Interviewer (2:50)

From Hollywood actors who go through extreme transformations and method actors who stay in character even when the cameras aren't Rolling to classically trained Shakespeareans. There are many techniques actors use to turn themselves into another person. But is acting always an act? And where is the line between our true authentic selves and the multitude of characters we all play each and every day? Join us of course, with award winning actor and artistic director of the Globe Theatre, Michelle Terry, who's here on my left. As she argues here, there is no rule book and there is no single way to act both in Shakespeare's reality or this one. So please give her a very warm round of applause. Thank you for being here. So, Michelle, maybe for those of us here who aren't fully familiar with your trajectory, do you want to just tell us a little bit about how you came to be the artistic director of the Globe?

Michelle Terry (3:47)

Yeah, sure. So I have been acting for a really long time, partly I suppose, as a sort of. We moved when I was quite young and I didn't know anyone so my mum and dad wanted me to kind of make friends. So I, they, I went to a kind of local and dram company basically as a way to I suppose essentially not be myself and be myself all at the same time and make friends. And then that was from the age of seven and then. So it's sort of been the thing that I've only ever known about how to cope with being alive essentially is acting. And then Mum and dad were very. So I knew that's all I ever wanted to do. Mum and dad were quite. Not traditional, but frightened. It was an industry that none of us really understood. We didn't know anyone that worked in the industry. It was a really unknown arena for them. My mum was a radiographer and my dad was a teacher. So their whole thing was about but what do you do if you don't make money? So I then took a really traditional route and went to university, but still all the time knowing this is what I wanted to do. Then went to drama school and then had about a 15 year career mostly in theatre and then a little bit of writing and a bit of television. And then it was quite an odd way into being artistic director of the Globe because it was a theatre that I absolutely knew and loved from having worked there a lot. And then it went through quite, quite a public crisis around an identity crisis essentially about who and what it was. And the predecessor left and I wrote a letter just saying I couldn't really understand why an organization that for me had put the artist and storytelling so at the center of something, how it could have gone so wrong and where were the artists in the conversation. And if they needed artists in the conversation, I. I'd love to be part of that conversation. And then the CEO at the time wrote back saying, that sounds like a job application. And I was like, it really didn't. But no one else has applied, clearly. So I just had the baby at the time. So I used the job application as a way of piecing myself back together, going, this is my name. This is what I believe in. And then gradually, you get through four rounds of interviews, and then suddenly you end up running one of the most amazing firms in the world. So I still don't really know. That's sort of how I got there. I. And it's the greatest privilege of my life to be able to talk, not just talk about the importance of storytelling, but also practice the importance of storytelling and see the impact of storytelling intergenerationally. Like watching young kids. It's amazing.

Interviewer (6:20)

Wow, what a story. I mean, I feel like there are so many lessons there. First of all, the first one being they always say if you don't ask, you don't get. But you weren't even asking, and you got so amazing. And also sort of this idea of storytelling through the generation. And as somebody who's also in the arts, I'm very curious why you feel that storytelling is so important, because I do think it's very devalued currently. And is there a particular reason why storytelling might be particularly important at the time we find ourselves in now?

Michelle Terry (6:51)

100%. I just bumped into Josh Cohen, who is this amazing psychologist, and we worked together on a play about 15 years ago. And I suppose to start off, I would just differentiate between acting and performing. And acting, for me, is a craft, and performing is something that we all do like. I think we all recognize that we have roles in our life that we switch in and out of all the time. Acting is a really particular craft of exploring someone that's not you and then sharing the someone that's not you with other people in the most safe environment that you could possibly have. So whether that's TV or film or theatre, we're sort of. For me, it's always an exploration of the self in a really safe environment. You know, the play is going to start at a certain time and it's going to end at a certain time. You might confront things about you or the state of the world, but it will end and it will be all right, and we'll all go back to. It will all go back to life afterwards. And we. And again, we were just talking about the power of television, the power of film. We were just talking about adolescence, the power of those stories, in a very safe construct, can put out some of the most difficult conversations of our time, but safely find a way to have nuance and have debate and have discussion about something in a world that externally sort of wants everyone to take a position, be singular and essentially disseminate nuance and complexity. So that's, for me, from. That's what kids do with role play, and that's what we keep doing for the rest of our lives. But we know it. We know that in Greek, they put the hospital next to the theater. You cleansed your body and then you cleansed your soul. We knew that, but somehow, how have we forgotten that? So weirdly, I think we're in a time of trying to remember that bit going. Actually, stories are the things that will help us have the conversation, if not necessarily solve the problem. Yeah.

Interviewer (8:41)

Amazing. Thank you so much. Well, you mentioned that distinction between acting and performance. So how has the quote, acting it many ways from Shakespeare's Macbeth inspired your approach to acting, theatre and performance?

Michelle Terry (8:53)

Yeah, I suppose I'll come to that as from a position of artistic director first. So I inherited this canon that historically was written for male performers, but not, sorry, male actors, but not all male characters. So inherent in the text is a writer that's going, I know I have a whole company of men, but I'm also really interested in understanding all these different bits of all of us, whether that's mostly exploring power. So through the prism of history, through the prism of kings, through the prism of women, through the prism of relationships, he sort of atomizes. And it's so kaleidoscopic, this amazing canon. I definitely come from the place where I think he wrote all the plays. So that, to me is again, going back to the sense of self. This is an amazing human being that was able to stand in the shoes of over a thousand different people, or a thousand different versions of him, which to me goes. We all have that capacity. We all have the ability to stand in the shoes of the most jealous bit of ourself and call it Iago, or the most tyrannical bit of ourself and call it Richard iii. And so there's something that he's asking for, which is an exploration of all those bits of us, again through the prism of role play. And so what's amazing, to be custodian of that canon means that there's a spectrum of where we are on where does lived experience come into acting. And sometimes you're trying to squish the gap between actor and character, and they become sort of almost inextricably linked, that they're not acting at all. And sometimes you're really trying to widen the gap. And I think there's something about. In the gap between. Of that width where, you know, this is the actor and, you know, this is the character in the middle somewhere the audience can get in knowing that this person isn't really a tyrant, isn't really an abuser, isn't really these things. But you can safely have a conversation about the play. So I think there's a spec. For me, the joy of the job is that spectrum. Sometimes you get very close to your idea of yourself or who you think you are, and sometimes you get very far away from yourself.

Interviewer (11:07)

And what is the connection between the two? Because I guess it touches on this idea of, you know, is everyday life a performance? But if it is, then how does that connect to the actual act of acting?

Michelle Terry (11:17)

Yeah, well, I guess that's where in life you're sort of practicing what you then put into your acting for me. So you spend all your time observing people, looking at how people respond in given circumstance. But that in performance is real. Like, we know right now we're all in the tent and you're all watching us. We're all in the same space when you're acting. We all agree that for the next two hours we're going to go to Athens and we're going to agree that now we are in the Forest of Arden and we suspend our disbelief. And so you have these two parallel kind of universes going on. There's a true universe where it's Michelle Terry talking. But then we also agree that I'm also Rosalind. So that's. The. The acting bit is over there. And I suppose the bit that unites them is the audience. I guess, like, someone asked an amazing question in one of the talks yesterday that are you. Are you closer to yourself if you're a hermit, do you. Are you then sort of living with yourself if you've got nobody to kind of as a touchstone to rub up against? And I suppose in some sense, yes, because the thing that challenges the sense of self is when you come into contact with another person. And then we're having a conversation we've never met, we're sort of rubbing up against each other, going, who are you and where do you stand in the world? And we're being witnessed by people, which also adds another element of. And it's being recorded. So There's a whole host of stuff that is going on in our sense of self while we're figuring out is this a useful conversation to. To have?

Interviewer (12:55)

Yeah. So. And I mean, we know the rule of. In life, as soon as you switch the camera on, people's behaviors change immediately.

Daniel (13:01)

Right?

Michelle Terry (13:01)

100. Yeah.

Interviewer (13:02)

It's a, it's a very strange experiment. You could take a room full of people, let them chat away. As soon as you hit record, something changes in the energy of the room.

Michelle Terry (13:12)

Yeah.

Interviewer (13:12)

Is it the self awareness thing? Is it suddenly awareness that you have to play a role as opposed to be? What do you think it is?

Michelle Terry (13:20)

Well, maybe it's something about that suddenly there's a gap. Appears like you start to watch yourself as much as you are being watched. It was quite interesting doing a conversation about the sense of self yesterday because I thought we're not gonna get it almost. You can't get close to answering that because there's a bit of you going, but it's being recorded and it's gonna be out there forever and that's gonna fix me to something. But I might change my mind tomorrow. So like.

Interviewer (13:47)

And you're not allowed to change your

Michelle Terry (13:48)

mind and you're not allowed to change your mind. And yet the self is not fixed and is endlessly fluid. So it's.

Interviewer (13:53)

That touches on another point I wanted to ask you about, which is about this idea of.

Daniel (13:58)

Yeah.

Interviewer (13:58)

I remember hearing Kirsten Stewart a few years ago saying, people say, oh, she,

Michelle Terry (14:03)

she's such a natural actress.

Interviewer (14:04)

And she said, well, really great acting isn't actually acting. And I was wondering what you thought about that statement because there's something about it being like, well, she's so natural, that it is natural. That actually, is it natural. So what is great acting? Is it actually not acting? Is it tapping into like a true version of yourself? Or is it just having perfected the craft of sort of mimicking a role or a character?

Michelle Terry (14:31)

Yeah. Wow. I'm just looking at my part. We've just done a play together and there's this amazing practitioner called Stella Adler that says if anyone comes up to you and says, you were so good at acting, you were so brilliant tonight, you should know that you've done a bad job because everyone's applauding you for your acting. And so they were, they were watching you do your acting rather than experiencing the story and having some kind of self evaluation or self reflection. And I suppose there is some truth in that. I just did this a piece last week with the amazing Tim Crouch. I Don't know if anyone knows him as a. So he's a. He's a polymath, really. He's a writer, he's a director. And he. There's this piece, if you ever get the chance to see it go. It's called an Oak Tree. It's been running for 20 years and it's a. It's a duolog. And the only thing that stays the same is that he plays one character and the other person coming in has never played it. And they. It's a new person every night. And you rock up, you test the microphone, you test the earpiece, you test that the font is big enough that you can read the script that he's going to give you throughout the play. And he's really playing with this idea, like, so I can't prepare my great acting. I can't prepare because I don't know what I'm gonna be doing. And so he really plays with this idea of the simultaneous world that on one level the audience are watching a person be in the most truest circumstance, which is, I literally don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what is about to happen next. So you're in a world that is very true. But at the same time, he also gives me a name that's not my own and a character description that's not my own. And you suddenly realize the power of projection from the audience that actually the creation of great character, not necessarily great acting, but the creation of character comes from the space where the audience can project them onto the character as much as you trying to force a character onto them. And there was this amazing moment on stage where he left me on my own for. He said, I'm going to go and get you a glass of water now. And left me on my own for a minute. And we all knew in the room that Michelle was on her own, not knowing where he'd gone and with nothing to say and left. So everyone knew Michelle was on her own. But there was a soundtrack playing that gave us the sense of the given circumstance that I won't spoil because you need to go and see the piece. But we also knew that there was another reality going on. So there was a kind of empathy for Michelle, the person. And then projection onto the. The character called that I won't say because you've absolutely got to go and see it. But it totally messes with your mind about who is creating the performance. Wow, that's.

Interviewer (17:17)

I mean, you sold it. I'm getting tickets tonight.

Michelle Terry (17:20)

Don't go and see it. Do it. Yeah.

Interviewer (17:22)

Oh, no. Doing it sounds like the one. It sounds like you learn about yourself a fair bit, so thank you for that. So let's talk a little bit about Shakespeare. What is it about Shakespeare that makes him so great for exploring multiple, even contradictory characters and aspects of human identity?

Michelle Terry (17:39)

It's quite a rare thing to have. I mean, I know he was writing 400 years ago. He absolutely knew who he was writing for. So in a way, character description was sort of unnecessary. He was. He knew that this person would go, then go and convert it and interpret it. It's really rare to get a writer that doesn't want to also nail down exactly what they want you to do in the performance. So the stage directions or the character descriptions. We've got a production of the Crucible on at the minute, Arthur Miller's amazing play. It's on it. And anyone who knows that script knows that when he first wrote it, he gave it in and everyone did it. And he was like, oh, my God, that's. They've got it wrong, essentially. So now when you read a version of the script, there are these endless pages of character descriptions because he wanted to just make sure there was the best possible chance of getting it right. That's such a. An unbelievable pressure on a live experience, because the chances of getting it right are really slim. And especially when you're playing somewhere at the globe where right is an impossibility, because you can have prepared to be or not to be in your room and have absolutely nailed it. But at the point that you start that speech, a pigeon is going to land and completely upstage you, or the rain is going to come in and everyone's going to suddenly start getting their ponchos on and make. You know. So it's sort of the most beautiful provocation to just.

Daniel (18:58)

B.

Michelle Terry (19:00)

So it means that you can always meet this material. A, as an audience member, you can. Like, we have a thing where we program Midsummer Night's Dream every year of my tenure, but it sort of doesn't matter because every time you come back to it, you are different, the audience are different. And I think there's such an unbelievable trust in that. The alchemy of where actor meets material, where it meets the audience and the time of day and the space you're playing it in, it's a really amazing provocation to an actor without not going. And when you sit on this chair, you need to look here and then you need to breathe in, and then it's like, oh, my Gosh, that's a mathematical sum. That's quite hard to get an answer to.

Interviewer (19:38)

I mean, it sounds terrifying, to be honest. It's not.

Michelle Terry (19:40)

Oh, there's no.

Daniel (19:41)

Yeah.

Interviewer (19:41)

Why to perform in, I guess. Well, I suppose as a bit of a control freak and as somebody who's used to controlling the parameters of the engagement, that, you know, the pigeon landing halfway through the monologue is going to disturb me.

Michelle Terry (19:53)

Yes, it will totally. Yeah, it will do that. Definitely.

Interviewer (19:56)

Probably be heavily focused on the pigeon at that point. And then the ponchos.

Michelle Terry (19:59)

Yeah. And the pigeon is asking you to as well.

Interviewer (20:02)

Do you then just adapt around the pigeon? I mean, is that also part of the beauty of the performance in those environments that you kind of can allow these interruptions to become part of the flow of the play?

Michelle Terry (20:13)

Totally, yeah. Yeah. Because that's. It's almost the truest thing that's going to happen on that day, because everyone knows I've rehearsed my lines and practiced it. Sit for six weeks and you will know that we're not really in Elsinore. And then the pigeon comes, goes. But I'm really here. And. Yeah. A moment of truth in something entirely artificial. Yeah.

Interviewer (20:30)

So let me ask you a little about this idea that we've touched on already, this idea of the real self. How does the idea that there might not be a real self, which some people here, of course, will debate, unsettle our need for something real? You know, is it that there's, know this ambiguity over whether there is even a real self? And we talk all the time. There's a lot of therapy books. You can find some at the bookshop telling you about finding your authentic self, but there's a debate over whether that's even real. So is acting, you know, a way of getting to that, or is it an exploration of the multitudes that maybe tell us that there isn't really one?

Michelle Terry (21:07)

I suppose because of. For whatever reason I've chosen this career, I think the idea of fixity scares me a bit. So I suppose I've spent most of my career doing a very live art form where presence is the thing that you're trying to get to. So it's not that there's not a self, like, absolutely, you can be in the middle of three sisters and having a very complicated scene with your three sisters and then going, but we're taking a really long time doing this play and we're gonna miss the last train to get home for the babysitt. There's another self that is also commenting on where you are. But I suppose that's also true in life. Like, we're sat here now, but you're also going, this is great, but we need to get to a Q and A.

Interviewer (21:56)

It does help. There's a panel. So letting us know that at the back.

Michelle Terry (21:59)

But. Yeah, yeah. So there's. I guess there is a divided self, I guess, which in acting you're exploring or exploiting. And I suppose that's the bit why maybe I've not landed in film or television so much. Because the idea that that's the performance. I would. I would go, ah, but there's a thousand other ways that I would have done that moment. Or maybe why we resist filming stuff because you go, that's. I might change my mind in 10 minutes, let alone 10 years. So I think there is a self, but the self is endlessly fluid. Yeah.

Interviewer (22:31)

Sounds very freeing, actually, without the lenses. And I think about that in the context of a generation where most of us are filming ourselves all the time, doing everything.

Michelle Terry (22:40)

Yeah.

Interviewer (22:40)

And the limitations that places potentially on our ability to see ourselves differently if we have to kind of then conform to the version that we've reproduced, created.

Daniel (22:48)

Yeah, right.

Michelle Terry (22:49)

Yeah.

Interviewer (22:49)

The avatar.

Michelle Terry (22:50)

Yeah.

Interviewer (22:50)

That we exist in. In social media, in other spaces.

Michelle Terry (22:53)

Or that then you put out there and other people need you to then maintain. Like, there's enough in your own family where people like. But you're like this. You're like, you. You do like. You like lemons. I just know I need you to like lemons. I don't like lemons anymore. But you. You change their sense of self if you don't like lemons anymore. No one likes that.

Interviewer (23:10)

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, my cousin is called Amandine, which in French is a reference to almonds, and she hates almonds. But it was not allowed for her to hate almonds.

Michelle Terry (23:19)

Right.

Interviewer (23:19)

Because her name is Amandine. So you have to like almonds. Very disturbing to everyone that she could not like anyway.

Daniel (23:25)

So.

Interviewer (23:26)

Yes.

Michelle Terry (23:27)

The name that you get.

Interviewer (23:28)

Give.

Daniel (23:28)

Yes.

Interviewer (23:29)

If you're called almond, basically, you have to like almonds. It just doesn't make sense otherwise. So. Yes, I hear you on that one.

Daniel (23:36)

Wow.

Michelle Terry (23:37)

What a narrative to ever imagine.

Interviewer (23:39)

And you actually despise them. Has a particular role ever changed the way that you see yourself or maybe revealed something to you unexpected about yourself?

Michelle Terry (23:53)

There's one. I think I mentioned it yesterday, one of my first ever roles coming out of drama school. And again, that thing where you want to give your best performance and you. You desperately want audience to like you and you desperately want to get another job out of it. And I was playing a Ma Blythe spirit. And I'm really sorry maybe you all heard me say this yesterday, but I came out of the performance and went to stage door and there was someone at stage door, a young girl, quite upset, and said, thank you so much for playing someone with greasy hair. I know in the age of representation, like, there's lots that's not being represented, greasy hair and not being represented. And she was like, thank, I've got greasy hair. And I never see people with greasy hair on. On stage. And I was like, you're welcome. But as I walked away, I was like, but I was wearing a hat. Play. So I was like, oh, my God. The power of her sense of self. Absolutely, for whatever reason on that day, needed herself to feel affirmed, found affirmation in my character, and had totally projected greasy hair onto my character. And I was like, wow, I'm really not in control of a lot of what I'm doing. So it was sort of after three years of lots of painful three years at drama school, I got the best lesson in that, really. Wow.

Interviewer (25:14)

Which was that the audience is, I mean, in huge part determining the meaning.

Michelle Terry (25:20)

Most part. Most part, I'd say. Yeah.

Interviewer (25:22)

So that's so interesting because that really is what distinguishes obviously, film and theater.

Michelle Terry (25:28)

Yeah.

Interviewer (25:29)

So the audience in theater is playing a much more critical role that maybe we even give it credit for, typically completely.

Michelle Terry (25:37)

And I suppose as well, because that's the ultra live relationship between the actor and the audience. So again, you know that when you're on stage and you know that someone's just moved a piece of paper over there, so you might need to slightly raise your voice. And then. Then you've got. And when you're doing Shakespeare, you've got maybe a group of students down here that are translating the play to each other at the same time as you're trying to perform. And everyone can see them talking to each other, but they're translating the play. So they're all of this stuff that's such an ultra live relationship. Whereas as an actor in television and film, you have none of that, which is what is a director's editor's medium. You sort of go, I'll give you what I've got, but you have no idea how it's going to be interpreted in a way. Yeah, yeah.

Interviewer (26:19)

And of course, you also don't have that. The beauty that you get in theater of doing things sequentially and then having the sort of going on the journey right you just like, turn up right now, cry hysterically.

Michelle Terry (26:30)

Yeah.

Interviewer (26:30)

And then the next scene, you're going to be jumping, jumping for joy because you just received.

Michelle Terry (26:35)

Exactly.

Interviewer (26:35)

First child's birth or whatever it may be.

Michelle Terry (26:37)

And I suppose that speaks to the provocation in. In the discussion, which is, I think, why. I can understand why some people do what we call method acting. Because if you're playing a role where you're going to do that, you're going to shoot the first scene of the film, you probably shoot the last scene of the film on the first day and the first scene of the film on the last day. But if you're where. You're gonna have to maintain a sense of character and maintain a sense of dramaturgy and hold the whole thing in your head. It's very hard when someone's then going, oh, I absolutely loved you in that TV program. Can we have a conversation? It's like, well, I've now got to go and play where I'm deeply upset. Also, sometimes. We were just saying, you can often do a scene where your scene partner isn't even there. Like, they've got a later call. So you're doing a scene in a. I remember doing a scene in a piece where I played a murderer, and spoiler alert, it was me. And I remembered in the last scene in the cell being interviewed, and I wasn't even playing opposite the person interviewing me. They weren't there. So I just had to absolutely not only imagine where my character might be in that moment, but also imagine how somebody might be reacting to me. Like it's.

Interviewer (27:44)

And project that on a black dot,

Michelle Terry (27:46)

or not even a black. Not even that.

Interviewer (27:47)

You didn't even get a dot.

Michelle Terry (27:48)

Yes. Like, imagine where they. Like how poor they were and so that intense. So I totally understand. I think method acting often gets a bad, bad press. Like, why can't you just try acting? But actually, the conditions are so kind of kaleidoscopic. Of course, if you want to hold an integrity of something, I can totally understand why you'd want to stay in character.

Interviewer (28:11)

And we've had some of the most amazing performances from people willing to go on that journey. Right.

Michelle Terry (28:18)

Thank you to Michelle. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Daniel (28:21)

Thank you. Thank you for listening to Philosophy for our times. If you enjoyed the episode, don't forget to, like, share and subscribe. And if you have any thoughts, you can find our email in the show notes.

Podcast Host (Miriam Francois) (28:36)

And Daniel, did you yourself have any thoughts on the episode?

Daniel (28:39)

I did. I mean, first of all, I found it really engaging and I really appreciated how Michelle expressed herself. I thought she was very funny. What particularly stood out to me was her description of this, these absurd layers of performance and acting that can go on during a performance. This idea that you can have the actor playing a role but at the same time you have these very banal, mundane aspects of performance that we, that we carry out day to day as, as humans. And I thought that brings a whole new level to how I will see acting performance from, from now on.

Podcast Host (Miriam Francois) (29:17)

Awesome. Yeah. So, yeah, if you have any, anything to say, if you want to riff off of what Daniel said or, you know, just get in contact with us, then, yeah, like we said, email in the show notes. But until next time, stay safe, take care and we will see you soon.

Daniel (29:33)

Bye.

Interviewer (29:37)

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