YouTube Acting School With Ricky Gervais

Look at that picture of me.  That’s me doing some fine acting in the short film “Textually Active”.  You can, of course, read about that in my earlier blog entry JD: The Gifted Director.

I have been at this acting thing for quite some time now and it was interesting to have a chat with someone recently about all of the training we do.  We spend a LOT of time, energy and money trying to get back what we did naturally as kids.  When we were kids and played cops and robbers, we believed that we were the parts we were playing.  When my sister had a tea party, she WAS the fancy hostess.  It was play, but we committed to it.

As grown ups, we have that playing squashed out of us, so we ‘study’ to try bringing it back.  It can cost a lot of money, but now we all have a chance at learning from a leader in his industry.  We can learn from him and his guest lecturers for free and even without their knowledge.  I have collected clips and provided commentary so that you can learn from the Unofficial Ricky Gervais School of Acting’s (RGSOA) YouTube Campus.

I can think of no one more suited for your introductory lesson than Sir Ian McKellen.  In this clip he explains his entire process for you.  Please don’t take notes, just listen.  If it’s too complicated for you, please note that it is YouTube and you can watch again.

How does this fine upstanding and Knighted man transform himself into a wizard?  I’m not going to tell you.  That job belongs to Sir Ian, himself in this episode of Extras.

In this next lesson, you will learn an important lesson to all of acting – the power and importance of improvisation.  I’ve always said that my improvisational training made all other acting training make sense.  Hopefully, Liam Neeson can convince you with his intensity in training.  These tools will help you master “being in the moment”.

BONUS: Stephen Merchant is there to remind us what we do not know and that is an important lesson in itself.

Finally, if I’ve ever given advice to actors on the best way to take control of their careers, it is always related to writing.  Writing gives you the power to create work for yourself and to bring something to the table.  If you are successful, you will have multiple revenue streams coming from the same body of work.  We’re getting ahead of ourselves, though.  It all starts with an idea.  They always say that it is best to write what you know.  I think Patrick Stewart will teach you while he is teaching Ricky that this is true.  He will also show, by example that when you are passionate about an idea, you will always come off as brilliant…or maybe that’s just his accent.

That’s it.  You’ve graduated and have the tools needed to find other tools to hopefully help you start planning to maybe build something similar to a career.  The RGSOA has no placement services, but we do guarantee the shallow depth of our perspective and offer a 100% refund of all tuition paid should you find that you lack the talent and or initiative to be successful even with access to our superior levels of excellence in education.  See, we can write long, complex sentences to make out point.

Now get out there and make us proud. We believe in you.  Seriously, we sorta, kinda do.