#actingasks

edvin's approach to wilhelm's anxiety is most likely my favourite acting aspect of the entire show – it's incredibly nuanced for someone of his age (not in a condescending way bc there's only like 5 years between us lol but like, you hardly see that degree of detail in a way that isn't over played or presented rather than experienced by seasoned Adult Actors). i know he's mentioned previously that it's something he relates to which is very clear in how personalised his work is. when we see wilhelm experience high anxiety it's honest to the moment because it's grounded in truth. he's connected it with his own anxiety and not in a way that lets his own experience do the work (which is method and that's 👎imo) but that it informs the decisions and motions wilhelm goes through in the scenes.

one of my favourite scenes where we see his anxiety manifest is in the scene in episode 5 where wilhelm tells him that he doesn't want to lose him.

the way he's clearly so distressed at the idea of losing simon that you can hear the emotion in his voice from the beginning of the conversation but as the scene goes on, his resolve begins to crumble and the anxiety he's been holding back comes to the surface when they hug. the way edvin let the anxiety inform the scene rather than direct the scene was so impressive – we can see and feel wilhelm's emotions but they don't take over the scene. omar plays wonderfully off them also and the hug they share is heart wrenching.

another scene i find myself rewatching over and over is the one where he confronts august in episode 6. immediately when wilhelm walks into the room you can feel the anger and fury radiate off of him. i really love how it wasn't approached as this huge screaming confrontation – whilst his definitely does yell at him (deservingly so) it again doesn't overpower the emotional drive behind the dialogue. wilhelm isn't just angry here – he's heartbroken.

august was one of wilhelm's last proper connections to erik – we know wilhelm looks up and trust's erik's judgements more so than anyone else so to be betrayed by that, by someone erik loved so much, it's heartbreaking. he was told he could trust him, he was told he would do right by him and he was wrong. all of this pain wilhelm is going through his partly because the queen wants to protect erik's legacy and give his death meaning, and here august completely spat upon it all. edvin does a phenomenal job w the line deliveries, they're clear and devastating and cut right to the heart.

i was going to end the post here, but i'm going to quickly highlight omar's work in The Break Up scene because they both work off of each other beautifully.

there is such a quiet devastation to omar's line delivery here - simon's clearly heartbroken but he's determined to stand up for himself and stand his ground (i just realised that maybe he took sara's words about letting people piss on him truly to heart). the dialogue comes out slowly and not in a way that drags or is over played for the drama, but for the audience to truly understand how difficult it is for simon to say these things AND how important it is for wilhelm to hear them.

i'm now going to end the post otherwise it's gonna get super long lol and i'm not even sure who else is going to read this but! the acting on this show is phenomenal (particularly from these two) and i could probably write many, many posts about it! it's only been a week since i first watched it and i've watched it through maybe 4 or 5 times since then because i can't get enough of the acting. it's truly something special.

as always, disclaimer: this is all my opinion, but i did go to drama school and have a degree. there’s a pandemic and nothing else to do, i just like talking about it. 

firstly, something I’ve always admired about noel’s work is his ability to tell us a thousand things without saying a single word. we’ve seen it from the very first season – there’s very few other actors on the show that consistently carry that much power with their silence and noel really did the most this week. let’s look at this moment:

mickey doesn’t say anything until prompted by ian and yet because of the intensity in noel’s look and the sheer amount of tension he’s carrying, we’re completely aware of mickey’s feelings in the moment without having to hear any dialogue. his physicality tells us more than any dialogue would. his shoulders are tense, his face is fight – it’s a deep, visceral reaction to seeing his father. noel has clearly thought about mickey’s pov here – not only about terry, but about this moment in general, about the first time he sees him after coming home from the hospital, about watching the man who tortured him for years finally be met with even an ounce of the same pain he was subjected to. immediately, we’re thrown into the heavy weight of the moment and when mickey does speak, it only echoes what we already know from his physicality. the dialogue complements noel’s performance, rather than solely carrying it. he’s managed to tap into the perfect balance of allowing the lines to come from truth — they don’t feel planned out or rehearsed but delivering them in a way we can tell that mickey has thought about it – mickey’s history with terry is lengthy and incredibly complex and that’s completely embodied in how noel delivers each line. It’s important to me that we can feel the history there, but that history is left at the door when it comes to his work in the scene. he’s not displaying the history, he’s existing in it. 

my personal ‘acting theory’ (to avoid sounding like a wanker) is that you don’t act as your character, but that you exist as yourself under those circumstances. mickey’s circumstances in the scene are noel’s circumstances and he reacts — as he would — in the moment. prep work for this is key. noel has said in previous interviews that when approaching mickey in the earlier seasons, he focused on having a secret and lengths he would go to protect it. knowing this, we have a small idea on how he approaches mickey now. he clearly has taken something in his own life and used it to personalise this situation with mickey, he’s thought about how he himself would react in those circumstances, because he is himself in mickey’s circumstances — this is why it feels so personal, this is why his performance is still so consistently nuanced all these years later. this is why he can tell us so much in a simple shift of the eyes. 

take emma’s performance during this episode – in the moments she’s talking about sandy and how upset she is (eg: inside the ambulance with ian and mick) she’s very much really going for the oh my heart is so broken blah blah, but it doesn’t land because you don’t believe her heart is broken. the lines are empty. you compare that to the subtleties noel shows us throughout the episode and it’s almost unfair that they have her scenes next to his. this isn’t to roast her, but just to highlight the differences in nuance and depth. allowing dialogue to carry a performance vs actually living in the performance. 

discomfort played a huge part in noel’s performance in 11x06 too and discomfort in scenes can bring wonders. mickey is uncomfortable — he’s faced with some horribly difficult decisions. we see a stark difference from his easy going ‘just pull the plug on him’ energy vs when he’s actually given the chance to. the stakes in the scene and situation are extremely high – mickey is quite literally battling with an opportunity he’s been waiting his entire life for. the weight of those stakes are heavy on his shoulders and the highlight of the episode for me was the physical journey on noel’s face as he holds the gun to terry's chest. noel gives us mickey’s internal battle – there’s the pent up rage he clearly had been carrying with him on the ride over, then the irritation, the fear, the sadness, the frustration. you can almost see everything mickey has ever had to go through because of terry in the way he looks at him. 

this shot above in particular has really, really stuck with me. the way he doesn’t respond to ian, keeping his eyes firmly planted on terry – he’s lost in his thoughts, in his history and you can feel everything behind noel’s eyes. 

it’s such a fantastically layered performance that he makes it impossible to look away. he allows the moment to play out and live and doesn’t speed run to achieve anything in his performance. he doesn’t push. noel doesn’t walk into the scene and go ‘oh i’m gonna make mickey feel this on this line and this on this line’ – he gives the emotions their time and place to land, we see and feel mickey’s journey without a single word. it all comes from his natural reactions to the circumstances. he doesn’t try and show us what mickey is going through when faced with the option to kill terry — he lives it, he sits in it and he exists in it. 

we also had a great example of noel’s range this ep. he delivered his funny, usual one liners like he has done throughout this season but really hammered home his talent when given dramatic scenes. it was a refreshing balance. 

overall, noel’s performance in this episode is a great example of how a well acted scene doesn’t have to contain screaming or crying or overt, obvious dramatics in order to be categorised as ‘good’. similarly to what I said in my post about ian’s vows, some of the smallest and subtle moments can carry as much as a 5 minute monologue or an intense shouting match. 

remember: this is all my opinion! i’m just an unemployed actor in a pandemic. 

one of my ultimate favourite things about jeremy’s performance is the way he approaches lip’s monologues. in my personal opinion as an actor, monologues fucking suck. they’re unnatural, difficult to pull off and so easily end up being a vehicle for the self indulgent actor to just hear their own voice. luckily for us, jaw manages to knock them out of the park every single time. the key to a successful monologue is a hell of a lot of prep work before hand – you’ve always got to remember that no one monologues and talks at a great interrupted length naturally, that’s just not how humans exist and interact in the world, so an actor always has to consider why their character continues talking and doesn’t stop after the first line. their objective for the scene – what they want to gain – has to be so solid, so vital to the actor/character that we believe they can’t stop talking until they achieve it. an objective is the only thing that drives dialogue forward – we only speak out loud because we want to achieve something. now, there’s an incredibly fine line between pushing to achieve your objective during a monologue and allowing the objective to push you. this is never a problem with jeremy’s work. 

a good objective goes hand in hand with how the lines of the monologue are delivered. every line a character speaks is new to them – the actor rehearses a line but the character doesn’t – each thought behind a line, even if it’s something they’ve thought about before, is new to them. when you’re working in a scene with another actor and trading dialogue, it’s easier for that new line of dialogue to feel more natural as a response to your partner – when you’re on your own in a monologue this can be a huge challenge. monologues are badly done when everything sounds rehearsed – you can tell when the actor isn’t working from moment to moment and is simply saying the lines they’ve learnt in a huge chunk. you don’t believe they’re speaking to achieve their objective, they’re simply speaking the lines on the page and probably are thinking about how good they sound. again, this is never a problem with jeremy’s work. 

now let’s look at this monologue from 5x08:

this is a really well done and subtle monologue on jeremy’s part – it’s one of my favourites and it does a really good job at highlighting how detailed and personalised his work is. before he even begins to speak, you can tell jeremy is prepared for the circumstances of scene. lip is completely riddled with tension – you can see it in the way he clenches his jaw and wipes his hands on his trousers – as an audience member, we already know there’s a hell of a lot on his plate. this monologue is a moment where he allows it all to bubble over. 

lip’s obviously trying to get some leeway on his college finances by explaining his situation to his adviser – perhaps that was jeremy’s objective (to achieve help with his finances) but as he continues talking, it morphs into really heartbreaking glimpse into lip’s pov of being the ‘golden goose’ of the family. it’s the first time we really hear his thoughts on ian’s diagnosis, monica’s illness and how guilty he feels every single day being away from his family. lip asking for a favour becomes less about financial help and even more so about being heard. he needs someone to understand and hear him out. to understand the heavy pressure he feels to achieve what everyone else expects of him. 

a monologue has a mini storyline arc within it and jeremy takes us on journey as we watch lip continue talking, continue exposing himself, putting himself in a horribly vulnerable position. he starts by easing himself in – cracking a joke about how they should get to know one another because he’ll be there a lot – but as soon as he starts going into detail about ian and why he needs an extension on payments, there’s a significant shift in jeremy’s delivery and lip’s relationship to how badly he needs this. jeremy allows himself to fully experience each thought before he delivers a line – he doesn't rush and allows moments to breathe. every single line he says, every single sibling or situation he mentions, we get a glimpse of his pov on the subject. these moments of pause allow lip’s journey throughout the speech to be so clear to us as audience members, there’s never a moment where a piece of dialogue feels delivered falsely or preplanned. jeremy doesn’t push to achieve anything and we follow lip throughout the speech on his journey without a clue where he’s going to end up. 

by the end of the monologue, lip’s desperation to be understood is clearer than ever. he’s panicking but jeremy never overplays it. even as it builds and he begins to visibly get more emotional with tears in his eyes, it never becomes a performance. jeremy always manages to get the balance right and it’s just a really, really beautiful reaction to his circumstances and truthful acting coming from the moment. it’s a huge deal to bare his heart like this to someone – a stranger at that – and jeremy manages to capture that vulnerable dent in lip’s pride perfectly. he’s not yelling, he’s not pulling his hair out, but we still completely understand why this is so important to him. although I'll never know how he actually prepares his work, his text work here is deeply personalised – you can tell jeremy has given lip’s pov a good thought. I believe him the entire way through, his objective is clear and whatever it was that jeremy decided to use worked perfectly for both his motivation and our belief. 

as someone who has shed a tear over performing many a monologue, he makes it seem so fucking effortless – i think that’s what really gets me. i’d love to see him do work on stage one day. as i said, there are about a million things I could talk about when it comes to jaw’s work on the show. this baaaaaarely even scratches the surface! I wanted to talk about another monologue here too, but i think this got long enough only talking about one! 

please always feel free to ask me about any specific moments if you have any pressing questions, i can’t promise i’ll get to it very quickly (i’m sorry, i’m sorry, i’m sorry!) but i will always try.my inbox is always open for anything, acting or otherwise. it takes me a while, but I really, really do love talking about this stuff. 

(remember this is all my own opinion! but i did go to drama school and do have an acting degree – i just like talking about it. we’re in a pandemic, there’s not much else i can do.) 

firstly, cameron’s delivery of the lines. in general, he doesn’t have the most consistent line delivery – sometimes the spontaneity is there, sometimes it’s not – but, in my opinion, his vows to mickey were the most believable thing he said throughout the whole season. every single different vow is said with a different point of view – meaning, you can tell how ian feels about each thing by the way he says them eg: in sickness and in health, richer or for poorer. it’s not done overly so that it removes us from the situation, but as a simple understatement. not only does this gives us a great insight into ian’s pov, but also an insight into how he feels about those things in relation to mickey. cameron does this perfectly – ian’s love for mickey underlines and drives the dialogue forward. 

the words are delivered so gently – you can tell how deeply precious they are to him. his love for mickey is precious and he says them in a way that it’s clear he never wants mickey to doubt it ever again. he never wants a moment like the court house, like the front porch, like the uncertainty in prison, ever again. cam has personalised the words so much, you believe ian. you believe in sickness and in health, in richer or poorer. you believe he’s sealing the deal. cameron wasn’t kidding when he knew that mickey brings out some of the best in his work with ian and whatever text work he put into crafting ian’s pov on the wedding, marriage and mickey is solidly upholding and supporting him here completely. he’s able to fully be 100% in the moment.

the honesty. i’m not sure what objective cameron was working with in this scene (to get married? that’s not a very workable objective – as my professor would say) but it’s clearly working for him to stay grounded in the truth of the moment. there’s so much vulnerability and cameron allows himself to be vulnerable, and that serves us so many moments that surprise us – in the way ian’s looking at mickey, in the little smiled mickey, even in ian’s whispered now? all of those moments come from spontaneous work in the scene. i’d be incredibly surprised if the script gave a direction for the way ian smiles as he says mickey’s name. 

even more so, if it was scripted, cam does a phenomenal job at making it come from a truthful reaction to saying mickey’s name – rather than being something he’d planned or instructed to do on that line. (this again isn’t something that is super consistent) another instance like this is the really beautiful moment when mickey says ‘i, mikhailo, take you ian, to be my husband.’ and ian shifts ever so slightly at the word husband. his face softens as he allows the words to wash over him. ian is so vulnerable in that moment and cameron allows himself to fully allow those words to hit him. his face tells how nervous ian is, how excited he is, how huge this moment is for him. it’s such a beautiful and genuine reaction sprung purely from cam working in the moment and off noel. it’s simple, but it’s a standout. 

the vows ending with them staring at each other, holding each other’s face, is a gorgeous moment of cam and noel’s chemistry together. they’ve done the relationship work, they know what they need to tap into, they can simply allow themselves to sit in the moment and tell us so much by the way they stare into each other’s eyes. that’s all down to two actors who know each other, know their circumstances and believe their circumstances. but i digress, this is about cameron. 

ultimately, i love his work here because i believe it all. i believe everything ian is experiencing in the moment and i believe it’s the first time he’s ever experiencing it. i believe it’s the first time he’s ever said those words. i believe his nervousness, i believe his excitement. cameron brings so much personality to dialogue that we have seen said on tv a million times over – words that could easily be stale, but they’re not. his work is subtle, yet there is so much behind it. i think it’s a really beautiful moment that showcases his talents as an actor that isn’t necessarily A Big Dramatic Crying Screaming Scene which people often point to when talking about an actor’s talent. good work doesn’t have to be crying or drama or screaming, good work can simply be the whispered vows of a man promising himself to the love of his life forever. 

thanks so much for the question! i’m so sorry this took forever. i’ve got a few more asks about cameron – specifically some about season 5, so i will approach his work in other seasons soon, but i really wanted to highlight his work here because it’s truly some of my favourite he’s done on the whole show.