A Quote by Stephen Karam
To see professional actors do my work, to take it seriously - that was the thing that made me think playwriting could actually be what I do. It's not a profession that has some sort of clear career track, like, 'This is what you do to be a playwright.'
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I first decided that I could make a career of MMA after I decided to take it seriously and not act like a teenager in some band, but fully commit myself like a professional. Roughly, when I decided to up and move in the middle of the night from Omaha, Neb. to Denver, Colo. for proper training.
I admire many actors, though I don't think there's anyone whose career I would want to mirror sort of by the beats. What I'm really looking to do is constantly defy expectations. I'm very curious to see if you can actually have a character actor and a movie star's career combined.
When I landed in L.A. in early '89, William Morris decided to take me on to see if I could get any jobs. I was cast in a TV movie called Protected Surf, and made $30,000 in four weeks, and I decided I needed to take acting seriously, because I had never made that much money in a year, much less four weeks. That's when I decided I thought I could make a career out of it.
I'm one of those lazy actors; I like to take what the playwright wrote and work with that.
One thing you gotta take into consideration is that it's professional wrestling, and you know it going in. There's dangers to every profession, and our particular profession, concussions is one thing.
My professional success is really important to me, and my career is really important to me. It's the most important thing to me outside of my family. I take it very seriously and work really, really hard at it. Family comes first, but this is something that's really important to me too.
What my losses made me think was that I needed to take my career more seriously and to train right.
When you're young, you kind of take yourself seriously, and you think, like, "People need to see what I can do." And it's so laughable, especially with actors.
I know that some actors take acting terribly seriously. I take it seriously in that if someone pays me to do it I know I have to deliver.
I don't want to take shots at professional actors, because obviously the great ones are great. But I do think that given the kind of stories I've been telling in my films, it's hard for me to imagine how professional actors would have done better. And it's easy for me to imagine how they would have done worse. Because I think a lot of what an actor is trained to do and a lot of what an actor's instincts point toward is clarification, is always making it clear what's happening in the story, how the character fits into the scene, what the character wants.
I tried to take seriously the idea that if you tortured language you might arrive at some new truth. Later it became clear to me that I was retreading ground by fighting the literary battles of the 1950s and 1960s, and that I was actually a bit bored by some of the books I professed to love.
I fell into playwriting accidentally, took some classes in it, and also took creative writing classes, but I really didn't expect it to be a career because I didn't believe there was a way to make money as a playwright without being lucky and I didn't feel particularly lucky.
I think 'The Witch' was actually my 100th job. Only took me 100 jobs to get a lead! But it did change things a lot. It was a magical thing for Rob Eggers to pick me out of the all the actors he could have for that part. It was an amazing part. It's changed my career massively.
The only thing I would advise young actors to do is prepare for the amount of adversity that you're going to come in contact with by choosing to be an actor because before you actually "made it" or get the skills, people are all not going to take you seriously, and many people will try to discourage you from it. Don't take any of their advice. Do it, and do it and do it. Remember the compliments. Forget the insults.
I'd like to do more dramatic roles but I would never give up comedy to do it. I've seen a lot of actors that do a complete 180 degrees and say: "I'm done with comedy, I want to be taken seriously." I take my comedy very seriously and I want to be taken seriously because of my comedy. I think it's more fun for me. I enjoy laughing and attempting to make people laugh. So I'd like to do more drama but I'd never do the 180 thing.
One of the things he liked about playwriting as to any other kind of writing is that a playwright is a w-r-i-g-h-t, not a w-r-i-t-e; in other words, that a playwright is more of a craftsman than an artist of the big novel.
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