135: Mara Wilson, Acting Cults And Isolation Tanks
Night Call
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 564 Ratings
🗓️ 23 November 2020
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We are joined this week by writer and actress Mara Wilson to discuss how acting classes can function like cults and why. Mara reveals her personal Alison Mack story and talks about how we can protect child actors on sets. Then she tells us about her personal isolation tank experience and we try to figure out hacks for making isolation tank like experiences at home. At the end of the episode we have a very bittersweet important announcement about the show.
Notes:
Mara's Substack https://mara.substack.com/
Mara's Twitter https://twitter.com/MaraWilson
Mara's book, "Where Am I Now?"
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/318758/where-am-i-now-by-mara-wilson/
The Landis Twilight Zone lawsuit
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-05-29-mn-2189-story.html
...and how he broke child labor laws
Franco's acting school
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/james-franco-acting-school-lawsuit-894571/
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.3 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:06.0 | It's 2.33am at the Kaminsky Method acting studio. |
| 0:12.0 | And you're listening to Night Call. |
| 0:18.4 | Hello and welcome to Night Call, a call-in show for our dystopian reality. |
| 0:27.5 | I am Molly Lambert, and with me, as always, is Tess Lynch. |
| 0:32.1 | And joining us today, we have a very special guest, Mara Wilson. |
| 0:55.1 | Mara is a writer, a playwright, and an actor. She's done a lot of voice acting. She has a substack called Shant We Tell the Vicar and is the author of the book, Where Am I Now? Welcome to Nightcall, Mara. Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here. I love this show. |
| 0:57.3 | Oh, we're so happy to have you on. |
| 1:09.5 | We were going to talk today about a couple of night cally things, isolation tanks, which you have some experiences with, and also acting classes and how they are like cults. |
| 1:10.1 | Oh, yeah. |
| 1:12.4 | I've written articles about this. |
| 1:13.5 | That's a real thing. |
| 1:14.5 | Perfect. |
| 1:18.3 | Why don't we kick it off with a night call? |
| 1:19.4 | Hi, night call. |
| 1:20.2 | It's Lindsay. |
| 1:25.3 | I heard the topic this week was acting classes that are like cults, and that brought back some memories. |
| 1:26.8 | I was a high school in college drama geek and a drama major in college, |
| 1:31.7 | and I took part in some really questionable activities that seemed normal at the time, |
| 1:37.7 | but that looking back, I'm kind of horrified by. |
| 1:41.4 | Some examples in high school drama class, we were regularly made to do stream of consciousness |
... |
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