It is Dec. 11 2023 and here is all the work that I’ve been able to accomplish this past week.

Acting Training

For this week, I worked on developing a character named Tommy in a scene from The Dreamer Examines His Pillow by John Patrick Shanley. This is for my class with the Warner Loughlin technique, and I’ve been slowly allowing this role to sink in this past week. I had one up already and now I’m simply laying into the technique’s work some more to specify and add clarity to the dialogue. I’m also challenging myself to get into this character physically a bit more which I’ll add more today.

Agency/Manager Emails

Nothing. But that’s alright, I’ve started with the top agencies, which tend to toss unsolicited material, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying. If they toss it they toss it, but if they read it they read it, and I’m in luck. Either way, the most important part is to focus on making it your full-time job to find a job. Agencies and managers will help with this, but a lot of times it’s the work that you do that’s going to get you noticed. So while we are also cold emailing for agents we are also on a mission to receive a job filming or a play in LA. It’ll make the move even easier.

Movies - Shows

Napoleon

I think Venessa Kirby just out-acted Joaquin Phoenix. Both were incredible. I thought Ridley Scott made some fantastic choices to help the audience feel even more connected to our characters. Scott does a great job telling the story by adding more focus to Vanessa Kirby’s Josephine and the relationship between both her and Joaquin Phoenix’s Napoleon. I felt choosing Joaquin for this role solidified Napoleon’s enigmatic, and mostly awkward character traits. Vanessa Kirby stood much taller (literally) and sat in the complexity of this role, with what I felt was a desire to be safe, but a fear of being trapped. The dilemma was well understood.

May December.

Todd Haynes utilizes zooms and sound design to create wonderful tension, but also humor in this study on complex human emotions, love, desire, lust, and a “may december romance” a phrase describing a relationship where one partner is significantly older than the other. An actor, Natalie Portman is exploring the role of a woman who has a child with a thirteen-year-old. Now twenty or more years later she finds her research through the persons themselves living a happy and busy life on the surface but underneath the thin veneer suffering from the consequences.

Fantastic performances all around from Julianne Moore, Charles Melton, and Natalie Portman paired with unique, campy, yet subtle techniques with Todd Haynes directing made for a great movie.

Mushi-shi

Onto the spiritual episodic portion. This is an anime that I believe anyone can watch. It’s slow, it’s patient, it’s beautiful. Mushi-shi follows Ginko a Mushi-shi by trade, someone who is highly knowledgeable of the spiritual beings that are called Mushi. Mushi are ancient mythological creatures that traverse our planet, beings unseen by many, and seen by special few. Each episode is fairly disjointed from another and so the whole series can be watched out of order if you’d like, and there are lessons to be learned in each. Though I don’t know if this show sits in anything like a tactile belief, there are hints of Shintoism in it, which is the belief that gods exist in the natural world. This nature-filled adventure will have you wanting to get a large cabinet for a backpack and hiking meeting locals everywhere you go. So go.

Invasion

I wanted to watch this show because Nedra Marie Taylor was my acting teacher in my freshman year at PACE University who solidified my desire to focus on acting. She appears in the second season so I binged it hard to get to her, and all I have to say is that it was worth it. Her performance is stunning and fine, I might be biased, but I hope season three comes soon and it focuses more on her character. Setting her wonderfully full and complex performance aside for a second, because the show is also fantastic. This show features multiple locations and even while filming had units across the world filming and then brought it all together in post, which I thought was such a smart idea. It makes me wonder who might have done some version of filming like that to bring the story together across the world. Because of this there are multiple narratives, this may be because I binged it but I didn’t feel lost at all while watching each of these stories take place. Fondly noting how they could have fallen into the trap I enjoyed watching each and every story develop as well. I felt there were some moments when some stories were stronger than others, but this didn’t show up for me too much throughout 2 seasons of 10, 50-minute, episodes.

Between… Killers of the Flower Moon or Fingernails

I’m currently writing this the night of Dec. 10 2023, and I’m deciding between these two, I’m leaning toward taking the time for Killers of the Flower Moon feeling somewhat intimidated by the run time, or Fingernails featuring a favorite actress of mine Jessie Buckley. I’ll let you know in the morning what I decide on.

Good morning: I watched Killer’s of the Flower Moon. I thought this film had a necessary story to tell. It felt poignant and truly punched you in the gut, which I loved. I want to get more into this film and hopefully, I’ll talk about it some more in the coming weeks.

Goals for Next Week and to Close

My goal is to hit 30 emails to separate agents and top folk (I met Will Ferrell for a moment at my restaurant, and I’m inspired to email him and his production company) So I am thinking A-listers. The goal isn’t always to send my material to people, the goal is to simply build a relationship, however that looks, and to me, that looks like simply sparking up a conversation, talking shop, and asking questions that I genuinely have questions about.

So Monday is here and the goal is to keep things optimized. For my email, I plan on batching today, Tuesday, and Thursday. I would also like to work on writing a character study on May December as well as Napoleon, and Killers of the Flower Moon. The goal right now is to simply begin writing these character studies and start posting them on my blog. I’d like to begin finding improvements to each that I do.

Thank you so much for reading and I can’t wait to update you on progress next week. Catch you Dec. 18, 2023

Much love today and every day,

Matt Piper 🐅🌱