Uta Hagen

He had a wife who was also a great stage actress and then a mistress for many years.

She was in my acting class, not at the playhouse, but when we studied with Uta Hagen.

So I would see Rip out in front of the HB studios picking Amy up.

Amazing.

You could also

read, like, Uta Hagen books.

She was a student of Stella Adler that, like, expands more on, again, like, how to tap into your imagination to build truthful characters.

And a lot of, like, the not underestimating your characters.

Sometimes it depends on the role.

But I found my personal way through it was really going to the textbooks like Uta Hagen, like looking at all of these, especially the more German schools of acting, because that's what how the singers are sometimes trained here.

And then I dug a lot into text and diction.

That was like my secret door for me to kind of understand and get past my own insecurities was digging into the text and diction of the piece, which kind of connected me back to my vocal technique, ironically, where I feel safe because I've learned it and I've trained it.

And so we got in.

But then, you know, but it was great because, you know, suddenly I was introduced to very serious stuff like Stanislavski and Uta Hagen.

We were having to read and learn about craft.

And that was all great.

when you have somebody who played the greatest foundational black American civil rights leader, arguably of all time, not one and two, you know, and then he doesn't even understand our history because he's a black Brit and he didn't know no better in his mind, his whole process.

I don't know if he used the Uta Hagen method or whatever it was, was you take the Nigerian accent and you slow it down.

It's like, yo, any way you slice it, it is not your fault.

But it happened on your watch.

just a lot of fundamentals and things like that.

And then I, I took a, I took an advanced theater course, advanced realism acting course, you know, the Meisner, Uta Hagen, all that stuff.

And then there was the thing that really opened it up.

And the reason why I do film now is we did have a, a acting for the camera film class taught by, he was a, he's a mentor of mine, Bob Hess, great actor.

It's tough.

But as Uta Hagen once said, 'Tell her you love her.'" It's not a direct quote, but I'm pretty sure it is.

Thank you, actor.

[laughs] As Uta Hagen once told me, "Kiss the girl.

Kiss the girl."

[laughs]