“In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast” features in-depth conversations with today’s most noteworthy actors and creators. Join host and Awards Editor Jack Smart for this guide on how to live the creative life from those who are doing it every day. This episode is brought to you by HBO.
Often referred to as one of the best “character” actors around, Bill Camp memorably appears—or often disappears—into countless supporting roles, and can be counted on to give a truthful, compelling performance each time.
How does he do it? “The bottom line is that I get hired to tell just a piece of a mosaic,” he tells Backstage. “I’m to serve the story. I’m there to serve.... It’s about listening and paying attention. That’s all that really matters. And then the other stuff will happen.”
Camp delves into the vivid details of that “other stuff” in his “In the Envelope” interview, which charts his journey through the industry while revealing the craft know-how he’s accrued along the way. Raised in Massachusetts and trained at regional theaters and the Juilliard School, Camp has impressed audiences for years on New York City stages, garnering an Obie Award for “Homebody/Kabul” and Tony nomination for “The Crucible.” Within the last decade, he’s built a prolific body of television work, including on series “Manhattan,” “The Leftovers,” “The Looming Tower,” and an Emmy nod for “The Night Of,” plus film roles in “Lincoln,” “12 Years a Slave,” “Birdman,” “Love & Mercy,” “Jason Bourne,” “Molly’s Game,” “Wildlife,” “Vice,” “Joker,” “Dark Waters,” “News of the World” (which also stars his wife, Elizabeth Marvel), and the upcoming “Passing.”
Bill Camp Became a Stalwart Screen + Stage Actor by Putting in the Work Transitioning from primarily theater actor to screen supporter—in demand from the likes of Steven Spielberg, Paul Greengrass, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Scott Frank—has meant recalibrating the size of his audience, says Camp. “I had to learn how to take what I knew in the theater...and integrate that into the form of now three cameras.
“There is a certain freedom, a kind of liberation and a sense of play, that I was able to achieve in the theater that grew over the decades. And I think at first I was really afraid to bring that kind of freedom to the camera. I was always criticized, or at least evaluated, as a somewhat hyperbolic actor in my youth—and very big! So I had to really tone it down.” His advice for stage actors new to working on film and TV sets? “Just listen. And do everything that one has done in the theater, but just know where the cameras are.”
Camp also explores the notion of a “heightened” performance, and how even a role with more silences and reaction shots than dialogue can prove magnetic. “Sometimes it’s a physical thing,” he says of approaching such characters. “Sometimes it’s purely interior, meaning it’s an idea, or it’s an image, or it’s somebody else.”
His now Screen Actors Guild Award–nominated work on Netflix’s limited series “The Queen’s Gambit” is the perfect example of Camp’s abilities at work. As Mr. Shaibel, the solitary janitor and reluctant chess tutor to Isla Johnston’s (and later, Anya Taylor-Joy’s) orphan Beth, he conveys depths of subtext in every glance. “The heightened-ness was the attention he gave her,” Camp says. “Where is he? He’s in an orphanage. He’s in a place where people, they’ve lost anybody to pay attention to them. They’ve either been discarded because people didn’t want to pay attention to them or they, like Beth, lost the people who were supposed to pay attention to them.”
Sense memory and imagination, he adds, are instrumental tools in constructing characters like Mr. Shaibel. “In a way, I’m using sense memory all the time [in life]. I’m recalling from memories all the time, I’m a library of memories. That’s basically what I am—I am content. And the content in my head is my life and people that have been in my life and the events of my life.”
For more insights into Camp’s creative processes, listen to his advice in full at any of the links below. And stay tuned after the interview for Part 2 of Christine McKenna-Tirella’s update on ongoing industry changes in the COVID-19 era.
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