An actor describes rituals she uses to separate herself from intense roles, like swapping wedding rings between scenes and having castmates touch her pregnant belly to remind each other it's pretend. She worked on a Ben Affleck film and a Scandal episode that required these psychological boundaries to stay grounded.
I just did a movie directed by Ben Affleck, and he and I are husband and wife. And so every day at work, I have to take off my wedding ring, and then I have to take this other wedding ring that belongs to the movie. Now I'm in this marriage. So at the end of the day, it's really important to me to take off that wedding ring that's not my life and put my own ring back on and step into my life. Right.
Because it's like a psychological process of becoming a different person.
We have these cues that really allow us to signal to our body different realities. We were doing some crazy scene on Scandal where somebody was lying on the floor of the office covered in blood, and we're all, like, screaming and holding them. And I was pregnant at the time.
Oh, my gosh.
And so after every take, the other girls in the cast and myself, we would all put our hands on my belly and we would say, it's just pretend. It's just pretend. Wow. That taught me that if I can do that for my baby, I have to do that for myself, too.
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