The Mike Leigh Method

by Ecstasy Seaton

My semester in London was great. It was challenging too, because I was very happy and set in my life at UB, and then I went into this new place where everything was already established. I started socializing right away, but I didn't adjust to the whole feeling of being foreign until later on in the experience.

Another thing that was hard is that the English acting style is really different. The stereotypical way of characterizing American style is with Stanislavski and Method Acting. You work on the inside and then it comes to the outside, as opposed to traditional English acting, which starts on the outside and works in. That's not strictly true, but traditionally, the styles are contrasted this way.

My regular acting class there was hard because it was very much outside-in, a really physical way to find the character. I couldn't process that, didn't know how to do it. It seemed more like how you'd put together a musical, with choreography. There was also wonderful Chekhov work and a style from this guy Mike Leigh, who's British. They have methods that are kind of outside-in, but those make sense to me because they use a physical memory or gesture to find an emotional connection to what's happening.

I loved the Mike Leigh method and used it when we did Mamet's play, Edmund. You would answer an endless list of questions about a person you know, on whom you want to base a character. If you were to go to an audition with Mike Leigh, you would give him a list of character bios, descriptions of people you know quite well. He would pick one of the bios that you gave him and say, "Do this one." You'd find someone's physical gestures, some internal monologue material. You'd find the essence of the character and distill it into several gestures, and through rehearsal, you would flesh it out.

So I used that method, asking every kind of question that you would ask a person if you were getting to know them really thoroughly - from, what kind of shirt does this person feel most comfortable in? to, what do they remember from their childhood? and from birthday parties to the kind of drink they would have with their dinner. Everything you could possibly think of.