at home, thousands of miles away from home

I was in most of the scenes we shot yesterday, including a scene where I talked for almost three pages.

Three. Pages. Of. Dialog.

It was a lot, and we were filming right next to an airport so there were constant interruptions from airplanes, so I messed up more than I would have liked … but the cast and crew were really awesome and understanding, and we got through it.

Actually, we didn’t just “get through it.” We did some really great work together. You see, I break down my scenes into actions, intentions, goals, and a few other specific things. Just like in real life, I may want to Let Them Know I’m The Boss, or Put Them At Ease, or Make A Generous Offer. I may need to do all of those things in the span of a few lines, because my primary goal that ties all of that together is To Get Them To Go Along With Something I Can’t Live Without.

Being able to take all of that work and put it into a scene, but then also throw all the preparation away and keep it simple and in the moment is a challenge on in the best of circumstances (it’s easy to get wrapped up in the process, to go into my head and lose my connection to the character and the scene — this is what an actor like me goes to school for years to learn how to overcome) but when there are airplanes a few hundred feet away ever two minutes, it’s even more challenging than usual. It would be very, very easy to be so distracted by the noise and so concerned with just getting through the scene, that I could lose all the levels and character choices … but the director and the cast made sure that didn’t happen, by reassuring me that the performance was layered and communicated all the things I wanted to communicate. (I usually have a good sense of what I’m doing, but there was so much to think about, so much information to convey, and so much noise distracting me, I wasn’t able to know if I was on point or not — and this is where  a good, engaged director and cast is the difference between a performance that is meaningful to the audience and a performance that doesn’t quite hit the mark).

So it was a very long day, and a very challenging one, but I’m proud of what we did and happy with the work.

I’ll be honest: I keep thinking that I’m done being an on-camera actor, but then I have an experience like the one I had yesterday, and I remember how much fun, and how artistically satisfying it is, to take the words off the page and bring them to life with some other people.

I’m in a lot of stuff, again, today. I get to work with an actor who I instantly liked tomorrow, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what we discover together in our scenes.

In which a scene from a movie is recreated (or: further confirmation of the benefits of being easily amused.)

I’m in Toronto for a couple of days, working on a show, before I go to Ottawa later this week.

I’ve had a nice time while I’ve been here, though I wasn’t prepared for how profoundly lonely I would feel after just 24 hours away from my family. I guess after months of spending as much time with my wife, kids, and dogs as I want, I’d grown accustomed to their faces.

To help ease my loneliness, I went for a big walk all around the city today. I took a lot of pictures, and I shot a lot of video, with the intention of making a short thing that I could put on the YouTubes about my day and the stuff I saw. Being creative while I was also being a tourist engaged my brain and my soul in a very good way.

Toward the end of my adventures, I wandered into a train museum thing by the CN tower (TRAINS INTO TUNNELS…) and I got inspired to make this really stupid-but-amusing-to-me thing:

Not bad for something I put together in iMovie in about 15 minutes, I must say.

Hey look I’m unboxing a box that I curated for Quarterly!

This year, I have the privilege of curating four boxes for Quarterly. Because my interests are so diverse, and because I’ve been on this planet for four decades, I thought it would be fun to use each box to pull together some things that reflect the different influences I had in each decade of my life.

This is a video of me unboxing my first box for this year, which is inspired by the 1970s (not the 1980s, which I say at the beginning of the video and didn’t realize until we were editing and it was too late to change it).

If you’d like to subscribe to the remaining boxes I’m curating this year, or just pick up one of them, you can do that at Quarterly.co/wil My next box will be filled with things that were a big part of my life in the 1980s, like video games and RPGs and stuff.