Lemonada.

This is Talk Easy. I'm San Francisco.

This is Talk Easy. I'm Sam Fregoso. Welcome to the show.

Today, actor Julia Garner.

Last week, I sat with Chicago playwright David Mamet.

It was an excellent episode of the show and a totally normal conversation between two civil adults.

It also featured the line, you look like someone who's never been punched in the face.

But there was something else, he said, that I really enjoyed, besides the whole punching in the face bit. And it was about acting and performers and how there's, quote, no inner meaning of the

character. This is something Mamet has been talking about for decades now.

The actor does not need to become the character,

Mamet wrote in true and false,

because there is no character.

It's just actors saying their lines.

But I was thinking in preparation for today's episode

with Julia, what if it isn't just that? What if a performer does invest

in interiority, does create narratives around the character that the audience may not see in the

finished film or show, but that help create the performance we so greatly enjoy? What actor Julia

Garner does and has been doing for over two decades is in many

ways a repudiation of the ideas we heard last week from Mamet. You need only to seek out her

body of work as evidence. Films like The Assistant, Wolfman, The Royal Hotel, or her television work in Ozark, the Americans, and Venting Anna,

each of which she imbues with the unique understanding of what director Kitty Green calls her character's inner world,

the entire film written on her face.

...