offcamera

Night after night, a five-year-old Rebecca Hall witnessed her mother losing her s**t, ripping off her clothes and wailing operatically while holding a severed head. What could’ve been a scarring experience instead underscored the beauty of committing to a role. And from about that age, Hall’s been certain about what she was meant to do, and how deeply she loves doing it. The proof is in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Please Give, Christine, and now Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, a lush...

Willem Dafoe is an actor who often seems a million miles from Hollywood, no matter where he is. It’s apparent in the roles he’s chosen, and how he’s chosen to play them. He’ll take Tanzania or a desolate Florida motel strip over a sound stage any day. He’ll show you the good side of a bad guy. And once he falls in love with an idea or a world, he’s all in. “There’s a pleasure to having someone tell me what they want to express or what they’re interested in, and then sending me in there...

When Chadwick Boseman got the call about Marshall, he was worried. Where’s the hard part, he wondered? The screaming muscles, bone-deep exhaustion and verbal abuse he endured to play Jackie Robinson (42), Vontae Mack (Draft Day) and James Brown (Get on Up) didn’t seem required to play future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall. He found it soon enough – you try leading a courtroom drama when your character is silenced at the opening gavel. For Boseman, the hard part is always the best...

Any number of things can fuel success. There’s talent and ambition, the usual suspects. But don’t discount fear, insecurity or being a wise ass, either. Check all of the above for Nick Kroll, but also add the belief that a career you love can’t be handed to you by anyone other than yourself. He’s created some of the funniest characters in modern sketch comedy for Kroll Show, two of which escaped to the surprise hit Oh, Hello on Broadway. Not all his ideas are brilliant (kale lollipop,...

Tom Papa is a happy, well-adjusted, family guy who's fine with being labeled clean. So how the hell did he ever become a comedian? He had no idea if he could make it in standup, and no roadmap to get there. What he did have was the certainty that nothing else felt right. It took a lot of observation, a lot of hard work and a certain comedy chiropractor, but mostly it took learning to be himself. He's now a successful standup, show host and actor. What keeps him going? The possibility of...

When you think about how many brilliantly wacky characters have sprung from Alan Tudyk's imagination to the screen for the past two decades, and then factor in his history of prank calls and high school improv competitions, it's a bit hard to fathom that his early career plan was to be a hotel manager. Sure, if Basil Fawlty is your idea of a hotel manager, but he was actually serious. Sometimes, the path not taken is a good thing. Alan's path has led him to Broadway, too many film and TV...

Here's a question: How many years do you have to spend watching actors through a camera before you realize maybe that's what you were meant to be doing all along? If you're Jay Duplass, you might also wonder why your brother Mark didn't let you in on how fun and freeing it can be a little sooner. But no matter. At a time in life when most actors are rushing the directors chair, the elder Duplass brother is running in the opposite direction on Transparent, and killing it. It's the second...

If you've always thought of Hollywood as a competitive, jealousy-ridden place where success is watched, compared and envied, Mike White is not here to disillusion you. And his latest film suggests the world inside your own head might not be so different. Few writers understand our inner dialogs better, and that can be embarrassing. Not to mention touching, depressing and yes, funny. We talk to one of the business's most talented screenwriters (and directors, and actors) about why he feels...

Hi Folks! Well, summer is almost over. Kids are shuffling back to school, the sun is setting a bit earlier, and over here at the Off Camera studios, we are hard at work on our fall season. To kick things off, we proudly present our second annual Call In Podcast, chock full of conversations with listeners like you, as we touch on a multitude of creative and show related topics.That podcast is available right now, right here. Opening up the phone lines is a lot of fun for us over here, and...

It's ironic Holly Hunter won an Oscar for The Piano, in which she did her own playing. If she'd had the chops she wanted, we'd never have seen her in that movie, Raising Arizona, Broadcast News or so many others that made us swear she was born to act. Fortunately, she found acting almost as sacred and transportive as music, her original dream. Working with a string of the best directors in the business right out of the gate helped - and led to some later-career disillusionment. But...

The woman huffing in impotent rage in a frozen Marshalls' checkout line with an armful of bras. The jubilant loudmouth barely able to articulate the awesomeness of a Monster! Truck! Rally! The lady blithely terrorizing passengers with her wheelie as she pushes up to the boarding gate. Nobody wants to be these people. Except Lauren Lapkus. She loves them. She wants to inhabit them. If it means being odd or ugly, it's also license to say and do anything she wants without repercussion. Oh, to...

We all have one or two turning points in life, but Michaela Watkins' life seems like an endless string of them. There was the classical music camp that unleashed her inner comic. The spontaneous road trip that became five years of regional theater. There was the backstage decision that doing Shakespeare actually kinda sucked. And then the double epiphany: she should be on a TV show in Los Angeles and join The Groundlings. Getting cast on Saturday Night Live and then inexplicably dropped...

What makes a kid cry on her birthday? The occasional cake-induced stomachache or bouncy-house bruise, sure. For Zoe Kazan, it was a sense of what she was leaving farther behind, and she cried every year. A direct and unselfconscious view of our imagination and its creative expression gets harder and harder to find in the rearview mirror unless you cultivate and protect it. Kazan tries hard to do just that through work that she loves, in a business she often doesn't. Acting is a joyful...

Struggle is just how Zoe Lister-Jones rolls. She watched her parents struggle to make a living from their art, and tussled with her own decision to pursue acting versus stability. She struggled to break into film, finally deciding that instead of fighting the system, she'd create one, co-writing and acting in her own projects. The biggest yet is Band Aid, which just happened to help women battling for a place on a film crew. It's a comedy about artistic and personal failure, and our...

When you don't know who you are or what you want to do, and you have no real intention of doing what your family wants you to do, and then you decide you have to do something you have no idea you can do, what should you do? First, avoid thinking about it. Lie to your loved ones a little. Then, write a movie about it. So far, so good. But how do you know if your life is entertaining enough to be a movie? If Judd Apatow tells you it is, that's a start. Standup-turned-leading man Kumail...

With a slew of acclaimed films and several TV series in the last two years alone, it seems Hollywood's come gunning for Sam Elliott. Fair enough; four decades ago, Elliott came gunning for Hollywood. But not for stardom or money. "It wasn't about anything but making film, and I knew the kind I wanted to make." He admired Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne - and the dudes who wrangled their horses. Guys who stood for simple, honest acting; guys we didn't want to watch being anyone but...

Jim Jefferies is an Australian comic who found success in America by mocking our laws, hypocrisy and leaders - and don't get him started on actors. But before you take offense, know that he's an equal-opportunity berator. The most patriotic thing you can do, whether youre British, Australian, American, South African, whatever the fuck you are, is speak out about things you don't agree with. Also, know that he loves the country that gave him both a permanent home and In-N-Out. It's just...

As a film-obsessed 10-year old stranded in a rural suburb of Virginia, Danny McBride went with his parents to pay the cable bill so he could see where all those movies were made. Maybe the magic didn't happen in that small strip mall office, but a film he made in a small strip mall 20 years later launched a career he never imagined. He made it with friends he still works with today, a group with the hubris to think they were just as talented as the guys they saw working in Hollywood. When...

Billy Crudup's post-theater school plans for a steady, workmanlike, and hopefully long career spent perfecting his craft were jackhammered by Almost Famous. Suddenly he was Hollywood's Next Big Thing, and completely unprepared for the dubious responsibility that comes with that crown. In fact, he was pretty sure he didnt even want the crown. "It throws you into some confusion about yourself and what you do and how each next move could affect that." Going with his gut and opting instead for...

From the this-just-in file: "Being in a band is not a normal job." Chris Shiflett knows it's a laughable understatement, especially when the band in question is the Foo Fighters, one of the few remaining rock acts that can record, tour and provide a (very) nice living for it's members. So why does he still take guitar lessons, humble himself in songwriting workshops and log 14-hour days in the back of a van? The answer is love, friends - an all-consuming passion for making, discovering and...