Working: Alison Wright Explains How Actors Get Emotional on Cue

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Arts, Tv & Film, Music

4.4 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 17 May 2020

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Host June Thomas digs into the craft of acting with Alison Wright, who portrayed Martha on The Americans and now plays Ruth on the new TNT adaptation of Bong Joon-ho’s 2013 movie Snowpiercer (which itself was based on the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige). Wright explains how she developed Ruth’s unique accent in Snowpiercer, how she utilizes the tools of Method acting to tap into emotions on stage, and why she thinks Daniel Day-Lewis and Meryl Streep are such impressive actors. Send your questions about creativity and any other feedback to [email protected]. And if you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get benefits like zero ads on any Slate podcast, bonus episodes of shows like Slow Burn and Dear Prudence—and you’ll be supporting the work we do here on Working. It’s only $35 for the first year, and you can get a free two-week trial now at slate.com/workingplus Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:28.1	Te's and sees apply. Welcome back to working. I'm your host, Ramon Alom. And I'm your other host, June Thomas.
0:41.0	June, one of the things I've learned in this period of working from home is that I actually
0:45.8	love checking in with friends and coworkers and hearing about what they're up to and what they're
0:50.2	enthusiastic about.
0:51.6	I love culture and art and film but I have a lot of blind spots and
0:57.2	sometimes I blame this on having two young kids like there's a lot from the last decade I've missed out on and I count on my coworkers to kind of
1:04.0	fill that in and I definitely sense that if I had worked with you between 2013
1:09.3	and 2019 one of those things I would have been urged to catch up on is the Americans, a show that I have to confess I have never seen.
1:18.0	You would definitely have heard about the show from me. I wrote a bunch about it from the beginning and then I hosted
1:26.1	the Americans Insider Podcasts for three seasons and which meant that I spent a lot of time down in
1:31.2	Gowanus talking to the showrunners and the writers and crew members and
1:35.2	actors, one of whom was Allison Wright, who played Martha in that show, a heartbreak of a character,
1:41.9	and Allison was kind of a late bloomer.
1:44.6	She was in her mid-30s when she landed the Americans and that was her first TV role
	...

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