Members of the prestigious Actors Studio – at which some of the greatest New York film and theatre actors have studied – Lee Grant, Martin Landau and Elisabeth Kemp, director of the University Masters Program with which the Actors Studio supports itself financially (a free activity for both the actors and mediators) spoke to RomeFilmFest audiences about their approach to the workshop and how their lives changed after their initial experiences.

For Grant, the Actors Studio is still the only opportunity for amateur and professional actors to explore and improve their craft. Grant’s work at the workshop led to her nomination for the studio’s board, along with Al Pacino in the 1970s, and then to her appointment as its head. During the conversation, however, they all spoke only of moderators, never of teachers, because, explains Landau simply, “It is not a school. The Actors Studio is a way of life”.

He became part of the workshop after debuting on Broadway and ten years of experience behind him. Only he and Steve McQueen passed their entrance auditions at that moment. Currently, the workshop has centres in both New York and California, each with a specific direction that corresponds to the needs of the location: cinema and theatre in New York, cinema and television on the West Coast.

To gain admission, actors must pass two auditions, the first of which is a five-minute scene between two people, in which candidates must show “what they have to offer”. The Actors Studio Method consists of “the development of the senses, otherwise we’d all be protoplasms, working on the body”, says Grant, who concluded with: “If anyone says that the Actors Studio does not believe in thinking and that acting is only a form of action, we answer that we actually try to avoid thinking and translate everything into our senses so as to embody the character”.