How to Think Like a World-Class Actor in 17 Minutes | Proven Acting Advice for Success

What's up, Believe Nation? It's Evan. My one word is believe, and I believe in you. I believe in your potential, and I want to see that thing inside you come out and be unleashed onto the world to benefit you, your family, your community, and the world. I started a new series called Success Clues because I believe success leaves clues, and the more we can learn from people who've done a lot more than us, you can apply it to your life, to your career, to your business. So today we're going to look at how the world's most successful actors And as always, guys, as you're watching, if you hear something that really resonates with you, please write it down in the comments, put quotes around it so other people can be inspired as well. And when you write it down, it's much more likely to stick for yourself too. Enjoy.

Let's start from the beginning. Was there ever a time that you doubted yourself?

Yeah, you know, I thought when I, you know, I live in this basically this flop house. It's 26 $60 a week, very transient, and you share the floor with 10 people. You don't know anybody on the planet, literally no one.

I think I recall you saying your acting low point, The Godfather, and you said you couldn't even get in the—

I couldn't even get cast as an Italian. I'll never forget where there's a party scene, is it 300 guests? I said no. I go, what part of me didn't make past the Italian identification aspect? They go, I don't know, you just don't I didn't fit in. I went, wow, God's telling me something.

That's got to play with your psyche a little bit.

A little bit.

I know.

Yeah.

But it didn't. And you decided to take matters into your own hands by writing Rocky.

You know, I've been coming here for 6 years. And 6 years you've been sticking it to me. I want to know how I've come. You want to know?

I want to know! OK, I'm going to tell you.

Because you had the talent to become a good fighter.

And instead of that, you became a late breaker.

You were able to write Rocky in 3 and a half days. The movie that went on to be Best Picture, you wrote in 3 and a half days?

Yes.

Was it just flowing out of you?

In a way, it was. I knew that this was going to be very flawed, but if I could get from the beginning to the end with some semblance of a character, then I'll repair the rest along the way.

And you want to star in it, and you're told no. You ain't— you were even offered $250,000. $360,000. $360,000. Struggling actor. You, you can't make ends meet. You get— you're getting offered all this money, but you didn't take it.

No, I just didn't understand how the rules of life were played at that point. But this character, I understood.

You don't pay a lot of attention to reviews and those kind of things?

Well, you know, you're always affected by opinion, but the, the more opinions there are of you me, the more I— the less I look at them because I just can't live my life based upon what other people think about me. So I can't concern myself too much with what other people think, you know, it's just not healthy. I don't think I could continue to do what I do if I was constantly worrying about what somebody thought about it.

You have to be able to be vulnerable in front of anybody. You know, you have to be comfortable looking silly. You have to be comfortable making mistakes. And you have to break the thing inside of you that doesn't want people to see, right? Because as soon as you allow people to see, all of a sudden you get access to things that you didn't realize you had access to, right? Um, for example, like the thing I used to do is when I was probably 18 or 19 years old. I got in touch with those blocks. The camera hates emotional blocks. Like, you put a camera in somebody's face, and they're uncomfortable about delivering emotion, it looks fake, and you feel it. You immediately know it's not real, right? Especially look at the size of this screen. And in a shot, that whole screen could be just your eyes. Right? So it's like you can't hide discomfort, uncertainty, so you have to be able to get comfortable, you know, just being anything!

Anything that you have to be for the role, you have to be comfortable being it! Everyone has a problem with time, but the day is 24 hours and we sleep 6. Now I know there's some out there that say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I need 8. Well, I say just sleep a little faster because the bottom line is we have 6 hours of sleep, 24 hours are available, so you have 18 hours now available to your work, your family, your hobbies, and also to learn something new or to do something new, which could easily be that you want to learn a new language or that you want to read. And as a New Year's resolution, I have to read a book every week. Or you say, I'm going to go and reshape my body. So you're going to go and take this hour out of your schedule and say, I'm going to train an hour every day. So this is for most people a huge challenge, but it is totally doable. I can tell them because the kind of things that I did when I came to this country. I mean, I went to school, I was working in construction, I was working out my 5 hours a day, I was taking acting classes from 8 o'clock at night to 12 midnight. I was doing all of those things. I wanted to make sure that out of the 24 hours of the day that I don't waste one single hour. Those hours were too precious. And so there I just want to tell people, don't give me this thing, I have a difficult time with the time and I don't have time for this and I don't have that. You have time, you make the time.

Do you remember the audition when you first met De Niro?

That was, yeah, I mean, that was one of those incredible auditions that came around that I suppose every kid had been waiting for for a long period of time because it's just not that often that you get a starring role above Robert De Niro in this incredible incredible screenplay, and it was Ellen Barkin and Michael Caden Jones, and it was just, everyone was sort of fiending for this role. And I got down, I suppose, to the final 5, and there was like a last sort of day. Tobey was there, and I do remember thinking to myself, "I gotta do something. I gotta do something to stand out." And in the audition, there was Art Linson, Michael Caton-Jones, Art Littman was the producer, and De Niro. And I remember there was a mustard jar scene, and he had to jam a mustard jar in my eye repeatedly. It was an abuse scene. And the script sort of didn't call for it, but I got up and I— he said, "Now, is it empty? Is it empty?" And I got up and I screamed, "No!" Like completely unnecessary, but I screamed in his face, and I sat there, you know, with my head, you know, looking like a red tomato, and everyone started laughing at me in the entire room. De Niro, everybody was in hysterics. I sat there frozen thinking, "Oh my God, I just screwed this entire opportunity up." And I just sat there frozen. And then, you know, Bob, in traditional De Niro fashion, kind of just looked at me and went, "It's good, it's good, it's good." And then, you know, we carried on doing the scene, and I think I actually had dinner with De Niro recently, and he told me, "No, I was the one who said you should get the job." The making, the actual making of a film, the day-to-day going to work, the construction of a film has always been my favorite thing.

I like making a film much more than I like watching them.

I do.

And even the ones I'm in. I really love the coming together with a whole bunch of people, having an idea on paper and everyone's got, everyone's an expert at what they do and you're off on this journey, you got ideas but then you just let them, you let it go and see what it can become. I love the making. That's when I'm happiest is when I'm making a film or telling the story, the day-to-day. And more so than watching them, really. I mean, look, I kind of defined that for myself about 4 years ago. Process, process, stay in process. Head down, in process, stay in your bubble. And when it's over, be that fulfillment. Notice when I started noticing that fulfillment of it, I just finished. Well, that's enough. That's it. I don't know if this thing— I don't know if it's even coming out. I don't even know what it's gonna turn in. Man, I hope we got it, and I hope the director put something good together, but I don't know. Nothing I can do about that. All I know is this experience that I just had. Go have the experience, mcgonaghey. And if I can love this experience, and at the end of it, I'm like, may never even hear that film again, may never even know that story again. It may be gone. May find out that all the negatives got fried in the X-ray machine. There is no film, but I've gotta be— that's okay. I had an experience there. When I got selfish for that, for that experience, when I got that process, enjoying that process, the day-to-day architecture of making a movie and creating a role, that's when I've been the happiest. And more results have come that way in an odd way. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] You know? But I just saw when I started really approaching them as this is a finite thing and this is just that experience. Other than that, I'm not producing this thing. I'm not the one editing it. I don't know what it's going to be.

Pshh.

That's it. And then all of a sudden they come out and you go, oh, I think we got a good one.

My belief is that technique should change for every single film that you make. That you can have— you can get into ruts. Ruts that can be bad ruts where nothing's working, but equally when everything's working, that's a rut as well. And you have to get out of it. You have to just abandon it because it starts to become phony if you're going, well, this worked for us before. And it can be from film to film, or it can be from take to take. Last take was really good. We had that little moment, didn't we? You said that and I went, and you went, and then It was great and everyone went, "Ah!" So let's do that again. It'll never be the same. So you actually have to try to make sure, no, ignore that, blow it apart and do something totally different. You know, hopefully they got that on camera. That's, that's a choice they have now. Do something completely different. And a similar thing with going from one film to the next. If you're working with the same director, don't fall back on your old tricks from that old film. That was a different film. Different tricks were needed, you know. Go for new tricks, don't be a one-trick pony.

I kept going, I had a path, I knew what my path was. My path was to become what I am right now. Now I lost sight of it in an interesting sort of way, or I went about it in a wayward path. But fortunately for me, all the getting high, the drinking, the drugs, and everything else I did, I showed up at the theater every day. I did plays ripped out of my mind. I rehearsed ripped out of my mind. But every lesson that I learned, I held on to for some reason. God, whatever, somebody let me hold on to everything that I was learning. My stage lefts, my stage rights, my upstage foot always out, turned down this way, learning how to develop a character, doing all those things. Because those are the things that I love. And I did them in the midst of everything else that I was doing. When my friends were getting ready to go get some more drugs, I go, oh, no, I got to be at the theater. I'll catch y'all in the theater when I'm done. And I jet. Or I got to go build a set. I got to do this. So I did everything that I had to do. So I was focused on this by any means necessary. Plus I had a professor who was like, well, you know, all the great ones do their jobs and get ripped out of their minds. You look at the Peter O'Toole's and the da-da-da-da. They get drunk and they get high. They do what they do. But they show up and they do the job. So we were like, OK. And that's what we did. We drank with him and we went to Styles' acting class. We'd go smoke a joint. And come in and do our other acting classes or go build a set or build some costumes or hang some lights and do all the things that we had to do. So I kept learning my lessons and doing them.

Well, we all are in the business of storytelling. I mean, it's not just exclusive for people like me who are in the entertainment business. I think that no matter what business you're in, no matter what you're selling or doing, Why is it certain businesses can hover above their competition? I mean, is Starbucks really serving the best cup of coffee? Maybe not. I mean, I like a caramel macchiato myself, but is American Express really the best return rate on a credit card? Mm, probably not. But it's the story they manage to tell. And I think that the more that we think about that, the more that we Sometimes we see commercials and we see stuff and we just go, "Ah, it's a turn-off." But somehow those people that manage to tell a story, that manage to even temporarily move us in a certain way, that we remember. We don't feel like we're being sold. We feel like we're being told something that we can connect to. So I've always been driven by that very idea, that very notion.

I don't have a lot of people coming up and saying, you know, I should be on Broadway, you know, I do this and that, or I should be in movies or whatever. But lots of people say, oh, I could do cartoons. This is my Homer Simpson. You go, that is good, I like that. But it's— you got to be dedicated, you know. It's not a matter of being able to do a good Homer Simpson and you're gonna have a career. It's hard work. I go to drama classes all the time, and I hate to be a buzzkill, but I try and talk kids out of show business. Seriously, I say, if there's anything you like as much as performing, even if you get into it academically and become a drama teacher, or if you— if there's something else you like, you can still do community theater, you can do amateur theater, you can still perform perform. But I'm telling you, if you get into it as a profession, you're in for a lifetime of rejection and unemployment. I mean, you could have a— you get 7 or 8 jobs and then you don't work for a year and a half, you know. You start running out of money, you have to go drive a cab or wait tables or something. It's a miserable profession, believe me. Please don't do it. And that's not just from the standpoint that, you know, obviously there's probably people in the audience more talented than me that will be stealing my jobs if they succeed. It's not that. It's just the fact that it is— it's only for the— if you can't talk someone out of show business, then they have a shot. I love the allure, the danger of working without a net. You know, it's one thing to be a tightrope walker if there's a net, as opposed to being a tightrope walker where you could plummet to your death at any moment. And that's the disconnect between someone who's rational and someone who's just crazy enough to go into show business and stick to it no matter what. Tenacity is more— almost more important than talent. It's equally as important for sure.

Thank you guys so much for watching.

I hope you enjoyed.

I'd love to know what did you think of this video? What can you take from this that you're going to immediately apply somehow to your life, your career, your business? Leave it down in the comments below. I'm really excited to hear from you. And as always, I appreciate your viewership. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love, guys. I'll see you soon.

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