting phase that would pass, rather than as a threat. But this summer actors and directors are calling for action to mobilise American drama teachers and schools to counter it.’ The impression of an invasion – the British are coming! – is rife, and a theme of British superiority is pervasive throughout this discourse. That theme is oriented not only around notions of acting skill, which will be discussed later in this chapter, but also around the explanations for why British actors are travelling across the ocean in such numbers in the first place. Notably, this trend is almost entirely contained within drama, despite Britain’s incredibly rich comedic legacy. The explanation for this is likely based in culture, with comedy being more culturally specific and tied to nationally specific language, mannerisms and timing and thus limiting the fit of a foreign presence. Linguistic challenges can also come into play when a British actor plays American, and this could pose particular obstacles for comedic performance. For instance, Matthew Rhys, the Welsh star of the FX drama The Americans (2013–), insists that getting an American accent right isn’t just about mimicking a vocal sound, it’s also about ‘the right rhythm and right cadence’ (Carter 2014), and this presumably is more challenging in comedy, where the humour in the dialogue is heavily reliant upon precise changes in rhythm and cadence. Similarly, English actor Hugh Dancy notes that he could not improvise on Hannibal (NBC 2013–15), not just because showrunner Bryan Fuller wouldn’t allow for it, but also because he needed to thoroughly practice the lines he was given in an American accent before delivering them (SAG-AFTRA Foundation 2014). The more spontaneous nature of comedy would presumably make that a

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prohibitive challenge. Regardless of the catalysts, dramatic acting tends to garner greater critical praise and artistic scrutiny than comedic acting, resulting in a frequent focus in the press on how actors like Dancy and Rhys are seeking to tackle the demands of American drama. Whether it’s causation or merely correlation, it is also the case that the volume of television drama has expanded exponentially, more so than comedy, on American television over the last decade, thanks to the expansion of distribution outlets and scripted programming aims (Knox 2013). FX Networks’ CEO John Landgraf coined the phrase ‘peak TV’ to describe the growth of scripted content and offered staggering statistics from FX’s research team:  American television aired 412 scripted television series in 2015, a jump of 94 per cent from 2009 and 174 per cent for basic cable alone (Goldberg 2016a). There are thus simply more roles to fill in the peak TV era, and thus more work to be found for all actors than ever before. While FX’s figures include comedies, it is apparent that the biggest growth has come in dramas, as they draw the critical attention so many cable outlets rely upon to cut through peak TV’s clutter and serve channel branding and carriage fee-value needs (Goldberg 2016a). Such financial value has spread around the world, as high-end drama is now at premium value on the international market. The BBC’s former controller of drama Polly Hill even called this a ‘perfect storm’ in 2015, exclaiming, ‘In all the years I’ve been working in drama I don’t think there been a time where there’s been such an incredible appetite for it’ (Creamer 2015). Studios and production companies have taken advantage of this transnational explosion by fostering global co-productions, including numerous US–UK partnerships that draw on both regions’ talent (Burt 2016; Hopewell and Keslassy 2015). Elke Weissmann argues that US producers recognize the importance of the UK market and, accordingly, ‘it makes sense to include UK actors to offer a local flavour to audiences in the UK’ (2012: 171). American Quality Drama has also expanded its formats beyond the usual 13or 22-episode run with the rise of the so-called ‘limited series’, from miniseries to season anthologies, which have come to dominate critics’ Top Ten lists and revolutionize the Emmy Awards (Lowry 2016). Such short-run drama series have long been common in the UK, so this new rise in the United States allows British actors to situate themselves in a familiar production model but one that is newly prestigious in the United States. At the same time as the United States has seen such expansion in television programming, the UK has witnessed contraction, particularly as the BBC deals with major budget cuts. Knox (2013) also notes, ‘[W]ith the rise of light entertainment and (structured) reality formats, the number of original drama productions has decreased in recent decades. Not only are there fewer dramatic roles, but there is also more competition for them since the British actor union Equity was forced to discontinue as a closed shop in the 1990s.’ British actors have long been able to take advantage of the scheduling

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flexibility enabled by short-run series, and it has even become essential for them to support themselves financially by doing work in multiple media and beyond the UK’s borders. However, this is usually framed in the entertainment press as less driven by money and more so by an altruistic desire to work regularly and find good roles. BuzzFeed highlighted such a perspective from British film actor Naomie Harris, who explained the westward flow of Black British actors thusly: I think it’s quite simple, really, and that’s work. I think there just isn’t enough work in England to sustain a career long term, unless you want to do one of the British soaps and stay on that. We have to travel across to the States, because the States has such a much bigger market; it’s a much bigger industry over there and therefore there are a lot more roles for us. (Carter 2015) The mention of the culturally derided soap opera genre here is notable. The impression is that actors who want to find genuinely challenging work, and not just coast by on easy soap offerings, have to head to America. It is the case that a non-US actor seeking such work must obtain not just a role but also legal immigrant status. As Simone Knox’s discussion of the labour issues behind the flow of British actors into the United States in this collection emphasizes, the power of such immigration policy must be considered, and from a cultural perspective, the language used to define this status is notable. For a foreign actor to legally work in the United States, he or she must have a Green Card or an O-1 visa. The visa is tied to the specific film or TV project and cannot be received without a job offer in hand. Approval for the visa requires the applicant to be designated as a person of extraordinary ability and as the best or even the only person for the particular job, such that they are not preventing a similarly qualified American from working. Proof of that status is secured with a letter from a peer group considered to have expertise in the relevant area, and for actors, that is the SAG-AFTRA union (Guillergan n.d.). SAG-AFTRA’s website (n.d.) instructs, ‘The visa application specifically requires the qualified petitioner (the performer’s representative) to contact the labour union with jurisdiction over the work at issue, and seek an advisory opinion from the union on whether the visa should be granted.’ SAG-AFTRA representatives then must judge if the actor has demonstrated in their previous work ‘extraordinary achievement evidenced by a degree of skill and recognition significantly above that ordinarily encountered to the extent the person is recognized as outstanding, notable or leading in the motion picture and/or television field’ (SAG-AFTRA n.d.). Factors such as previous leading roles, awards, critics’ reviews and high salary status in their home countries will be weighed (USCIS 2015). One can see how this would dictate the hiring of non-US actors in lead roles, rather than supporting roles, both because they are usually experienced actors already and also because it is difficult to prove that no American actor would be

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similarly fit for a background part. But considering this circumstance alongside a list of British actors who have filled lead roles on American Quality Dramas over the last five years raises questions due to the fact that there are over twice as many men as women on the list. Why is that fewer British women than men are able to take advantage of these opportunities? If the television industry wants to prove a British actor is of extraordinary ability compared to American peers, whether for immigration or marketing purposes, on what basis is this rhetoric supported, and does it inevitably have gender implications?

Extraordinary ability, dramatic legitimacy, gender identity While the SAG-AFTRA recommendation letter supplies the official evidence for the O-1 visa approval, one could also just consult journalistic coverage of British actors on American television to back the argument that British actors have ‘a degree of skill and recognition significantly above that ordinarily encountered’ and, therefore, deserve parts over them. Of course, this rhetoric is provided in television coverage not for labour support but to explain casting choices, offer judgements about television quality and underscore the prestige of particular dramas, which reiterates its utility for networks, studios and production companies participating in this trend. As Simone Knox’s chapter explains, a reason frequently offered in the press for hiring a British actor is that American audiences usually aren’t familiar with them; therefore, these stars offer fresh, distinctive faces. Scholar Christopher Holliday writes: ‘The “un-starry” nature of UK actors abroad makes them better suited to ensemble programmes, with their obscurity preserving an authenticity for viewers who do not identify them through the prism of previous characters’ (2015: 64). While there are numerous examples of British actors on broadcast network TV, Knox (2013) smartly argues that non-US actors can provide a crucial asset to the premium cable drama in particular: ‘That the quality status of cable shows on HBO and Showtime et cetera is partly constructed around the notion of distinction, of being new, different and fresh is significant here, as the casting of unknown British actors works well in this regard.’ The casting director for the HBO miniseries Generation Kill (2008) echoed this in telling BBC News Magazine of the series producers who sought out non-American actors for a key part ultimately played by Alexander Skarsgård: ‘They didn’t actually want known actors in the role because it would have broken the authenticity’ (Spencer 2010). This also illustrates Knox’s claim in this collection that such casting can draw praise for being particularly imaginative and risk-taking. Even in cases where an audience is likely to recognize the pre-existing persona of an actor, including his British identity – Martin Freeman in FX’s Fargo (2014–), for

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instance  – characteristics of difference still resonate, particularly because so many of these actors play Americans and adopt American accents, placing them in an alternate performative identity. Fargo’s creator Noah Hawley said of casting Freeman as a first season lead, ‘The fact that Martin was from England set him apart and set him outside, which is his character. It’s not Method, but it is a method’ (Grosz 2010). In turn, British actors looking for work to burnish their images find the prestige drama a favourable space. As Knox describes: [T]he history, glamour and status of Hollywood have always held an attraction for British actors, tempting them with assumed economic and profile-raising benefits. And with US television drama’s shift of recent years towards discourses of quality, the prospect of a dramatic role in an acclaimed production by the likes of HBO has certainly only furthered this attraction, and done much to resolve traditional hesitations about working for the medium of television. (Knox 2013) Indeed, in much the same way that Quality Drama is discursively framed as superior TV and ostensibly geared towards those with high-culture tastes, British actors are framed as inherently appropriate for prestige drama. This fits within a much larger context than just acting, as British culture in general has long been positioned within the United States as elite and superior to American culture. In her book Global Television, Barbara Selznick (2008) discusses heritage drama and the so-called mod or Cool Britannia movement and argues that while those two import trends embody different brands, one historical and traditional in nature and the other modern and anti-authoritarian, both connote intelligence, high quality and superiority when posed against American popular culture. Selznick uses as her case study examples Pride and Prejudice (BBC One 1995) and Cracker (ITV 1993–2006), and more recent counterparts, such as Downton Abbey (ITV 2010–15) and Luther (BBC One 2010–15), also come to mind. Those shows’ US outlets, PBS and BBC America, respectively, draw from high-culture brand elements in marketing each series. British actor imports are similarly framed in publicity about their appearances in US shows, particularly in quality and prestige dramas, thereby underscoring the impression of cultural superiority that these programmes are striving to perpetuate. For instance, in a TV Guide article entitled ‘Why Foreign Actors Are Taking Over American TV’, author Ileane Rudolph (2013) writes that the logic behind this trend is obvious:  ‘For producers doing the hiring, they’re simply looking for the strongest talent.’ She then offers a quote from Bates Motel (A&E 2013–) executive producer Carlton Cuse on casting English actor Freddie Highmore as Norman Bates: ‘We looked at a lot of actors, but the truth is, there currently seems to be a big gulf between . . . British actors and American actors. The

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American actors just don’t seem as well trained or as deep and complex.’ The notion of British culture as more refined and British actors as more serious about their craft than their American counterparts also surfaces frequently. In a BBC News Magazine article, English actor Dominic West tries to explain why actors from his country got prominent roles in HBO’s pre-eminent prestige drama, The Wire (HBO 2002–8): In The Wire, there was no star actor. It was an ensemble serving the writing, and maybe in America agents have become more involved in trying to make a star in whoever is acting in it. [Among British actors] there’s maybe a readiness to be part of an ensemble which goes slightly against the grain of how Americans view celebrity and show business. (Spencer 2010) The platitude that British actors serve American Quality Drama best because they’re about work and not fame pervades countless publicity articles, as writers, producers, actors and casting directors alike all offer variations on it. Sony Pictures TV casting director Dawn Steinberg closed her thought on why she prefers to look in London for network actors with the comment, ‘We need good actors; it’s not going to be the models who didn’t train’ (Goldberg 2016b). The pervasive insistence on superior British acting training glosses over examples like Hannibal’s Hugh Dancy, who did not attend a traditional acting school. But whether it is true or not is beside the point, because with such inescapable discussions, the discourse of legitimization that rhetorically sets apart the prestige drama from ‘ordinary’ drama similarly provides a baseline for the justification of British actors on American television. Accordingly, the superiority of British actor training described in these articles is always framed as a difference between the shallow pursuit of celebrity in the United States and the dedicated quest for mastery of the craft in the UK. In a Telegraph article about the success of British actresses on US TV, English casting director Lucinda Syson explains that ‘British drama schools are very nose-tothe-grindstone. The majority of British actors have worked bloody hard and have a lot of theatrical background, which makes them very unstarry and grounded’ (Llewellyn-Smith 2015). A British agent quoted in the same article is even more dismissive of American talent and from a gendered perspective: ‘There are an awful lot of good US actresses but there is also a huge number of small-town dimwit former beauty queens who take the bus to Los Angeles, get their teeth, t*** and lips done within half an hour of arriving and think that’s what it takes to be the next Meryl Streep’ (Llewellyn-Smith 2015). Such a focus on looks rather than talent is constantly evoked, as is a comparison to reality TV, as it is often mentioned that US actors believe they can get instant fame without having to hone their talents, whereas British actors undergo years of training before even embarking on a career (see Lebrecque 2015). Scholar Paul Booth voices the

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resulting fallacy concisely: ‘The American actor strives for celebrity; the British actor strives for authenticity’ (Teng 2015). Given the similarly fallacious typical association of femininity with facile celebrity and masculinity with multifaceted authenticity, one can perceive a gender imbalance in the praise and scorn invoked by these observations. Authenticity is also evoked in regard to the dominance of theatre as a training ground for British actors, which builds upon the impression of the cultural superiority of stage acting over television. The above-cited Telegraph article touts the challenge of live acting and of playing prestigious parts like Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra at the National Theatre compared to the ease of acting on US television and playing the same rote part for years (Spencer 2010). Casting director Lucinda Syson (2015) similarly offers, ‘There’s no “celebrity” in theatre, so [British actors] put their heads down, work hard and don’t have huge expectations. Having to do Shakespeare and working their way through theatre pieces is really good training, and it gives them the foundations.’ UK acting training is also lauded as better preparing British actors for working in complex television drama because of its approaches to character development. Edward Kemp, director of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, explained to The Telegraph that British actors are taught to adjust one’s voice and posture to roles, in contrast to the American Method model of adapting a role to one’s personal experiences (Llewellyn-Smith 2015). Similarly, British theatre director and principal of LAMDA, Joanna Read, explained to Entertainment Weekly that British actors have an edge over Americans due to ‘how we ask them to think about characters, how we ask them to be imaginative, and to change themselves. Our training will ask an actor to really play against type at times, to play a role that they wouldn’t necessarily be cast in the profession, in order to work out and transform how they move towards that character. It’s almost like putting on a second skin’ (Lebrecque 2015). These approaches to characterization, however short and simplistic these references may be, bring to mind scholar Barry King’s (1991) foundational impersonation/personification designation, where impersonation describes roles for which an actor is thought to transform personal qualities to fit a character’s difference, whereas with personification the actor maintains the continuity of a persona, such as his or her established star image, across characters. Though this is not a mutually exclusive binary in practice, and an actor’s training will include a range of approaches which problematize this distinction, it is often treated as such in critical appreciation, as impersonation becomes valued over personification as exhibiting genuine acting skill. This distinction is quite apparent in the journalistic discourse under study here, and it meshes well with American Quality Drama rhetoric that finds cultural value in complexity of character. This factors in twofold when the British actor is playing an American and can display a complexity of accent. In fact, many of the British actors making

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the transatlantic crossover are playing American characters and thus shrouding their national identity behind American accents. Simone Knox (2013) notes that adapting to the accent widens up the range of characters that British actors can play, as they’re not locked into the well-spoken villain or suave gentleman role that has historically been their assigned stereotype thanks to the class connotations tied to British accents. In turn, this only enhances assumptions about the superiority of British acting talent. Journalistic coverage poses British actors as better equipped to adopt American accents than would be the reverse for American actors. It’s often observed that British youth grow up with American accents surrounding them through TV and film screens on a regular basis, thus allowing them to acclimate to it easier than an American actor might to a British accent (see Syson 2015). Sarah Chalcroft, a British theatre actor living in the United States, explained to the Chicago Tribune, ‘We are constantly exposed to [the American accent] in the media. If you go to the cinema, there’s probably an 80 percent chance that you’re going see an American film’ (Brotman 2015). However, lest this imply that British actors don’t work hard to earn their way into American acting jobs, the training they undergo to perfect American accent is stressed even more. Accent training is described as a key part of the rigorous acting school programmes discussed earlier, especially due to how varied accents are across the UK and by extension the characters an actor might be asked to play (Hewett 2015). Actor Alan Cumming told NPR he was instructed at the start of drama school that he would have to learn to perform with a variety of accents if he had any hope of having a productive screen acting career beyond Scotland (Talk of the Nation 2011). And this is frequently framed as very dedicated work. In a Guardian article characterizing British and Irish actors as having stormed Hollywood thanks to learning American accents, Cecilie O’Reilly, a voice training coordinator for Columbia College Chicago, notes that it’s tricky for British actors to master the rhotic ‘r’ sound of American English and variations on regional accents, but they are always ‘happy to switch vocal techniques and are prepared to study’ (Thorpe 2015). Sarah Chalcroft told the Tribune about the pure dedication of British actors: ‘They come from a tradition of vocal skill and training. The Brits are steeped in a tradition, of many, many years of having the appreciation of the variations on their speech. And there is a pride in it’ (Brotman 2015). Inevitably tying this back to prestigious theatre acting, RADA director Edward Kemp told The Telegraph, I am often struck by the ability of British-trained actors to make the ludicrous lines in space movies – ‘Moving to warp factor nine in sector z 3337’ – sound like they really know what they’re talking about. I suspect this may be an interesting side effect of fretting over the more obscure lines of Shakespeare and Restoration comedy. (Llewellyn-Smith 2015)

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While British actors adopting the American accent draw such impersonationbased praise from critics, it is intriguing how often this is described not just in terms of learning an American accent but more so of hiding or cloaking a native one, as if such performance is more about suppression than either impersonation or personification. For instance, actor Matthew Rhys was praised on a Paley Center discussion panel for his ability to ‘mask’ his accent for American work. This implies that there’s an extra layer of skill to a good performance, one that American actors don’t have to work through, which thus offers another avenue for lauding British acting talent. Of course, not all viewers know when an accent is being masked. Surely some fans of The Americans still presume Rhys was born in the States. But prestige drama courts those who receive gratification from consuming extratextual material about a series, as such inside knowledge offers further cultural capital. Therefore, casting a British actor to play an American can potentially foster the deeper connection with a show that has become an imperative part of the prestige drama’s allure. This can also enhance the meanings spectators take away from characters in complex dramas, as Christopher Holliday explores in his 2015 article, ‘The Accented American: The New Voices of British Stardom on US Television’. Holliday takes note of the praise British actors have accrued for their ability to play American characters on television in recent years, and he connects this with Quality TV discourse: The screen presence of British actors on long-form American television carries the weight of their elite training and functions as a small-screen outlet for their prestigious acting talents. The critical discourses mobilised around British actors and their aptitude for quality acting are supplemented by the very act of affecting an accent within a screen performance. (2015: 66) Holliday also highlights the significance of ‘the heightened levels of curiosity surrounding the negotiation of off-screen Britishness with on-screen Americanness’, as this results in subtexts of masked foreignness and identity rupture. Given that so many prestige drama protagonists themselves are steeped in complex identity issues and are often hiding crucial secrets from others, this British-as-American duality plays perfectly into the larger discourse surrounding their shows. Holliday’s primary example is English actor Damian Lewis’s performance as Homeland’s (Showtime 2011–) Brody, an American soldier with ambiguous national allegiances, and Holliday explores how Lewis’s accented performance of the secretive Brody underscores the profound cultural anxieties that the series explores: ‘Such ambiguity around the conflicted Brody both hinges upon, and is amplified by, extra-textual discourses of the actor’s real-life foreignness’ (2015: 77). Holliday also thereby stresses how crucial vocal performance is to a complete understanding of character and portrayal: ‘Identity is exchanged

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through speech, and the voice is both shifting and shifty, not a true marker of nationality but primed to be falsified and faked at the drop of a vowel’ (2015: 78). Yet even acknowledging such variability in character identity, it is striking how much actor identity is still cemented, especially in terms of class and gender and in a way that favours men in the crossover trend in an especially substantial way in Quality Drama. It’s been much observed that prestige drama (as opposed to melodrama) leans towards more masculine themes and thus more featured roles for men (see Newman and Levine 2011). So it stands to reason that despite the expanded number of roles in the peak TV era overall, there are fewer available for women, British or otherwise. There is also a higher premium placed on physical attractiveness in American TV compared to British TV, especially for women, perhaps making British actresses less sought out for stateside work than their male counterparts, particularly among middle-aged actors most appropriately matched to Quality Drama roles.1 Gender also clearly intersects with class here. American Quality Drama might be middlebrow entertainment in terms of broader cultural taste hierarchies, but these series are the upper-class elite of scripted television, and so much of the journalistic discourse analysed throughout this chapter is steeped in class-based and masculine rhetoric. Actresses are more readily associated in the press with the banality of celebrity and physical beauty than with the craftsmanship of acting, and this could presumably undercut their utility for Quality TV marketing value. Class and acting have also become intertwined in the UK amidst concerns that the acting profession has become dominated by posh elites trained at exclusive schools like Eton and Harrow, thereby cleaving a class divide where only the rich can afford to make an acting career today (Rahman 2015; Rawlinson 2015). One could see this impacting the transatlantic crossover flow, as well, especially given the twinned pressures of needing to prove extraordinary ability for the O-1 visa and to fit with Quality TV’s discursive demands. With such circumstances, we see that the correlation between American Quality Drama and acting opportunities goes well beyond marketing consequences and raises crucial identity and representational issues. We can thus see how performance, character and identity are fused tightly with cultural legitimation in this transatlantic trend. British actors on American TV, especially those adopting an American accent, play into the Quality TV trope that there is more to be mined from these screen images than just what is given on screen, more than just meets the eye and greets the ear. The male-dominated facet of this casting trend then is only further frustrating, because it perpetuates the troubling notion that this masculinized fare is more worthy of extensive exploration and intellectual appreciation than feminized forms of drama. It also only adds to the challenges that women must face in sustaining television acting careers that match the range and depth offered to men, both in the United

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States and the UK. Maybe all good TV is indeed British; it’s just too bad it’s so dominated by blokes.

Note 1 There seem to be many more Australian actresses on American TV than British ones. There is no space in this chapter to explore reasons why, but they may be rooted in issues of culture, accent, industry and experience.

References Brotman, B. (2015), ‘Blown Away by English Actors with American Accents’, Chicago Tribune, 14 June. Available online: http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/ columnists/ct-perfect-accents-brotman-met-0615-20150615-column.html (accessed 8 May 2016). Burt, K. (2016), ‘Are International Co-Productions the Future of TV Drama?’ Den of Geek, 23 April. Available online: http://www.denofgeek.us/tv/the-night-manager/ 253935/are-international-co-productions-the-future-of-tv-drama (accessed 8 May 2016). Carter, K. (2015), ‘The Rise of the Black British Actor in America’, BuzzFeed, 5 January. Available online: http://www.buzzfeed.com/kelleylcarter/the-rise-of-the-black-britishactor-in-america (accessed 8 May 2016). Carter, L. (2014), ‘Q & A: Matthew Rhys on “The Americans”, Accents and Shooting During Snowmageddon’, Daily Actor, 23 May. Available online: http://www.dailyactor. com/interview/matthew-rhys-the-americans-interview. Creamer, J. (2015), ‘The Televisual Drama Report’, Televisual, 7 December. Available online: http://www.televisual.com/blog-detail/The-Televisual-Drama-Report_bid-838.html. Goldberg, L. (2016a), ‘Proof of “Too Much TV”? The Full List of 1,400-Plus Primetime Series That Aired Last Year’, The Hollywood Reporter, 27 January. Available online: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/proof-tv-full-list-1400–859851. Goldberg, L. (2016b), ‘TV Pilot Season: 6 Casting Directors Talk Diversity Push and Stars They Couldn’t Get’, The Hollywood Reporter, 17 March. Available online: http://www. hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/tv-pilot-season-6-casting-875367. Grosz, C. (2010), ‘Why Brits Like Hugh Dancy and Matthew Rhys Are Taking Over American TV’, Variety, 4 June. Available online: http://variety.com/2014/tv/features/ hugh-dancy-matthew-rhys-brits-taking-over-american-tv-1201211388. Guillergan, E. (n.d.), ‘O-1 Visa as an Alien of Extraordinary Ability’, Know Your Visa. Available online: http://www.knowyourvisa.com/O1_visa.html. Hewett, R. (2015), ‘The Changing Determinants of UK Television Acting’, Critical Studies in Television, 10 (1): 73–90. Holliday, C. (2015), ‘The Accented American: The New Voices of British Stardom on US Television’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 12 (1): 63–82. Hopewell, J. and E. Keslassy (2015), ‘Mipcom: TV World Embraces Content Revolution’, Variety, 8 October. Available online: http://variety.com/2015/tv/markets-festivals/ mipcom-2015-1201613431-1201613431.

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King, B. (1991), ‘Articulating Stardom’, in C. Gledhill (ed.), Stardom: Industry of Desire, 167–82, London and New York: Routledge. Knox, S. (2013), ‘Reflections on Actors: British Actors in Contemporary US Film and Television’, Flow: A Critical Forum on Media and Culture, 19 (3). Available online: http://www.flowjournal.org/2013/11/reflections-on-actors. Lebrecque, J. (2015), ‘What Does the Latest British Invasion Say about the State of American Acting?’ Entertainment Weekly, 28 January. Available online: http://www. ew.com/article/2015/01/28/selma-british-actors. Llewellyn-Smith, J. (2015), ‘Why British Actresses Get Top Billing in US TV’, The Telegraph, 4 April. Available online: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/ 11514768/Why-British-actresses-get-top-billing-in-US-TV.html. Lowry, B. (2016), ‘Are Limited Series Rewriting the Rules for TV Drama?’ Variety, 4 February. Available online: http://variety.com/2016/voices/columns/ limited-series-tv-drama-true-detective-american-horror-story-1201696159. Newman, M. and E. Levine (2011), Legitimating Television, New York: Routledge. Obenson, T. (2015), ‘What to Make of Buzzfeed’s “Rise of the Black British Actor in America” Piece . . .’, IndieWire, 7 January. Available online: http://blogs.indiewire. com/shadowandact/what-to-make-of-buzzfeeds-rise-of-the-black-british-actor-inamerica-piece-20150107. Paley Center for Media (2007), ‘Brothers & Sisters – Matthew Rhys’ British Accent’, YouTube, 27 May. Available online: https://youtu.be/c5XnwGg8qlQ. Rahman, A. (2015), ‘James McAvoy: Dominance of Rich-Kid Actors in the UK Is “Damaging for Society” ’, The Hollywood Reporter, 10 February. Available online: http:// www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/james-mcavoy-dominance-rich-kid-772139. Rawlinson, K. (2015), ‘Lack of Working Class Actors Is Changing What Gets Made, Says Jimmy McGovern’, The Guardian, 24 February. Available online: http://www.theguardian. com/media/2015/feb/24/posh-actors-working-class-drama-jimmy-mcgovern. Rudolph, I. (2013), ‘Why Foreign Actors Are Taking Over American TV’, TV Guide, 31 January. Available online: http://www.tvguide.com/news/ foreign-actors-american-tv-1060158. SAG-AFTRA (n.d.), ‘O-1 and P Visa Forms and Letters’, SAG-AFTRA. Available online: http://www.sagaftra.org/union-info/o-1-visa-letters/ o-1-and-p-visa-forms-and-letters. SAG-AFTRA Foundation (2014), ‘Conversations with Hugh Dancy of Hannibal’, YouTube, 29 April. Available at: https://youtu.be/NRKpLW3N8mw. Selznick, B. (2008), Global Television: Co-Producing Culture, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Slacktory (2013), ‘All Good TV Is Actually British’, YouTube, 3 April. Available at: https:// youtu.be/4Xh--ce0-4U (accessed 8 May 2016). Spencer, C. (2010), ‘Why Are British Actors Playing Americans?’ BBC News Magazine, 27 April. Available online: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8643941.stm. Syson, L. (2015), ‘From Christian Bale to Benedict Cumberbatch: Why British Actors Nab So Many American Roles’, The Hollywood Reporter, 25 March. Available online: http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ christian-bale-benedict-cumberbatch-why-783860. Talk of the Nation (2011), ‘Alan Cumming: A Great Fit for The Good Wife’, NPR, 11 October. Available online: http://www.npr.org/2011/10/11/141240655/ good-wife-s-alan-cumming-on-his-career-in-acting.

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Teng, E. (2015), ‘If You Want to Age Gracefully in the Movies, You’d Better Be British’, New Republic, 11 March. Available online: https://newrepublic.com/article/121267/ british-actors-and-rise-senior-cinema. Thorpe, V. (2015), ‘The Talent, the Twang: How the Brits and Irish Stormed Hollywood’, The Guardian, 5 July. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jul/05/ us-rallies-to-stop-uk-taking-hollywood-by-storm. USCIS (2015), ‘O-1 Visa: Individuals with Extraordinary Ability or Achievement’, USCIS. gov, 14 September. Available online: https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/ temporary-workers/o-1-visa-individuals-extraordinary-ability-or-achievement. Weissmann, E. (2012), Transnational Television Drama: Special Relations and Mutual Influence between the US and UK, Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

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10 EXPLORING THE CASTING OF BRITISH AND IRISH ACTORS IN CONTEMPORARY US TELEVISION AND FILM Simone Knox

From Josh Bowman, Liam Cunningham, Idris Elba, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, David Harewood, Kit Harington, Lena Heady, Hugh Laurie, Damian Lewis, Andrew Lincoln, Kelly McDonald, Iwan Rheon, David Tennant, to Ed Weeks and Dominic West  – the presence of British and Irish actors in contemporary US television drama is certainly noticeable, spanning different genres as well as network, cable and streaming television. Add to this such recent outings on the big screen as by Christian Bale, John Boyega, Kate Beckinsale, Henry Cavill, Daniel Day-Lewis, Andrew Garfield, Tom Holland and David Oyelowo, and it is clear that British and Irish actors have been achieving success in the United States in terms of both breadth and depth, with many securing prominent roles in high-profile productions. This transatlantic success is intriguing and attracting growing attention in press, fan and academic debates (Weissmann 2012: 170–2; Holliday 2015; Becker, elsewhere in this book; Knox and Cassidy forthcoming). Of course, the US creative industries have long made use of British/European acting and other creative labour. Drawn by Hollywood’s stature and glamour, British and Irish actors have been able to exploit their linguistic advantage over their continental competition since the coming of sound. As Babington has noted in relation to the deployment of British actors in Hollywood: While Hollywood also desired [continental] European stars, their more obvious difference made them more narrowly deployable and in smaller numbers.

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French stars could only be French, but British stars might be used in ways that accentuated their Britishness (usually Englishness), as with Herbert Marshall or David Niven, or – as has happened from Cary Grant to Minnie Driver and Gary Oldman, diminished it so that they pass, all, or some of the time, for Americans. (2001: 15) Part of a long trajectory, the contemporary influx of British and Irish actors in US productions is, like all transnational labour flows, subject to historical contingency, bearing out significant patterns and nuances. Certain patterns in Hollywood’s use of foreign labour have already been delineated in the existing literature: focused on directors, Petrie (1985) noted three key periods with a noticeable influx of foreign talent into Hollywood: the 1920s, marked by Hollywood’s fear of its European competition; the 1930s/1940s, when political refugees fled from the dangers in Europe; and the 1960s/1970s, when Hollywood was keen to lure talented figures away from revived European cinemas. The first two of these periods have been understood as key moments for the specific export of British acting talent to the United States: the 1920s and 1930s have received attention from Morley (2006), Russell Taylor (1983) and Street. The latter notes: ‘The economic problems of the British film industry in the 1920s made Hollywood an attractive place where many native actors tried their luck on the screen’ (2009: 160). Moreover, Glancy (1999) has discussed the Hollywood ‘British’ Film in the late 1930s and early 1940s, which provided notable employment opportunities for British actors. Considering and developing some of the directions for future research on émigré actors outlined by Polan (2002), this chapter will illuminate some of the significant patterns and nuances for the recent stateside move of British and Irish talent, which needs to be understood as another key historical moment of such acting labour flow. What distinguishes this present moment within the larger history of British and Irish actors in the United States is that the post-2000 period has seen a significant number of such actors being cast for high-profile roles in major US productions. In these, the actors in question utilize their less obvious difference and broader deployability that Babington (2001) noted, appearing at times in roles that draw on their Britishness/Irishness (e.g. Jonny Lee Miller in Elementary (CBS 2012–), Chris O’Dowd in Bridesmaids (2011)), but predominantly in roles that mask their origins (see also Holliday 2015). Part of a wider trajectory of ‘unmarked transnationalism’ (Hilmes 2012:  257), these actors do not merely (to recall Babington’s words) pass, all or some of the time, for Americans, but often play (albeit at times darkly) heroic characters and figures deeply resonant with the US popular imagination. These characters and figures include the doctor (Laurie, Kevin McKidd), cop (West), sheriff (Lincoln), CIA/FBI agent (Harewood, Jean-Baptiste), soldier/marine (Lewis), pastor (Christopher Eccleston) and superhero (Bale, Cavill, Garfield, Holland).

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They further include celebrated figures from US history, such as Martin Luther King, Jr (Oyelowo), Abraham Lincoln (Day-Lewis), plus a raft of US presidents in John Adams (HBO 2008) and Sons of Liberty (History 2015). The productions in which these actors play such roles are predominantly concerned with subject matters located within US contexts  – quite a difference from the days of the Hollywood ‘British’ Film.

A note on methodology and terminology This chapter will examine the casting of British and Irish actors for US productions from an industrial perspective that is interested in the lived experience of screen culture. Attending to the working environment of these actors on both sides of the Atlantic, I will explore how this casting has been negotiated by an interlinking complex of industry structures, practices and technological developments. Warner rightly points out that casting is important but highly underresearched, with ‘relatively little effort [having been expended by scholars] to penetrate beyond final product to examine the process by which actors come to inhabit . . . roles’ (2015: 19). To address this, the chapter will draw on original, in-depth interviews with talent agent Kelly Andrews, Equity official John Barclay, actor Tony Curran and casting director Suzanne Smith.1 These four are highly established in their respective fields, possessing transatlantic experience. A  partner in Brown, Simcocks & Andrews, Kelly Andrews spent several years at the agency Markham & Froggatt, where she was involved in Lewis’s auditioning process for Band of Brothers (HBO 2001). Having worked for the UK trade union for professional performers and creative practitioners since the 1990s, John Barclay is Equity Head of Recorded Media. Trained at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Tony Curran’s career includes roles in Underworld:  Evolution (2006), Sons of Anarchy (FX 2008–14), Thor:  The Dark World (2013) and Defiance (Syfy 2013–15). Receiving Emmy Awards in recognition for Band of Brothers and The Pacific (HBO 2010), Suzanne Smith cast Laurie and Jesse Spencer for House (Fox 2004–12) and has worked on the UK casting for an extensive list of productions including Black Hawk Down (2001), True Blood (HBO 2008–14) and Outlander (Starz 2014–present). The chapter will combine the insights gleaned from the interviews with archive research conducted at the BFI Reuben Library, building on existing scholarship, which in recent years has shown an emergent interest in European émigré actors in Hollywood (Phillips and Vincendeau 2006), the rise of Hollywood talent agents (Kemper 2010), US television casting practices (Warner 2015) and trade unions such as Equity (e.g. Dean 2010). Whilst the chapter refers to British and Irish actors, US film/television, etc., the long-standing presence of European talent in Hollywood to some extent calls

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into question terms indicating distinct national contexts and identities. As Phillips and Vincendeau discuss, given Hollywood’s increasing dependence on subcontracted multinational companies, and globalization of plant, location and personnel: ‘it has become increasingly difficult to define what a “Hollywood film” actually is’ (2006: 4). With the shift to digital platforms and different economic models, such complexity of terminology also applies to what is commonly understood as US and British television. Moreover, the ‘Britishness’ of ‘British actors’ is far from straightforward, fixed and homogenous. Nuances such as those pertaining to regional identities usually get lost in press/fan discourses on foreign acting talent in the United States. These further tend to conflate Britishness and Irishness (subsuming the latter into the former), with the term ‘British’ often becoming convenient shorthand for Anglophone European actors. This shorthand covers (if not obscures) the considerable fluid (if not liminal) identities of a number of actors; and it is partly through their westward move that the actors of interest to this chapter acquire what Phillips and Vincendeau call ‘ “hyphenated” cultural lives’ (2006:  4) that straddle both sides of the Atlantic. Mindful of such complexity, this chapter now proceeds to uncover the patterns and nuances of the contemporary westward move of British and Irish actors.

The appeal of US film/television production to British and Irish actors This move is closely linked to these actors’ working environments. Film and television east of the Atlantic have been marked by a simultaneous increase in the competition for roles – particularly since the Employment Act 1990 ‘neutered what had been [Equity’s] defining characteristic, the pre-entry closed shop’ (Dean 2010)  – and decrease in the number of available productions, in an already smaller home market. With the long-standing struggles of the British and Irish film industries, and the decline of repertory theatre as noted by Rawlins (2012), television has become the main employer for British and Irish actors. Here, with shrinking funds (partly linked to the shift to different economic models), the rise of light entertainment and reality formats, investment into original drama production has overall declined over recent decades (see Media Legislation Report 2010). What have also declined are overall earnings for actors without the clout to demand higher fees. So, the majority of professional actors in Britain and Ireland have been facing more competition for fewer dramatic roles that on the whole pay less, resulting in economically precarious conditions that concern Equity, as Barclay stresses. This makes it hardly surprising that these actors, reminiscent of their 1920s’ predecessors, would consider moving across

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the Atlantic, attracted by the high volume of productions in the larger market and the anticipated economic and profile-raising benefits. Broadly concurrent with the declining employment opportunities in Britain and Ireland has been an increase in Hollywood’s gravitational pull with the acclaim that US television has been gathering since the 1990s. As Curran reflects, the prospect of a dramatic role in a ‘quality’ production, working on a budget and creative scale generally unavailable in the UK, has proven attractive to a good number of British and Irish actors. This prestige and the ‘investment into character’ in long-form storytelling have also been resolving past hesitations about working for the medium of television. Interestingly, Curran identifies a distinction concerning ‘the multiple determinants of television acting’ (Pearson 2010: 166), especially time and the collaborative process, between network and nonnetwork shows which have different cultures of production. That the quality reputation of contemporary US drama is, in the case of cable and streaming, linked to a production model involving fewer episodes and more creative risktaking than the ‘well-oiled machine’ of network production generally can allow, has only furthered the attraction of a stateside move. Smith has noticed a shift in attitude, an increasing willingness to seek employment in the United States, by (established) British actors, noting that cable and streaming’s comparatively shorter production schedules are attractive in terms of career management, as ‘it becomes more tempting, viable and easier to manage that with a film career, or a theatre career, or having a family’. Curran agrees with this, further pointing out that concerns about ‘potentially signing your life away’ when becoming optioned for a network show2 are offset by the prospects of regular employment in a profile-raising production, especially for actors from less secure economic backgrounds. British and Irish actors have also been attracted by the prospect of a more interesting range of roles for which they are being considered in the United States. As they have auditioned for and secured US roles, this sidesteps established British stereotypes. As Phillips and Vincendeau (2006) and Spicer (2006) have discussed, in its portrayals of British identities, Hollywood has traditionally relied on stereotypes such as the suave gentleman, the interfering manservant, the bumbling fool and the well-spoken villain; with British actors often playing British sidekicks to the US lead. ‘The force of such images has meant that actors who wished to escape “their” national typecasting . . . found it extremely hard to obtain significant roles’ (Phillips and Vincendeau 2006:  13–14). With shifting US industry approaches to employing British and Irish actors, even what Rutger Hauer had described as ‘Hollywood’s number one rule . . .:  American actors play heroes, foreign actors play villains’ (in ibid.: 14) relaxed. Playing US characters, actors like Cavill, Lewis and Lincoln are cast increasingly not only as the leads, but as the (often interestingly flawed) hero. This diversity of dramatic roles on offer is very appealing from an actor’s perspective, Curran confirms.3

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A different type of diversity on offer becomes apparent from the perspective of British and Irish actors who have perceived the casting across the borders of race, ethnicity, class or region to be rare east of the Atlantic. There has been public criticism for a failure to take risks with black casting and a lack of colourblind casting in Britain in recent years, in which actors such as Harewood, JeanBaptiste and Morgan Freeman, and director Rufus Norris have been involved. For example, referencing his casting for Homeland (Showtime 2011–), Harewood has commented: ‘It’s taken me 26 years and a couple of trips to America to convince people in the UK that I can carry a show and that I can be a leading man’ (in Sherwin 2012).4 However, a narrow approach to casting has also been perceived when it comes to genre. Several actors who worked in British soap operas before heading to the United States report having felt typecast in Britain. Nathalie Emmanuel, who worked for four years on Hollyoaks (Channel 4 1995–) and later joined the cast of Game of Thrones (HBO 2011–), argues that struggling to find employment is an experience common to actors upon exiting British soaps: ‘People can’t see you in any other role. So you just think: why not move to another country?’ (in Sampson 2013:  14). Agreeing that ‘an actor who has been in a soap in the United Kingdom for a long time will have more difficulty being cast in a versatile way in subsequent work’, Andrews notes the efforts by actors (including post-Doctor David Tennant) to circumvent being typecast: the move abroad is one increasingly taken-up option for some actors ‘to try and affect some kind of change in their career, to take control back’. So, auditioning for US productions has been perceived as holding a transformative potential for British and Irish actors. This is not because the US creative industries currently represent some kind of utopian haven of equal employment opportunities, nor because casting directors and agents in the United States are more imaginative than their counterparts east of the Atlantic (see also Warner 2015). British professionals such as Andrews and Smith have been working creatively within and beyond the UK for years. The US screen industry has long been associated with role segregation and stratification, reductive representations and tokenism; and a significant difference is to be drawn between US network and non-network television. Instead, the transformative casting experienced by British and Irish actors in the United States needs to be understood as facilitated by a number of local factors. One of those is their ‘blank slate’ status overseas: aspects of the actors’ identity pertaining to class, regional identity and genre connotations are less apparent or relevant during the process of auditioning in the United States, enabling different kinds of casting choices. (However, this ‘blank slate’ status is complicated by the fact that, as Becker importantly points out elsewhere in this book, the transatlantic crossover flow is impacted by issues of class, as well as gender.)5

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The appeal of British and Irish actors to US film/television production Here, the reasons why British and Irish actors are attracted by the prospect of looking for work in the United States merge with the reasons why such actors have proven an attractive proposition for US film/television production. The actors in question tend to be relatively unknown abroad at the point of casting. This could pose a risk – Andrews rightly stresses, ‘bankability and marketability drives everything’ – but this risk has been managed by recent US productions (e.g. through balancing the presence of unknown actors and marketable names), and casting such unknown actors offers several advantages to US productions. For example, fan/social media discourses may be more easily managed, as the recent backlash against Ben Affleck as Batman suggests. Casting actors with less exposure to US audiences also works well in relation to the quality status of cable shows being partly constructed around notions of distinction, of being different and fresh. Weissmann (2012:  171) has further identified the strategic use of UK actors by US quality drama in terms of their usable high cultural capital, derived partly from their association with British theatre heritage. Furthermore, the actors’ relative anonymity enhances realism and verisimilitude, which can aid brand building. During the ‘Making It in the States: British Actors and Directors on American TV’ BFI panel on 25 April 2010, producer Andrea Calderwood recalled that Generation Kill (HBO 2008) had actively preferred less known actors, with the intention to aid notions of authenticity and audiences’ ‘identification with an illusory real’ (Caughie 2014: 149), helping to elide the difference between actors and characters. Of course, when Emmanuel refers to how ‘people can’t see you in any other role’, the ‘people’ refers to not only UK industry personnel, but also British audiences; and casting directors and producers employed for US productions work with the expectation that when American viewers watch, for example, a telefantasy show like The Walking Dead (AMC 2010–), they are unlikely to be distracted by the thought:  ‘Oh, it’s Egg riding a horse in the post-apocalypse!’6 So, the ostensible gap between the approach to casting for US productions (which has gathered praise for its imaginative choices and perceived risk-taking) and for British projects (which has been criticized as narrow-minded) is narrowed by the fact that both approaches are driven by analogous assumptions about what their key audience would be likely to (not) accept. Whilst British and Irish actors can offer ‘productive anonymity’ (Holliday 2015:  64) to US productions, they are experienced performers, usually (like Curran) with drama school training, and always several years’ worth of professional experience behind them. The latter is significant, given that obtaining

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permission to work in the United States has become somewhat arduous, as Andrews recalls: Immediately after 9/11, the studios who had been prepared to have their lawyer green-light an O1 visa at the drop of a hat – ‘Oh, we’d really like this actor we saw in London for an episode of 24: rubberstamp it, green-light it, push it through’ – all of that stopped because of the change in the security status in the States and the evolution of homeland security. If you could get a visa on your own, you could come to a studio like FOX and work, but you couldn’t get a visa endorsed by FOX. . . . You had to be able to prove that you were already ‘known’, ‘famous’ or a ‘marquee name’ in the UK. Since 9/11, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services requires foreign actors who apply for a work permit – usually the O1 visa (or EB1 green card) for ‘aliens of extraordinary ability’ – to provide a file of evidence for a high level of accomplishment in the creative industries. To simplify (and further detail is provided by Becker elsewhere in this book), such evidence ideally includes a resume and showreel showcasing a body of significant work, nomination or receipt of an acclaimed award or prize and other forms of critical recognition, such as material in the national/international press. That Curran began amassing credits during the 1990s and won a BAFTA Scotland for Red Road (2006) has helped his transatlantic career. Smith has witnessed casting decisions get overturned because of insufficient evidence, noting that ‘recently [she] was doing a pilot for NBC and Amazon, and the girl chosen that they wanted was British, but we couldn’t get her visa because she hadn’t got enough body of work’. While obtaining the right to work in the United States became more difficult after 9/11, the same time period also saw a shift in US industry attitudes that facilitated the employment of British and Irish actors for US productions. This shift traces back to Band of Brothers, the high-profile miniseries that featured an abundance of British and Irish actors, including Jamie Bamber, Michael Fassbender, Dexter Fletcher, Tom Hardy, Matthew Leitch and James McAvoy. Its critical and commercial success, including the award recognition for lead actor Lewis, demonstrated to US industry professionals that such actors could head high-profile productions and convincingly play US characters. Smith confirms this: [Band of Brothers] was a really big thing. I  think that when [the production team] started, they did not know what they would find here. They were considerably worried that the British couldn’t do an American accent that would be acceptable: so initially a lot of the actors had to have voice coaching, and it really stemmed from there. After Band of Brothers being so successful, it then became everybody, you know. . . . The agents then realized, with the

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success of that, that it was viable for British actors to get American parts. The American agents then went, ‘Oh, there’s an untapped field’. They want to have another actor that they can market:  ‘who’s the next hot one?’ So, very quickly, a lot of those actors got American agents, you know, with British agents and American agents. Given the industrial imperative of risk management, the success of British and Irish actors in Band of Brothers was crucially reassuring. Showcasing the talents of these performers, it set a catalysing precedent that helped shift industry perspectives and practices, a shift that has been productively engaged with by a number of industry professionals. Here, attention is merited to the trajectory of the careers of Smith as well as Nina Gold, two high-profile British casting directors, who, since Band of Brothers and Rome (HBO 2005–7), respectively, have worked extensively across the Atlantic. (Gold has cast for projects including John Adams, Game of Thrones and Prometheus (2012).) Band of Brothers paved the way for not only the future international careers of many of its cast, but also, often aided by Smith and Gold, further high-profile showcases for British and Irish acting talent, such as House, Rome and Game of Thrones. Post-Band of Brothers, experienced actors such as Lewis or Lincoln have been more readily regarded by US producers as capable of carrying a production and coping with the demands of US filming schedules. Emphasizing that Lewis had already ‘reached a level of profile here before that happened’, Andrews notes: And it is the debate that you will find that agents have with their actors all the time, younger actors, actors who haven’t broken through here, yet saying to you: ‘I want to go to LA and try it out, because there’s so many British people in LA now.’ And you go: ‘Yeah, but Damian Lewis didn’t go to LA until he was already Damian Lewis here’. Not only did Lewis have a track record, but, Andrews points out, this included a role with direct resonance: Particularly helpful in that case was the fact that he had been in a Peter Kosminsky drama called Warriors. So when the agency at Markham & Froggatt was able to send [the recording of Lewis’ first audition for the role of Winters], they also sent a tape of Warriors, because it was the right sort of tape to send. So, there’s a bit of Damian doing Warriors and there’s a bit of Damian doing [Band of Brothers], and that’s what went forward first. Aided by his existing body of work, Lewis’s achievement was continued by subsequent actors, most notably Laurie, whose prior experience of drama and

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comedy, Smith emphasizes, was important for his casting in the role of House. In a somewhat self-perpetuating movement, these successes provided reassurance for US producers that British and Irish actors have the ability to deliver successful performances in high-volume, pressured productions. Laurie is an interesting example of transatlantic acting success as he problematizes certain assumptions about British actors:  he has been praised for his performance of and accent for House, yet neither is the result of vocational British actor training.7 British and Irish actors have long been held in high regard in the United States (and elsewhere), because of the cultural capital of British and Irish theatre and the prestige accorded to drama schools such as The Lir, RADA and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. The value of this training is upheld by Andrews, Barclay, Curran and Smith; and press discourses on the contemporary success of such actors in the United States contain numerous references to the rigorous training they have received, equipping them with technique and discipline.8 Interestingly, this training is cited in contemporary discourses as reasons for their success in the United States, when the same training has been evoked in the traditional view that British actors are more suited for the stage and US actors for screen-based work (see Zucker 1995). This binary view, based on dominant understandings of acting traditions on both sides of the Atlantic, is certainly being challenged by the recent success of British and Irish actors in the United States, whether they attended drama school or not. Returning to the relative anonymity of British and Irish actors at their point of casting for US productions, this aids not only transformative casting decisions and creative concerns, but also commercial imperatives. Actors considering a westward move are likely to be driven by the anticipated economic benefits and taking note of success stories such as Laurie’s exceptional salary for portraying House (which made him one of the highest-paid actors in television history), as Smith has noticed. However, trained and experienced as they are, these actors have little leverage for negotiating salaries at their initial entry point in the US market. Moreover, whilst their immigration status in some ways facilitates their casting in lead roles (as visas are tied to ‘extraordinary ability’), it may also delimit their leverage for salary negotiations in the medium term.9 As a consequence, they are paid considerably less than their US counterparts, even on the same production and for roles of comparable size and importance. According to an unnamed industry executive, in 2007 it was becoming increasingly difficult to cast a US actor in a lead role for a television drama with a salary of less than $100,000 per episode, and British actors generally work for considerably less (Carter 2007:  E1). As James Purefoy pithily put it during the 2010 BFI panel session:  ‘We are often referred to in LA as white Mexicans.’ With increasing pressures on budgets, British and Irish actors have been proving attractive, costeffective propositions for US film/television producers.

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As Curran notes, these US salaries are, of course, nevertheless attractive, as are the opportunities for a profile boost and the chance of being cast in a production that could turn into a major film franchise or long-running show. Here, the prospect of obtaining not only potentially continuous employment, but also bargaining power for contract renegotiations is an important consideration, especially given the precarious working life of the vast majority of professional actors in the United Kingdom and Ireland (and elsewhere). As a specific example, that Laurie’s salary for House began ‘in the mid-five figures’ (Andreeva 2008: 1), increased to $250,000–$300,000 per episode in 2006 and then again to roughly $400,000 per episode in 2008, would have been of interest to his professional peers.

Continuity and change: The lived experience of contemporary transatlantic screen culture As the chapter reflects, the seeking/securing of employment by actors closely involves a number of ‘off-screen’ industry professionals. Their labour is usually neglected (if not erased) in discourses on the contemporary success of British and Irish actors in the United States, and on acting and actors more generally. And yet, the perspective of such ‘unseen talent’ stands to productively inform those discourses and ‘give new insights into otherwise opaque industrial processes’ (Banks et al. 2016: xi). For example, one well-known story circulating in press/fan discourses is that Laurie was hired on the spot by Bryan Singer for House after he sent in his audition tape (filmed in the bathroom of his Namibian hotel). Laurie’s US accent was so convincing that Singer, who had stopped considering British actors, praised Laurie as an example of the kind of US actor he had been searching for. Here, Smith’s involvement paints a different picture. Smith recalls that Laurie’s agent Christian Hodell loved the House script and Laurie’s wife took the script and a camera when visiting her husband, and the resultant recording was sent to the United States via the Fox carrier pouch. On arrival, a delay was caused by the difference between the British and US video standards:  ‘I communicated with the American casting director, asking “why haven’t you viewed it? Why haven’t you viewed it?” And she said, “we can’t view it”, and it had been sitting there for a couple of days, and they couldn’t transfer it from PAL to NTSC. Christian [Hodell] then managed to find somebody to transfer it.’ Once this technical issue was resolved, Laurie’s casting proved still not instantaneous. As Smith explains, the production took a risk, because [Laurie’s] American accent wasn’t that brilliant; but they didn’t give him the job from that, they waited until he’d finished the filming [in Namibia] and then he went to America and auditioned in front of them so it

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wasn’t ‘tape = yes’. It was ‘tape . . . oh great, he’s really interesting. Worried that his accent is [not quite there]’. Here, Smith’s testimony demonstrates how practitioner discourse may not ‘legitimate long-standing tightly held industrial mythologies’ (Caldwell 2008: 318), but work to precisely challenge what she calls ‘lovely myths’. As Smith’s testimony furthermore vividly reflects, casting directors and talent agents, as well as the actors whose employment they facilitate, are located within a complex lived experience of screen culture. Here, it is crucial to recognize that the present historical moment is embedded within an industrial culture marked by continuity and change. Much of what Tom Kemper argued in his work on the rise of Hollywood agents from the late 1920s to the 1940s still applies to the present, especially his following point: ‘Crucial to my argument here is my conception of Hollywood as a business world embedded within a social network (and vice versa). This may not be big news, but it adds an important perspective to understanding the business, which, in the case of agents, cannot be extracted from the social culture in which it is rooted’ (2010:  ix–x, emphases added). With the enduring centrality of professional contacts, the work of Andrews, Barclay and Smith hinges around cultivating relationships, exchanging information and managing a range of continually evolving parameters within and across groups of multiple stakeholders. Actors are, of course, equally located within these social cultures, which become only more densely populated for those who move abroad. There they, under the US model, acquire not only a local agent, but also a manager and eventually a lawyer, PR consultant and stylist. Andrews explains, ‘in the States, the manager has maybe, on average, 20 or 25 clients. The agent has a lot more, and it’s the manager’s job to drive the agent hard for that specific client’. With such a multifaceted model, British and Irish actors find themselves paying commission to a larger number of professionals than they were accustomed to: for Curran, this involves the agency Domain Talent and manager Tammy Rosen. Recent initiatives such as the establishment of a West Coast branch of Equity and the organization Brits in LA aim to offer such actors local advice and support. This includes guidance concerning the different cultures and processes of casting, such as the importance of network casting approval and the particularities of the television pilot season (a ‘challenging and stressful time of the year’, Curran notes), as well as accommodation, transport, etc. Since the period Kemper explored, the industrial framework within which the transatlantic careers of actors unfold has become increasingly complex, following rounds of mergers, takeovers, expansions, buy-outs and start-ups. In the case of talent agencies, the ‘big four’  – WME (William Morris Endeavour), CAA (Creative Artists Agency), ICM Partners (International Creative Management Partners) and UTA (United Talent Agency) – became ‘capitalised as global corporations’ (Burrows 2006: 454) with multinational offices that invariably include

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London. They operate alongside smaller/newer competitors in Britain (e.g. United Agents and Troika) and the United States (e.g. Domain Talent), whose physical infrastructures, though not working practices, are local in scale. There are noteworthy connections and collaborations between these competitors, which mean that Curran, for example, is represented by both his long-term British agency, Scott Marshall Partners, and Domain Talent. Barclay notes that in such strategic alliances: ‘the agent in America will put forward in America some UK talent of the agents that they’re linked with in London. . . . So that’s how they access each other’s territory and each other’s clients. I’m sure that there must be things like split commissions.’ What may further accompany such strategic alliances is an industry practice with much longevity, namely package deals. For example, it is no coincidence that Game of Thrones’s Gethin Anthony, David Bradley, Natalie Dormer, Emun Elliott, Joel Fry, Kit Harington, Sam Mackay and Tony Way (the list continues) are represented by the same agency, United Agents. As Kemper (2010) has discussed in relation to the studio era, package deals that attach a number of actors to a project can help reduce the labour and time of seeking out talent for producers and casting directors, and agencies may gain more leverage for negotiations on behalf of their clients. Following a trajectory of preceding strategic investments, most notably perhaps the establishment by then-leading agent Myron Selznick of a London office for his US agency in 1933 (Kemper 2010), this complex transatlantic framework facilitates the movement of British and Irish actors to the United States. It does so in that it allows for both a pool of strong local knowledge and trans-national networks, whereby agents, managers, casting directors, etc. (as appropriate to their remit) establish and cultivate relationships with one another, as well as with actors. This aids with the scouting of talent, securing of employment, negotiating of contracts and setting up of deals. Perhaps the single biggest development marking this framework, certainly in terms of the impact on the everyday working practices of the on- and off-screen professionals involved, concerns the ascendancy of digital/mobile technology. The use of the internet/email, smartphones, laptops/tablets, videoconferencing/ Skype and cloud storage services facilitates the casting of foreign actors, as it speeds up the complex decision-making process (crucial in pressured working schedules), reducing labour and costs. Smith elaborates: I remember when we were putting actors on video tape, and then it became DVDs, and you were sending those physically: I remember rushing down to FedEx, having to get there for 17.15 pm before it closed, with your VHS tape or later on with your DVD, making sure it got to America, and it then would take 48 hours to get there. And then with [online casting service] Cast It, you could actually put it up, and they have it instantly.

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More recently, UK performer directory Spotlight has begun offering the Actor on Tape recording service, specifically set up so that actors who have secured an audition in the USA do not need to travel there. Producing a professionally produced, high-resolution file that is then uploaded, Spotlight promotes the service as allowing actors the opportunity to seek employment abroad without disruption for their (pursuit of) work in Britain. As Smith and Andrews confirm, this kind of service can help reduce the arduousness of getting cast for US productions – Matthew Rhys’s stateside success followed trips to the United States for numerous pilot seasons – certainly in the early stages of the individual auditioning process.

Conclusion Spicer argued in 2006 that British actors’ ‘extensive contribution to contemporary Hollywood deserves to be more widely recognised than it is’ (146). This recognition has been a slow process, but efforts in recent years, such as the 2013 ‘Exploring British Film and Television Stardom’ conference at Queen Mary University of London and the associated issue of the Journal of British Cinema and Television (Spicer and Williams 2015), offer hope that this process is gaining traction. This chapter contributes to such efforts by having examined the recent wave of British and Irish actors in US film and television, which needs to be understood as a key historical moment within the long trajectory of transatlantic acting/creative labour flow. Historicizing the contemporary, the chapter has highlighted some of the significant patterns and nuances of this historically contingent moment, in which – following the catalysing precedent set by Band of Brothers, and intertwined with changing legislative frameworks, increasing industrial globalization and the rise of digital technology – industry practices have been increasingly moving to assist the casting of such actors for US productions. Here, the shift in mindset by industry personnel in the United States and the UK, as identified by Smith, has been paramount, and led to the development of closer transatlantic working relationships. Such a shift in perspective and practices has seen British and Irish actors find unprecedented success in the United States. Given the ephemeral nature of the social culture of the creative industries, further shifts in perspective and practice seem likely. Having illuminated some of the ways in which acting is embedded within a complex web of wider contexts and practices, this chapter argues for the importance of paying more sustained attention to the work of unseen, off-screen professionals such as casting directors, talent agents, and union officials, who, individually and collectively, make a formative contribution to the creative industries. Weaving together interview testimony by Andrews, Barclay, Curran and Smith, each of which displays considerable industrial reflexivity (Caldwell 2008),

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the chapter has offered an insight into the lived experience of British and US screen culture by some of the individuals that populate it. It has positioned the work of actors in their professional contexts and explored the impact that off-screen professionals have on their work. All of these individuals constitute increasingly global players whose professional careers are embedded in an industrial landscape marked by continuity and change. Using broader brushstrokes at times due to its size, the chapter has made space for ostensibly minor details – such as the recollection of a casting director rushing to a courier service before close of business – because such texture concerning process is so ephemeral and yet so impactful to the products on screen. Insisting on the importance of unseen, off-screen professionals is not to argue that less attention should be paid to the work of actors, nor is it intended to inappropriately negate actors’ agency. On the contrary, closer engagement with the work of the former allows a better understanding of the contexts, working practices and professional relationships within which actors, acting and actors’ agency operate, simultaneously facilitated and dependent. With a burgeoning interest in acting within television studies, which has a strong tradition of paying close attention to industrial contexts, there is now an opportunity to steer the wider scholarship on acting and performance to pay more attention to the professional relationships, processes and cultures within which acting and actors are located, including those concerning pre-production. Through its use of interviews pertaining to the interlocking perspectives of the actor, agent, casting director and union official, this chapter hopes to have offered a route which further research in this area can productively use.

Acknowledgements I thank Kelly Andrews, John Barclay, Tony Curran and Suzanne Smith for generously providing their time and thoughts, and Gary Cassidy and Trevor Rawlins for facilitating the interviews with Curran and Andrews, respectively.

Notes 1 Subsequent quotes are taken from personal interviews with Smith on 12 September 2014, Andrews on 9 December 2014, Barclay on 28 August 2015 and Curran on 6 May 2016. 2 Such contracts are somewhat reminiscent of those from the Hollywood studio system in that they place commitment unilaterally upon the actor. 3 So, although British and Irish actors may come to represent a homogenized Britishness, the range of roles open in this more general guise in the United States is noticeably wide.

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4 These concerns have been highlighted in recent campaigning led by Equity, Lenny Henry and Act for Change. 5 Moreover, increasing attention is being paid within current press, scholarly and political discourses to the foundational role privilege can play in the working lives of professionals actors within the British context. For example, the current Labour shadow government has launched an inquiry titled ‘Acting Up – Breaking the Class Ceiling in the Performing Arts’. See also Friedman, O’Brien and Laurison (2017). 6 US screen products have a long history of employing foreign actors to gain access to overseas markets, and Lincoln’s casting offers an additional point of interest for the desirable British export market. 7 As Rawlins (2012) argues, Laurie can be understood as an exception that proves the rule. 8 Elsewhere in this book, Becker explores the discursive framing within such press articles. 9 I thank Christine Becker for bringing to my attention that the immigration status of foreign actors in the United States is usually tied to their employment, which can impact their ability to depart early or hold out for a higher seasonal raise once they have signed a standard contract for a series.

References Andreeva, N. (2008), ‘Uni Raises the Roof for Its “House” Star’, The Hollywood Reporter, 12–14 September: 1, 30. Babington, B. (2001), ‘Introduction: British Stars and Stardom’, in B. Babington (ed.), British Stars and Stardom: From Alma Taylor to Sean Connery, 1–28, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Banks, M., B. Conor and V. Mayer (2016), ‘Preface’, in M. Banks, B. Conor and V. Mayer (eds), Production Studies, The Sequel! Cultural Studies of Global Media Industries, ix–xv, New York; London: Routledge. Burrows, J. (2006), ‘United Kingdom’, in A. Phillips and G. Vincendeau (eds), Journeys of Desire: European Actors in Hollywood – A Critical Companion, 452–5, London: BFI. Caldwell, J. T. (2008), Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television, Durham: Duke University Press. Carter, B. (2007), ‘The British Are Coming to Play American Roles’, The New York Times, 5 April: E1. Caughie, J. (2014), ‘What Do Actors Do When They Act?’, in J. Bignell and S. Lacey (eds), British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future, 2nd edn, 143–55, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Dean, D. (2010), ‘Contingent Power in Contingent Work: Must the Show Go On?’, Paper presented at the 28th Annual International Labour Process Conference, Rutgers University: not paginated. Friedman, S., D. O’Brien and D. Laurison (2017), ‘ “Like Skydiving without a Parachute”: How Class Origin Shapes Occupational Trajectories in British Acting’, Sociology, 51 (5): 992–1010. Glancy, M. (1999), When Hollywood Loved Britain: The Hollywood ‘British’ Film 1939– 45, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Hilmes, M. (2012), Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting, New York: Routledge. Holliday, C. (2015), ‘The Accented American: The New Voices of British Stardom on US Television’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 12 (1): 63–82. Kemper, T. (2010), Hidden Talent: The Emergence of Hollywood Agents, Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press. Knox, S. and G. Cassidy (forthcoming), ‘Game of Thrones: Investigating British Acting’, in M. Hills, M. Hilmes and R. Pearson (eds), Contemporary Transatlantic Television Drama: Industries, Programs and Fans, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Media Legislation Report (2010), ‘The British Film and Television Industries – Decline or Opportunity? HL 37-I, First Report of Session 2009–10 – Volume I: Report’, London: The Stationery Office. Morley, S. (2006), The Brits in Hollywood: Tales from the Hollywood Raj, London: Robson Books. Pearson, R. (2010), ‘The Multiple Determinants of Television Acting’, in C. Cornea (ed.), Genre and Performance: Film and Television, 166–83, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Petrie, G. (1985), Hollywood Destinies: European Directors in America, 1922–1931, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Phillips, A. and G. Vincendeau (2006), ‘Film Trade, Global Culture and Transnational Cinema: An Introduction’, in A. Phillips and G. Vincendeau (eds), Journeys of Desire: European Actors in Hollywood – A Critical Companion, 3–18, London: BFI. Polan, D. (2002), ‘Methodological Reflections on the Study of the Emigre Actor’, Screen 43 (2): 178–86. Rawlins, T. (2012), ‘Studying Acting: An Investigation into Contemporary Approaches to Professional Actor Training in the UK’, PhD thesis, University of Reading. Russell Taylor, J. (1983), Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood Émigrés 1933–1950, London: Faber and Faber. Sampson, I. (2013), ‘Hooray for Hollyoaks’, The Guardian, 26 January: 14. Sherwin, A. (2012), ‘Homeland Star David Harewood Bemoans Lack of Black Roles in UK’, The Independent, 24 July. Available online: http://www.independent.co.uk/artsentertainment/tv/news/homeland-star-david-harewood-bemoans-lack-of-black-rolesin-uk-7966293.html (accessed 30 May 2016). Spicer, A. (2006), ‘Acting Nasty? British Male Actors in Contemporary Hollywood’, in A. Phillips and G. Vincendeau (eds), Journeys of Desire: European Actors in Hollywood – A Critical Companion, 141–8, London: BFI. Spicer, A. and M. Williams (eds) (2015), ‘Stars and Stardom’, special issue of Journal of British Cinema and Television, 12 (1). Street, S. (2009), British National Cinema, 2nd edn, London; New York: Routledge. Warner, K. J. (2015), The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting, New York: Routledge. Weissmann, E. (2012), Transnational Television Drama: Special Relations and Mutual Influence between the US and UK, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Zucker, C. (1995), Figures of Light: Actors and Directors Illuminate the Art of Film Acting, New York: Plenum Press.

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11 WELL-BEING AND THE TELEVISION ACTOR: CHALLENGES AND COPING STRATEGIES Christopher Hogg and Charlotte Lucy Smith

Introduction The pressures of working life in the twenty-first century are becoming ever-more complex and intensified. Consequently, over the last decade, the significance of employee health and well-being has become increasingly recognized in the UK, with a growing emphasis on strategies to address both the physical and psychosocial features and challenges of contemporary working life. The experiences of actors working in television drama are no exception to these general trends of intensified pressure and resultant need for measures to protect health and wellbeing. However, to date, the particular coping mechanisms (both personal and organizational) in place to maintain the health and well-being of television actors have been little documented or considered from either industry or scholarly vantage points. In aiming to address this, the following chapter utilizes original interview insights from three actors working in television in order to identify and better understand some of the factors which impact upon their health and well-being, and the coping strategies that they currently employ. The UK Health and Safety Executive (2016) reports a marked reduction in fatal and non-fatal physical injuries to employees since the introduction of the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act. Nevertheless, as the dynamics and demands of professional life evolve, so too have our understandings of the potential impacts of work on individuals in ways which extend beyond the physical to encompass also the emotional and the psychological. Indeed, improved understanding gains urgency in a world of rapid social, economic and technological change. Although various definitions exist, as early as 1948 the World Health Organization (WHO)

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usefully defined employee health as ‘a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’. Such an emphasis upon health in all these forms is of clear value not only to employees but also employers, since it follows that workers who exhibit high levels of well-being will be more engaged and effective in the workplace, whilst those who experience low levels of well-being may encounter difficulties in meeting the demands of their roles. The key factors that drive psychological well-being in the workplace may be broadly grouped into those which relate to the person (individual differences such as personality and coping style) and those which connect to the wider situation that the person inhabits (situational factors) (Arnold and Randall 2010:  453). There are numerous situational factors but key examples include: the demands of the role (cognitive, emotional, physical and degrees of responsibility and work–life balance); the level of control over the way work is organized and performed; the perceived degree of managerial/supervisory support; peer support; the quality of relationships at work; physical working conditions; job insecurities and opportunities; and organizational cultures and value systems (Arnold and Randall 2010: 454). However, not all situational factors are sources of stress for everybody. Tom Cox et al. (2000: 1) use the term ‘hazard’ to describe how these working conditions have ‘the potential to cause harm’, but much can still depend on individual differences in personality, coping styles and demographic factors such as age, gender and length of time in the profession. Moreover, how individuals cope with stress has been the focus of a considerable amount of research (see e.g. Zeidner and Endler 1996). For example, one measure of coping proposed by Charles S. Carver et al. (1989) includes sixteen different techniques, including: taking active steps to try and remove or alter the source of stress; seeking social support for advice, assistance, information or for more emotional reasons; abusing alcohol and/or other substances to distract from the problem; and even giving up on the goals with which the stress is interfering. Of course, a person may have a wide range of coping strategies but choose to use only a small number of them due to their personality and/or the situation in which they find themselves (Arnold and Randall 2010). As this chapter will examine further, when applied to the context of acting within the television industry, certain personal and situational factors assume heightened significance. In considering the application of ‘resilience’ training for actors across the performing arts in general, Kimberly Wimmer Totty (2016: 2) describes actors as an ‘ “at risk” population’, experiencing tensions between an understanding of their work ‘as a passion, a calling, or even a purpose’ and the realities of a job ‘rife with rejection, a lack of agency, and income instability’. Yet, such features of the profession are regularly dismissed as ‘going with the territory’ (Burdon et  al. 2014:  6), meaning that actors regularly endure challenges associated with their working circumstances for prolonged periods (Maxwell

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et al. 2015). These tensions are often further exacerbated by some of the more particular working conditions of television acting, including extremely limited formalized rehearsal time for actors within particularly rapid, intense and – in the case of long-form drama  – ongoing production schedules (Cantrell and Hogg 2016). These features have the potential to make television work seem especially pressured, isolating and lacking in agency for actors. Furthermore, the distinct production structures of television drama can require actors to be able to assume both short-term visiting roles with a lack of stability and security and also long-term roles demanding heightened and sustained levels of investment in their character and the wider production environment. With these more uniquely televisual concerns in mind, this chapter will engage in detail with original testimony from three actors working in television drama in order to begin to address the following key questions: What are some of the factors which impact upon the health and well-being of actors working in television? What kinds of coping strategies do television actors employ? How do they select and develop the strategies? All three interviewees are female actors who have worked in long-form British television drama over the last five years. Given the nature of the subject matter and some of the sensitive issues raised, we have anonymized these actors in order to protect their privacy. The actor participants will instead be referred to as Actors A, B and C. Actor A  has a well-established and high-profile television career, having played a recurring character in a popular British soap opera for over a decade. Whilst Actors B and C are relatively more early-career, both have experienced involvement in broadcast series drama, Actor B in a recurring role and Actor C as a visiting actor. They all received formal training at the same well-known and prestigious London-based drama school. Actors B and C trained over the last decade and Actor A in the late 1980s. We recognize that the issues which impact upon the health and well-being of male actors may be different to those which affect female actors, and the lack of the male actor perspective in this present research is acknowledged as a methodological limitation. Nonetheless, we consider this research a valuable opportunity to explore the experiences of female actors as members of an under-represented group within the screenmedia industry (BAFTA 2017). Whilst actor well-being has been the focus of some recent valuable research seeking data from actors themselves (Maxwell et al. 2015), the work published to date relies upon quantitative data collected through an online survey of actors working across theatre, film, television, radio, corporate, community and musical in an Australian context. By contrast, this chapter instead begins to explore the utility of a qualitative approach to data collection and analysis of a small sample of actor experiences and perspectives. Moreover, rather than adopting a broad view, this chapter aims to pinpoint issues of well-being associated more

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specifically with television acting in the UK. Interviews are one of the most commonly recognized and widely used methods for generating data in qualitative research (Bryman and Bell 2007; Guest et al. 2013; Holstein and Gubrium 2004). Here, interviews are employed to gain a more nuanced understanding of some of the issues surrounding the health and well-being of actors, by asking each interviewee to ‘share not just the aspects of their experience that could be captured by a camera but also the aspects that can be captured only by a human being, someone who can tell you what that experience means’ (Guest et al. 2013: 116). Further, the interview method allows us to probe into participants’ responses as necessary in order to obtain more detailed descriptions and explanations of their experiences, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours in a way not possible through using questionnaires or surveys. The value of such an approach is brought into greater focus through employing the lens of organizational psychology to analyse the themes identified within the actor-interview data. We conducted semi-structured interviews with our three participants, using open-ended questions designed to encourage interviewees to speak freely about their work-based experiences and opinions of health and well-being. Given the lack of existing research investigating health and well-being from the viewpoint of television actors and the consequent exploratory nature of the present research, we did not impose a fixed order to our questions and were instead led by emergent issues important to the interviewees, allowing their perspectives to unfold in ways that were meaningful to them, rather than be constrained by our views or those expressed within existing literature.

Actor well-being: Existing research contexts Before engaging with the actor-interview content, it is important first to situate our analysis within the existing relevant literature relating to actor well-being in general. Whilst this body of work is currently small, it nevertheless provides a range of potentially useful insights into the psychological impacts of the profession for television actors in both training and work-based environments. As early as 1992, in an editorial for the journal Medical Problems of Performing Artists, Alice Brandfonbrener described theatre actors as ‘the forgotten patients’ (101), drawing the attention of medical practitioners towards recognizing the specific health and well-being hazards associated with the profession. Brandfonbrener goes on to assert that ‘there are . . . health risk factors in the lifestyles of many people associated with the theatre. Among those are sleep deprivation; poor dietary habits; excesses of caffeine, tobacco, and alcohol; and a higher use of street drugs than I have encountered either in musicians or in dancers’ (101). Brandfonbrener also highlights the significant psychological

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challenges involved in the requirement for actors to ‘portray convincingly the emotions of their characters and, indeed, temporarily to take on the personality traits of this character’, with the process ranging ‘from difficult to unbearable’ for many (102). Compounding this, Cheryl Kennedy McFarren (2003), in her doctoral thesis, emphasizes the dangers of training techniques aimed at enabling actors to draw upon their own personal emotional experiences to meet the demands of character plausibility. Pursuing the exploration of such psychological challenges and possible coping mechanisms, Mark Seton (2006) coins the phrase ‘ “post-dramatic” stress’ to articulate the need for greater safeguards within actor-training pedagogies to counteract the risks of many taught techniques for actors’ psychological well-being. The most significant piece of recent research on the specific occupational health issues impacting actors has been the Actors’ Wellbeing Study by the University of Sydney (Maxwell et al. 2015), carried out in Australia. The survey had 782 participants, comprising actors across all forms of professional acting. In this study, 46 per cent of participants noted experiencing some health-related complaint (physical or psychological) that impeded their ability to perform. Moreover, 16 per cent of these participants reported these complaints lasting ‘several years’ (95) and 39 per cent of these participants admitted that they ‘tried performing despite strong symptoms’ (96). Of all those suffering from a health-related issue, psychological complaints were reported by 25 per cent. In response, the study indicates that actors employ a variety of strategies to tackle these prolonged challenges of their work, including physical exercise and/or sport, counselling, meditation and yoga, support from family and friends and reliance upon both legal and illegal substances. Unsurprisingly, this research also notes that, for 82 per cent of participants, finances were a source of stress at least ‘sometimes’ (97) and 42 per cent suggested that performance-related stresses (either physical or psychological) affected their relationships with friends and family. Meanwhile in the UK, a questionnaire was distributed in 2013 during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival by a Mental Health Working Party established by the Equity East of Scotland General Branch Committee. This questionnaire was in response to the suicides (during late 2012 and early 2013) of a number of members of the performing arts community. The results of the questionnaire highlighted ‘the repeated testimony of real distress within the profession caused by many aspects that are completely changeable but which are too often simply dismissed’ (Burdon et al. 2014: 6). In reply to the question, ‘What would help?’, respondents suggested Equity support centres in all major cities, a well-being area on their website, more invitations to events to keep in contact and diminish feelings of isolation, psychological education for performers and an increased sensitivity to well-being needs from employers. In light of these findings, the chapter will now turn to examine the accounts of our television-actor participants in order to map similarities and differences

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across their experiences compared with those working more broadly in the performing arts, and to assess the need for more industry-specific training and techniques that address issues of well-being within television acting in particular.

Actor insights With reference to our central research questions, we traced key themes across the accounts of all three actors relating to issues of health and well-being in television, coping mechanisms (both personal and organizational) and current provisions of support for the emotional and psychological challenges of television work. Titled using apt quotes from the interview data, the selected themes are as follows: ‘Do something that’s not acting’, ‘Find out what’s sustainably healing for you’ and ‘Don’t feel guilty to be working’. The remainder of the chapter will discuss each of these themes in turn using illustrating excerpts and consider broader implications for television acting.

‘Do something that’s not acting’ Across all three interviews, a recurring point of emphasis in maintaining health and well-being is the need for a conscious and sustained separation between work and life. Clearly encapsulating this, Actor B asserts: ‘Acting is my job and I’m blessed to be doing something that I love as my job but it is still my job. It cannot be my entire life’, explaining that, ‘to let your roles permeate your day-today life . . . is not a good call for your well-being’. In reflecting upon her long period of involvement in a popular British soap production, Actor A describes the environment as ‘very much a closed, peculiar world of its own,’ adding, ‘You only really understand it if you’re in it.’ As such, it is easy to appreciate that actors working in long-form television drama may feel a strong temptation to generate a structure of support amongst fellow cast-members, since they share a common, prolonged experience of such a ‘closed, peculiar world’. However, as Actor A goes on to stress: ‘you need the people from before who know you outside your work and who can keep you grounded’, recognizing the importance of an identity separate and distinct from the professional, and offering a valuable reminder that such a world is not all-encompassing and common for all people. Indeed, developing this line of thought, Actor C recognizes the importance of staying ‘grounded’ in a world external to the professional for the resultant quality of work as well as life, stating: It is a responsibility not just to exist in that bubble of the actor’s world and be in your job-mode the entire time because I  think that leads to boring

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performances. It is an actor’s job as a storyteller to be part of society and its wider concerns. Otherwise, what are you telling stories about? (Actor C) As suggested above, concerns around the separation between job and life are inextricably connected to notions of simultaneous (and at times conflicting) responsibilities, both to one’s performance within work and to one’s self and relationships outside of work. Expressing these very tensions of felt responsibility, Actor A comments: ‘You can be playing harrowing storylines at work but then you have to go home and be present for your family.’ Similarly, Actor B maintains: ‘I wouldn’t like to think that something I was doing for my job could adversely affect any of my relationships or my real life because I need to keep that sacred to me.’ Such a commitment to ‘keeping something for yourself’ (Actor B) highlights also the measures actors consciously take to preserve a stable identity within the ‘frenetic, anxiety-ridden world of television work’ (Actor C). The need for conscious measures of this kind are made all-the-more pressing by the industrial realities of television. As Actor B recognizes, whilst the shorterform production runs of film offer greater potential for creatively profitable ‘total immersion in a character’, ‘in television, on a long-running production, you would go mad’. Not only do these insights compound the findings of Maxwell et  al. (2015:  99) regarding the possible detrimental impacts of performance-related stress (physical and/or psychological) on wider personal relationships, they also extend these findings in illuminating the ways in which actors can already be conscious of, and take active measures to counteract, such well-known and anticipated occupational hazards within the context of television acting. Having all stressed the fundamental perceived importance of a separation between work and life, the actor participants each offered examples of their commitment to ‘do something that’s not acting’ (Actor B): I look for things that give me a schedule and a structure . . . going to the gym, seeing friends and doing things that aren’t about acting are all crucial. For me, that’s writing or more silly things like knitting. I know people who do gardening, yoga, they fix cars. You have to have some outlet that is creative or productive but that is not acting. (Actor B) Expanding on this, Actor C emphasizes the value of voluntary work and charity work, working in areas where your career isn’t. Not just hanging out with other actors but doing things that matter to you in other ways. Being with people, and helping people, who have other lives and joys and concerns and anxieties is important. . . Little rituals, connections and communicating with people in meaningful ways, that isn’t about networking. (Actor C)

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This is not to say that television actors are always successful in their deliberate attempts to maintain a clear divide between professional and personal responsibilities. As Actor A notes: Burn-out is a problem in long-running TV. People can end up running on empty for a long time. If there’s a public appetite for a character, that can be great but actors can then get tired, stressed and anxious, and your work-life balance goes out of the window when you’re going home after twelve hours on set and then learning the lines for the next day. (Actor A) Further, Actor C acknowledges that, to a certain extent, ‘Inevitably you will take work home with you because it’s in your body’, before stressing the importance of a supportive and relaxing home life in order to ‘leave those things behind’ as much as is possible. More complicatedly, Actor A reveals: ‘If I’m playing a difficult part about some type of suffering that people are actually going through, I have to make myself available to them to talk. I see that as absolutely being part of my job.’ Here, in offering her time and input outside of performance to further work-through the issues depicted by her roles, Actor A articulates a more complex perception of responsibility in which professional and personal identities become intertwined. Such complexity corresponds with existing research relating to workplace well-being, which highlights the ways that individuals may respond differently to professional experiences and challenges, based on their own personalities, motivations and needs (Cox et al. 2000). For Actor A, the need to preserve a healthy separation between work and life is mitigated by a concurrent drive to be ‘part of something that feels meaningful’, in further ensuring that her work has a positive impact beyond the screen. Indeed, the felt requirement for a sense of purpose and broader impact derived from work is already well-documented within existing research relating to work-based motivation (e.g. Pink 2009).

‘Find out what’s sustainably healing for you’ A further reading of Actor A’s extended investment of self, as indicated above, is that it constitutes an active response to a broader professional situation which she feels offers limited personal agency. In discussing her work on a popular British soap, Actor A reflected upon the high level of pressure she experienced to conform to the representational demands of the show as entertainment brand: ‘you feel like you have to have your professional-self switched on all the time’. Indeed, the level of control an individual may exercise over the way work is organized and delivered is one of the key situational factors influencing psychological well-being (Arnold and Randall 2010). By taking measures to make

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herself available to individuals affected by issues represented through her performances, Actor A assumes a greater degree of influence in determining the ways in which her television work is defined and used, in this case for social benefit as well as for commercial entertainment value. Here, Actor A effectively redefines the terms of her work in a way which provides a greater degree of meaning and purpose, therefore enhancing her psychological well-being. As outlined earlier in this chapter, there are a number of situational factors impacting upon psychological well-being that are particularly pertinent to television actors and which trigger a variety of coping mechanisms. Alongside the above-indicated issues relating to work–life balance and levels of control at work, interviewees identified the following situational factors: the emotional and physical demands of the role, job insecurities and opportunities, and the broader cultural context and value system of the television industry. Recognizing the long-form demands of much television work, all three interviewees stressed the importance of identifying sustainable coping strategies that can be employed repeatedly over prolonged production periods. For instance, Actor B suggests:  ‘when you’re in work . . . know what you go to for comfort and have that with you. It has to be something that is maintainable for television because you could be doing it for a long time’. Building on this, as both Actor B and Actor C highlight, such sustainable coping mechanisms need to address both the physical and psychological demands of performance: I find it quite hard not to let a story infect me. It lives in your body and so it does influence how you feel, because you’ve had this character walking around with you for however long. To help with that I use meditation. Reading around the subject matter is also helpful because it’s then not just you and your instincts. You feel more like a researcher. (Actor C) In broad terms, Actor C’s reflections may be described as emotion-focused coping strategies, since they are aimed at modifying her emotional responses to a stressful working situation so they affect her differently (Lazarus and Folkman 1984). In the case of becoming a ‘researcher’ of the subject matter, such modification is arrived at through approaching the work from a vantage point which is not about instinct and physical embodiment of emotion. Similarly, Actor B notes: When you’ve spent five hours filming a rape scene. . . although of course it’s not real, your body still registers that and responds to it. When I’m acting, I do let all of that in. I think it’s useful to surrender to that. Let it have the impact that it’s going to have because that’s useful for your performance. After, I would have to go back to the trailer, have a cup of tea and put a dressing gown on. What you see a lot are noise-cancelling headphones – sometimes with music

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on but not necessarily. I’m an introvert by nature and I do it. If you put those on it’s a useful signal to everyone else to give you some space. (Actor B) Thus, whilst Actor B recognizes the utility of embodying (sometimes traumatic) character emotion to serve the demands of performative sincerity, like Actor C, she stresses the need for measures which then allow physical and psychological distancing of self from the production context. By contrast, Actor A  makes a conscious decision not to allow emotions which arise from portraying difficult roles to ‘infect’ her in the ways that Actor B and Actor C describe: I’ve played a number of characters who are traumatised in some way. It’s always been absolutely clear for me that I’m an actor playing a part. There are people going through these things for real and so you really can’t be selfindulgent about it. . . That’s something I won’t tolerate in myself at all. (Actor A) Actor A’s more extreme coping approach reflects the aforementioned ways in which different personalities can influence responses to situational factors, such as the emotional demands of roles that depict real-life traumatic experiences. Actor A  rationalizes a refusal of prolonged engagement with such associated emotions by framing this in terms of respect towards real-world sufferers. Offering further insights, Actor B has observed a range of emotion-focused coping behaviours, some of which seek to distract the individual from a source of stress or upset (such as playing computer games, sports and musical instruments), whilst others primarily communicate to others a need to be left alone (such as wearing noise-cancelling headphones). Indeed, Actor B indicates that there often exists a tacit understanding of such personal needs amongst cast and crew: When you’re on set with each other for prolonged periods, people very quickly become aware of what other people need and how other people function and take care of themselves. . . there’s very little judgement on that, especially when you’re filming away from home, as people know that we all have our comforts that we go to. (Actor B) Whereas Maxwell et  al. (2015) find that actors working more broadly across the performing arts reported using a variety of substances (legal and/or illegal), including alcohol, as a means to deal with the demands of their work, the televisual context problematizes the long-term viability of such an approach. As Actor B goes on to explain: You can’t be a hell-raiser for long in television because you’ll quickly burn out or they’ll just fire you. The sort of indulgence you get on a movie set only goes

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so far. As soon as you’re putting anyone’s money at risk, nobody is worth that, especially in television. Nobody is bigger than the show. They’ll just write you out. You just won’t work again. (Actor B) Compounding the significance of sustainable coping approaches for television work, Actor A stresses that, ‘For television there are no understudies. You are the face of that character and you need to be able to turn up every day for filming.’ As explored elsewhere (Cantrell and Hogg 2016, 2017), larger structures of guidance and support can develop both formally and informally amongst cast and crew, particularly in order to provide younger cast members with more sustainable coping strategies appropriate for television acting. Offering an example of a support framework established more formally within the mechanics of a popular British soap production, Actor A describes a group setup particularly for younger actors coming into the show, to offer help and advice, and that included representatives from Equity, the casting department, the press office, and older cast members who were more accustomed to that sort of attention. Because you do notice when people start out in soap how much of themselves they’re willing to give, and it’s unsustainable, and so older actors who have been through it and have had to pull themselves back a bit, to protect their well-being, can give useful advice. (Actor A) Above all the concerns relating to stresses whilst in television work, all interviewees emphasized the challenges associated with the unpredictability of their careers and the ever-present possibility of finding oneself out of work. Actor C recognizes the potential pitfalls associated with a particular mindset when not working: It is an easy psychological loop to get into, to be resentful about not getting opportunities that others are. The people who seem most happy are those who connect with other types of people, have other interests and make their own work. The fact that they’re being proactively creative and taking charge of their own lives is essential. If you’re a painter or a writer and you’re at home you can do your work: you paint or you write! You can’t just sit at home and act! (Actor C) Similarly, Actor A comments: It’s easy to think that every time you finish a job that it was the last work you’ll get so you need to find things to keep you going, and to keep feeding your passions and your creativity, whilst you’re waiting for the next thing to come along. It’s the real downside of any freelance work – that fear that the next

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thing will never materialise  – so you have to find ways of coping with that. (Actor A) Both of the above statements indicate the need for a proactive approach to health and well-being from television actors, both when in and between work, with Actor A recognizing: ‘You have to take some personal responsibility for looking after yourself.’ Existing research has demonstrated the efficacy of more active coping strategies of this nature, whereby individuals use their own resources to manage a stressful situation (e.g. Holahan and Moos 1987; Zeidner and Endler 1996). Developing this further, Actor C states: I’m not sure if it’s an industry attitude change or technology changing but rather than just sitting and waiting for the phone to go, the big push is now about generating your own work, be it an Edinburgh show or a web series. And that is incredibly important because it empowers you and allows you to have creative output that you can feel passionate about in an otherwise disempowered environment. (Actor C) A recent meta-analysis found that emotion-focused coping techniques (those aimed at reducing negative emotional responses to stressful situations) are often less effective than using problem-focused methods which aim to remove or reduce the causes of stress (Penley et al. 2002). However, emotionfocused techniques can be a good choice if the source of stress is outside of an individual’s control (Folkman 2013). Indeed, for television actors, finding ways to manage the emotions which are associated with stressful work-related situations is the only recourse available since it is not within their power to alter the existing operational structures and power dynamics of the television industry. Still, above, Actor C recognizes the ways in which being attuned to contextual changes of industry and technology can provide new opportunities for creative proactivity and enhanced professional empowerment for actors, rather than simply accepting the established mechanics of industry by ‘waiting for the phone to go’.

‘Don’t feel guilty to be working’ A range of possible organization-directed strategies to target the sources of work-based stress are proposed within the broader body of literature examining professional well-being (e.g. Elkin and Rosch 1990; Cooper et  al. 2001; Richardson and Rothstein 2008). However, this chapter’s three interviewee accounts suggest a prevailing attitude within the television industry that ‘there is definitely very little sympathy. . . for people feeling under extreme emotional and

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psychological pressure’ (Actor C), leading to limited industry drive and flexibility to address the previously discussed situational factors causing workplace stress for actors. Underpinning all of this is an unhealthy cultural attitude of ‘you should be grateful to be working and deal with your own shit on your own time’ (Actor C). Similarly, Actor B identifies that ‘The rhetoric of “chasing your dream” or “your job is a gift” seems particular to acting’. Such pervasive attitudes within the context of television are connected to the inherently competitive nature of the industry, in which success is afforded to few and often not for very long. Supporting this, Actor A notes: If you are managing to get to get to a level where you’re working it seems almost churlish and entitled to express any kind of anxiety about the professional world you’re inhabiting. . . Younger actors starting in soap at about 17 are coming in on relatively low wages for television but there’s often this unhelpful attitude of: ‘You should be grateful because a lot of people your age can’t get a job or they’re on zero-hour contracts or they’re working a dull job. Look at how lucky you are. You’re living the dream. We’re giving you it all’. (Actor A) Indeed, dominant cultural attitudes of this nature can generate an underlying sense of guilt associated with struggling in any way as a television actor, or even to be working at all when others are not. For instance, both Actor A and Actor C share that they had sought counselling support in the past, but with Actor A qualifying this to say: ‘even telling you that, there’s a sense of shame in doing that for me, because of this idea that I  should be grateful for what I had’. Conversely, even when things are going well, Actor B observes that, ‘You can sometimes feel awkward about sharing your triumphs. . . because you don’t want to come across as though you’re gloating.’ Resultantly, during the process of production itself, such prevailing cultural norms work to discourage actors from communicating psychological or emotional distress and seeking support from the production team: I wouldn’t want to raise a red flag like that. I would feel uncomfortable about that because there is this sense that there’s an expensive production machine that’s so much bigger than me that must motor forward. You don’t want to clog that up. Honestly, I would have sucked it up because I wouldn’t want to jeopardise anything for anyone else. (Actor B) The perceived social pressure simply to carry on in the face of adversity was also noted by Actor C as a potential barrier to effectively resolving organizational problems within an individual production or the industry more generally:

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That ‘in-it-together’ mentality can sometimes be a negative because rather than there being some structure of support in place within a production, you often put up with it and just stick it out together. (Actor C) As such, the qualitative actor insights regarding the influence of cultural norms on television actors’ felt ability to express emotional and psychological issues provide a plausible explanation for Maxwell et al.’s finding that actors often choose ‘to keep working in circumstances in which they report experiencing serious and often long-term symptoms’ (2015: 108). As Actor C recognizes: ‘Problems can only be tackled if you feel you’re working in a structure that can handle problems in a supportive and non-stigmatising way.’

Conclusions and implications This chapter has identified and examined a variety of situational factors impacting upon the health and well-being of actors working in television, alongside individual differences that mediate the degree to which such factors are experienced as stressful and influence modes of response. Significantly, our findings suggest that, although there already exists an efficient structure in place to resolve issues relating to physical health within television production, these support systems are not perceived as currently extending in the same effective manner to emotional and psychological well-being. As Actor B comments: ‘Medical support for physical injuries is very well-established. The second you have a sniffle they’ll put you in a car and take you to a doctor. That’s in their interests, so helping you in other ways should surely be also.’ However, a more fundamental concern expressed by all three actor participants connects with well-established cultural norms within the industry itself that work to deter television actors from communicating emotional and psychological issues affecting or arising as a result of their work. Thus, the substantive contribution of this chapter is in emphasizing the inherent complexities involved in tackling issues of health and well-being as they relate to the particularities of the television industry. The solution lies not solely in individual coping strategies nor in organization-directed interventions; rather, there is a need to address the deep-rooted barriers to providing and seeking support presented by the existing industry culture and rhetoric of being fortunate to work at all, and instead engendering a climate in which psychological well-being is afforded the same level of significance and attention as physical health. Furthermore, the chapter signposts a range of potentially fruitful directions for future research. Firstly, all three of our interviewees are female actors; therefore, it would be of value to extend the scope of study to investigate the experiences of a broader gender spectrum. Secondly, the findings suggest age and length of

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time in the profession as possible mediators of individual responses to stressful situations. This points towards the utility of further exploration relating to both formal and informal systems for ‘handing-down’ sustainable coping techniques to early-career television actors.

References Arnold, J. and Randall, R. (2010), Work Psychology, Harlow, England: Financial Times Prentice Hall. British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) (2017), Succeeding in the Film, Television and Games Industries: Career Progression and the Keys to Sustained Employment for Individuals from Under-Represented Groups. Available online: http:// bit.ly/BAFTACareersReport2017 (accessed 5 May 2017). Brandfonbrener, A. (1992), ‘The Forgotten Patients’, Medical Problems of Performing Artists, 7: 101–2. Bryman, A. and E. Bell (2007), Business Research Methods, 2nd edn, New York: Oxford University Press. Burdon, M., C. Joss, L. Kerr and R. Moore (2014), ‘Sometimes We Are Treated Quite Well’: Mental Health, Stress and Distress in the Entertainment Industry – A Report. Available online: https://www.equity.org.uk/branches/east-of-scotland-generalbranch/documents/mental-health-report-sometimes-we-re-treated-quite-well/ (accessed 9 April 2017). Cantrell, T. and C. Hogg (2016), ‘Returning to an Old Question: What Do Television Actors Do When They Act?’, Critical Studies in Television: The International Journal of Television Studies, 11 (3): 283–98. Cantrell, T. and C. Hogg (2017), Acting in British Television, London: Palgrave. Carver, C. S., M. F. Scheier and J. K. Weintraub (1989), ‘Assessing Coping Strategies: A Theoretically Based Approach’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56: 267–83. Cooper, C. L., P. Dewe and M. O’Driscoll (2001), Organizational Stress: A Review and Critique of Theory, Research and Application, London: Sage. Cox. T., A. J. Griffiths, C. A. Barlow, R. J. Randall, L. E. Thomson and E. Rial-Gonzalez (2000), Organizational Interventions for Work Stress, Sudbury: HSE Books. Elkin, A. J. and P. J. Rosch (1990), ‘Promoting Mental Health in the Workplace: The Prevention Side of Stress Management’, Occupational Medicine: State of the Art Review, 5 (4): 739–54. Folkman S. (2013), ‘Stress: Appraisal and Coping’, in M. D. Gellman and J. R. Turner (eds), Encyclopedia of Behavioral Medicine, 1913–15, New York: Springer. Guest, G., E. E. Namey and M. L. Mitchell (2013), Collecting Qualitative Data: A Field Manual for Applied Research, London: Sage. Health and Safety Executive (2016), ‘Trends in Work-Related Injuries and Ill Health in Great Britain since the Introduction of the Health and Safety at Work Act (HSWA) 1974’. Available online: http://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/history/index.htm (accessed 9 April 2017). Holahan, C. J., and R. H. Moos (1987), ‘Risk, Resistance, and Psychological Distress: A Longitudinal Analysis with Adults and Children’, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 96: 3–13.

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Holstein, J. A. and J. F. Gubrium (2004), ‘The Active Interview’, in D. Silverman (ed.), Qualitative Research: Theory, Method and Practice, 140–61, 2nd edn, London: Sage. Lazarus, R. S., and S. Folkman (1984), Stress, Appraisal, and Coping, New York: Springer. McFarren, C. K. (2003), ‘Acknowledging Trauma/Rethinking Affective Memory: Background, Method, and Challenge for Contemporary Actor Training’, PhD thesis, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado. Maxwell, I., M. Seton and M. Szabo (2015), ‘The Australian Actors’ Wellbeing Study: A Preliminary Report’, About Performance: The Lives of Actors, 13: 69–113. Penley, J. A., J. Tomaka and J. S. Wiebe (2002), ‘The Association of Coping to Physical and Psychological Health Outcomes: A Meta-analytic Review’, Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 25 (6): 551–603. Pink, D. H. (2009), Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us, New York: Riverhead Books. Richardson, K. M. and H. R. Rothstein (2008), ‘Effects of Occupational Stress Management Programs: A Meta-Analysis’, Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 13: 69–93. Seton, M. C. (2006), ‘ “Post-Dramatic” Stress: Negotiating Vulnerability for Performance’, paper presented to Conference of the Australian Association for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Sydney, 4–6 July. Wimmer Totty, K. (2016), ‘The Resilience Compass: How Mindset, Skills-Development, Self-Compassion, Service, and Community Empower Actors to Bounce Back, Reclaim Their Passion, and Live Their Purpose’, Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. World Health Organization (1948), ‘Constitution of WHO: Principles.’ Available online: http://www.who.int/about/mission/en/ (accessed 9 April 2017). Zeidner, M. and N. S. Endler (1996), Handbook of Coping: Theory, Research, Applications, Oxford: John Wiley.

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action 31, 33–5, 99 acting method accent 147–50, 163–5 ghosting 119–21 impersonation 69–73, 75–6, 119–20 improvisation 111 listening 115 process 63–4, 66–8, 70–6, 86, 88, 111, 115 re-performance 65–6, 110 research 70, 75, 87, 115 vocabulary 112, 116–20 actor training 2, 4, 7–8, 10, 26, 49, 118, 127–9 see also drama school accent 148, 161 employment 131–2, 137 television and 112–13, 127–38 theatre model 127–32, 134–6 trends in 127, 136 actor well-being 2, 7, 9, 171–85 coping strategies 176–85 gender and 173 adaptation 16, 22 Adventure of the Mazarin Stone, The 15 aesthetic 30–9, 42–4 Allam, Roger 117, 119 Allen, David 80, 90, 92 American film British and Irish actors and 154–7, 160 Hollywood 155–8 American television 7–9 British and Irish actors and 140–50, 154–67, 168 n.3, 169 n.6 employment 157, 161, 163–4, 167 European actors and 155–6 representation of race in 7, 55, 79–85 US production context 3, 158

visa 141, 143–4, 150, 161, 163, 169 n.9 Andrews, Kelly 156 Armchair Theatre 33 Ashes to Ashes 48, 50, 54, 59 n.4 Hunt, Gene see Life on Mars Atkinson, Jim 36–7, 39, 42–3, 44 n.4 audience see viewers audition 8, 166–7 Baker, Julia 83 Band of Brothers 161–2, 167 Barlow, Ken 54 Barclay, John 156 BBC 3, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 23, 25–6, 29, 32–3, 35–6, 39–40, 44 n.4, 44 n.8, 48, 58 n.1, 63, 142 BBC1 47 BBC2 47 BBC America 145 BBC Wales 49, 56 BBC Worldwide 49 Television Centre’s Studio One 40 Beadle, Gary 99 Beharie, Nicole 79–80 Berry, Halle 79–80, 82 Beulah Show, The  82 Big Brother 96–7, 102 Big Impression, The  69 Bill, The 134 biography performance of 63–77, 110–21 blocking 20, 26–7, 51 Bonneville, Hugh 7, 114, 117 Breaking Bad 140–1 Bremner, Bird and Fortune 69 Bremner, Rory 69, 119

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188

Brett, Jeremy 15–18, 20–2, 24–5, 27 Brown, Beulah 82–3 Called to Account 69, 77 n.6 camera 31, 35, 43–4, 49 aspect ratio 24 camera movements 26, 32–5, 37–9, 41, 42, 44 n.10 camera mobility 33–4, 36 camera operator(s) 2, 4, 6, 29–36, 38–9, 42–4 camera scripts 35–6 camera tracking 18–19, 32, 34, 40–1 camera work 33, 35, 39, 41, 44 handheld camera 23 immersive 34, 42 multi-camera 6, 15, 18–25, 29–31, 34, 36–8, 42 pedestal camera 18, 36–8 rehearsal 36 shot length 52 single-camera film 19 single-camera set-ups 21–3, 42 static camera 26, 35 Steadicam 37 takes 16, 24, 33, 38–9, 41–3 video 32, 39 camera shots close-up 4, 17–25, 29–30, 41–3, 51 closing shot 23 head-and-shoulder shot 52 long shot 19, 23–4 master shot 24 medium shot 21–2, 24, 40 over the shoulder shot 24, 52 reaction shot 21, 26 reverse shot 24, 38 point of view 52 two-shot 52 wide shot 30 Callow, Simon 117 Carroll, Diahann 82–3 Cartier, Rudolph 17, 37 Caruso, David 54 casting 2, 8, 49, 134–5, 137, 140, 156, 158–60, 163–7 actor manager 165–6 class 150 gender 140–1, 143–4, 146–7, 150 representation of race in 159

INDEX

talent agencies 165–6 talent agents 156, 159, 161–2, 165–7 casting directors 8, 134, 137, 144, 146, 159–60, 162, 165–8 Casualty 10 Celebrity Big Brother 95, 97, 101, 103–8 character 99, 177 construction 5, 114 cultural context 56 development 7, 9, 53–5, 63–4, 147 historical context 56 objectives 16, 18 political context 57–8 revelation 53 Chekhov, Michael 117 psychological gesture 117 chroma key technologies (‘green screen’) 10 cinema see film City of Angels 85 Clark, Aibileen 82, 87 Colbert, Stephen 120 Collins, Gemma 7, 97, 101, 104–8 comedy 1, 51, 58, 141–2 Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur 6, 15–16, 20, 22–3 Conlin, Sheila 100–1 Conspiracy 115–16 Corley, Bob 82 Coronation Street 54 Cosby, Bill 83, 85 costume 4, 11 n.1 Cox, Michael 20 CSI: Miami 54 Culp, Robert 83 Cumberbatch, Benedict 15–18, 22–6 Curran, Tony 156, 165–6 Cushing, Peter 15–20, 26 Dancy, Hugh 141–2 Davis, Phillip 121 n.7 Davis, Viola 7, 79–92 Dead Ringers 69 Deavere Smith, Anna 117 Dench, Judi 136, 138 Deveraux, Dominique 83 directing 4, 34 director 1, 10, 11 n.1, 32–3, 35–6, 49–50, 76, 128–31

189

INDEX

Doctor Thorne 48 documentary-drama 63–5, 73, 76–7, 110, 113, 121–121 n.3 ethics of 71, 75 documentary theatre 69, 73, 110 Verbatim Theatre 110, 118 Doubt 82, 86 drama 141–4, 173 cable drama 143 long form 173, 176 prestige drama 149–50 series drama 9, 47–50, 142–3 drama school Bristol Old Vic Theatre School 5 drama centre 113, 117–18, 131 East 15 Acting School 127 Guilford School of Acting 5, 8, 127, 136–7 Julliard 7, 81, 88–9 The Lir 163 London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) 5, 112, 147 New York Reality TV School 100 Rhode Island College 81, 87, 93 n.3 Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) 4, 11 n.1, 112–13, 147–8, 163 Royal Central School of Speech and Drama 5 Royal Conservatoire of Scotland 156, 163 Sylvia Young Theatre School 106 Drury, Ken 69 Duncan, Neil 21–2, 24 Dungey, Channing 80 Dyer, Richard 51 Dynasty 83 EastEnders 128, 134 editing 4, 11 n.1, 24, 26, 31, 33, 37–8, 49, 90, 97, 100, 106, 114 editor 1 Empire 80 equity 142, 156–7, 165, 181 Ethel Waters Show, The 82 Ettridge, Christopher 113, 115–16, 118, 122 n.9 Euston Films 20 Evans, Graham 18 Ex on the Beach 103 Extant 80

189

Fargo 145 Fassbender, Michael 86–7 Fences 81–2 film 31–2, 116 cinema 8, 11 n.1, 30–1, 33, 35, 38–9, 47 framing 4, 11 n.1, 21, 24, 26, 31–5, 38–42, 44, 52 framing performance 29–30 Freeman, Martin 22–3, 25–6, 144 Fry, Stephen 47 Fuller, Bryan 141 Galinsky, Robert 100 Gardner, Julie 56 Gatiss, Mark 26 Geordie Shore 99, 104 genre 1, 49–52, 95–8 gesture 16, 17–25, 27, 31, 51–2, 54, 76, 90–1 gestural range 6, 75 Get Carter 57 Get Christy Love! 83 Glenister, Philip 6, 48–50, 52–8 Gold, Nina 162 Good, Meagan 79–80 Graham, Matthew 53, 55 Granada 15–16, 19–20, 26, 27 n.2 Graves, Robert 39 Graves, Teresa 83 Grey’s Anatomy 80, 89 Gunn, Andrew 50 Happy Valley 4 Hardwicke, Edward 20–2, 24 Harris, Naomie 143 Hawley, Noah 154 Help, The  7, 82, 86 Henson, Taraji P. 79–80 Highmore, Freddie 145 Hill, Polly 142 Hollander, Tom 48, 58 n.1 Holliday, Christopher 144 Holmes, Sherlock 5, 15–27 Homeland 149–50, 159 Hound of the Baskervilles, The 5, 16–20, 27–7 n.2 Hound of Baskerville, The 26 Hounds of Baskerville, The 16, 22, 26 How to Get Away with Murder 7, 79–91 Howard, Ronald 27 n.1

190

190

House 9, 163–4 Hurt, Marlin 82 Hutchinson, Lloyd 113–14, 116 I, Claudius 6, 29, 36, 39, 42–3, 44 n.11 Caligula 39–42 Claudius 39, 42 Drusilla 40–2 I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here! 97, 101, 104 ITV 27 n.1, 47–8, 54, 56, 58 n.1, 63 ITV3 47 Jefferies, Christopher 65–76 Julia 83 Keating, Annalise 79–81, 89–92 Kemper, Tom 165–6 King Headley II 81 Kingdom 47 Knight, Henry 16–17, 22–6 Kudos 49 Lancashire, Sarah 4 Lancaster, Marshall 48 Landgraf, John 142 Latifah, Queen 84 Laurie, Hugh 8, 162–4, 169 n.7 Laytons, The 82 Le Carré, John 48 Lee Bower, Yvette 84 Lee, Paul 79–80 Leland, David 19, 21, 23, 26 Lena, O My Lena 33 Leveson Inquiry 63, 65, 70 Lewis, Damien 149–50, 162 Life on Mars 6, 48–58, 58 n.2 Hunt, Gene 6, 48, 50–3, 55–8, 59 n.4 Tyler, Sam 48, 50, 52–3, 55, 59 n.4 lighting 4, 11 n.1, 29, 44 n.3, 52 Lila and Eve 88 line delivery 1, 17–25 Lisemore, Martin 39, 42 Living Single 84, 86 location 10, 26, 32 location filming 35, 56 location realism 5, 15–16, 22, 26–7 Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies, The 6, 63–78

INDEX

Love, Nina 63 Macy, William H. 118 Made in Chelsea 99 McCann, Ferne 105 McKenna, Megan 103 McNeice, Ian 115 McNeil, Claudia 83 Marlin Hurt and Beulah Brown Show, The 82 medical drama 9 method acting see Stanislavski, Constantin Michell, Roger 65, 68, 73, 77 n.2 Mills, Brian 21 Mirren, Helen 69 mise en scène 23, 52 Moore, Paul 129, 131–5, 137 Morgan, Peter 63, 65, 68, 72, 74 Morris, Beth 40 Morrissey, David 69 movement 1, 16, 18–19, 26–7, 31, 51 Mrs. Miller 86 Nalluri, Bharat 50, 57 National Theatre 70 naturalism see Stanislavski, Constantin narrative 34, 38–9, 43, 50–3, 56, 137 arc 48 context 57 design 90 development 5 logic 21 tension 48 Neame, Gareth 65 Nichols, Nichelle 83 Night Manager, The 48 Nineteen Eighty-Four 17 Nowalk, Peter 79–80, 92 Olivier, Laurence 131 O’Neill, Eugene 70 Only Way is Essex, The 7, 96–9, 104–6, 108 Osborn, Andrew 15 Paramount Television 50 Peake, Maxine 7, 113–15, 118 Pennington, Michael 114

191

INDEX

Perry, Tyler 85 Pharoah, Ashley 53 physicality 26, 53, 74–5, 88, 90–2, 119–20 Picard, Captain Jean-Luc 50, 54 police drama 1, 9, 56 post-production 24 producer 11 n.1, 20, 35, 53, 160, 163 production process 5, 15, 18, 26–7, 29–31, 49, 168 props 10 Pulman, Jack 39 QI 47 Rakoff, Alvin 33 Randolph, Amanda 82 Randolph, Lillian 82 Ravens, Jan 69 realism 33, 38, 51 reality television 7, 47, 95 celebrity 100, 108 character archetypes 101 constructed reality television 7, 96–101, 108 docusoap 98 performance of self 95–108 performative contract 95–9, 104, 106–8 preparation for performance 100–1 stock character 99 Regan, Jack 56 rehearsal 6, 7, 26–7, 39, 50, 63, 114, 128–9, 173 room 16, 63, 76 techniques 88–9 Reid, Anne 115–16 Renaud, Lissa Tyler 132, 134, 137 Reynolds, Peter 130–1, 134–5, 137 Rhimes, Shonda 79–80 Rhys, Matthew 141–2, 149 rhythm 1, 73–4, 91, 141 Roach, William 54 Rudolph, Ileane 145 Sands, Diana 83 satire 69 Saturday Night Theatre 17 scale 6, 16–19, 27, 31 Scandal 80

191

Schreiber, Lieve 117 Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) 143–4 script 4, 26–7, 33, 50 script analysis 72–6, 86–8 script development 53 scriptwriter see writer Selznick, Barbara 145 set 10, 40, 90 design 11 n.1 four-walled 39 soundstage 26 standing set 26 three-walled 16, 18, 26, 38, 40 Shanley, John Patrick 86 Shatner, William 129 Sheen, Michael 69 Sherlock 5, 15–16, 22, 27 Sherwood, Ben 79 Shipton, Catherine 10 Singer, Bryan 164 Simm, John 48–50, 52–3, 55 Sitcom 20, 23, 25, 51 Skarsgård, Alexander 144 Sleepy Hollow 80 Smith, Suzanne 156, 162, 164–5, 167 Soans, Robin 115, 118 soap opera 1, 9, 20, 98–9, 143, 159, 176, 178, 181, 183 Sopranos, The 89 sound 41 sound design 31 soundtrack 41 space 31, 33–5, 38, 43, 53 narrative space 33 Splash 104 Stanislavski, Constantin 6, 7, 64, 67, 77 nn.3–4, 88 actioning 88 active analysis 7, 90, 92 character action 90–2 events 7, 90–2 given circumstances 52, 87–8, 92 naturalism 20, 25, 30 physical 70–2, 76–7 psychological 72–4, 77, 77 n.5 psychophysical 6, 64, 67–8, 73–7 truth 74

192

192

Stangard, Lila 80, 90–1 Star Trek 83 Star Trek: The Next Generation 50 Stetson, Ron 87, 93 n.3 Stewart, Patrick 50–1, 54, 129 Stock, Nigel 17–20, 23, 26 Strasberg, Lee 117 Streep, Meryl 86 Stubbs, Una 23, 25 studio 30, 40, 43 studio acting 33 studio drama 31–2, 43 studio executives 8 studio production 30, 32, 35 studio realism 5, 15–20, 22–3, 26–7 studio sets 39 Sweeney, The 56, 59 n.5 television awards 63, 65, 76, 79–85, 142, 156, 161 representation of race in 79–85 Thaw, Jack 56 Theron, Charlize 87 theatre 2, 5, 8, 10, 16–17, 22, 27, 35, 47, 50, 63, 114, 116, 129, 133, 135–6, 160 Till Death Us Do Part 23 Timlin, Scott 104, 107 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy 20 Tovey, Russell 22, 24–5 Tricycle Theatre 69, 77 n.6 Trollied 63 Trollope, Anthony 48 truth 78, 117–21 truthiness 120–1 Tubman, Harriet 79 Tyson, Cicely 82, 84 Undercovers 85 Union, Gabrielle 79–80

INDEX

viewers 9, 20, 34, 41, 58 audience 34, 40, 121 British audiences 160 means of consumption 128 reviews 55–6 US audiences 8, 160 viewing habits 9, 51 vision mixer 37, 42 vocal performance 23, 31, 51, 53–4, 73–5, 90–2, 116, 149 projection 16, 18, 20–2, 24–5, 27 training 88, 136, 148 W1A 63 Wainwright, Sally 4 Wallis, Quvenzhané 82 Walter, Harriet 113, 116 Warriors 162 Washington, Denzel 81 Washington, Kerry 79–80, 84 Waters, Ethel 82–3 Watkins, Jason 6, 63–77 Watson, Dr John 5, 15–18, 20–6, 69 Weissmann, Elke 142 West, Dominic 146 West, Timothy 119 Wheatley, Alan 15 White, Liz 48 Williams, Raymond 127 Williams, Roy 133–7, 138 n.1 Willis, Emma 103–4, 107 Wilmer, Douglas 15 Wilson, August 81–2 Wire, The 146 Wise, Herbert 39, 44 n.11 Won’t Back Down 82 workplace well-being 172 writers 11 n.1, 30, 35, 49, 53 Yeates, Joanna 63, 65, 71

193

194