The following Career Dispatch essay was written by Stella Baker, who stars on the CW’s “The Republic of Sarah,” premiering June 14. She graduated from the Yale School of Drama in 2018.
If you’ve seen “All the President’s Men,” you might recall the following anecdote: G. Gordon Liddy, one of Nixon’s chief operatives in the Watergate scandal, had a little party trick (itself taken from the film “Lawrence of Arabia”) that involved holding his hand over an open flame for an extended period of time. When asked, “What’s the trick?” he would respond, “The trick is not minding.”
The first time I heard this was from a teacher at the Yale School of Drama, where I studied acting. They told this story one day during a particularly trying time in my second year of training. For a while, I’d been feeling that my performances were not escaping my mind and translating to my body, my voice, or my audience. I wasn’t using my instrument to its greatest capacity. I needed to take more risks, be louder, and be bolder.
This sort of risk-taking freedom requires immense vulnerability, flexibility, humility, trust, and the courage to keep moving forward through mistakes. If you’re like me and have spent most of your life preoccupied with getting everything “right,” these are some of the most difficult things to obtain. The pursuit of them is usually uncomfortable and sometimes painful. Hence the insight: “The trick is not minding.”
How to Audition for ‘Riverdale’ CD David Rapaport Since leaving school and starting my acting career, I’ve found myself repeating that sentence. There is a sort of stubborn resilience to pain, rejection, fear, and humiliation that is required in this industry. It grows in us in the audition room, in the months that pass between auditions, and in the years that pass between jobs. For some, it grows in the 10 years spent trying to get a film made or in the months of rehearsals for a play that closes early.
This resilience also grows on the job. Sometimes, the trick is not minding that, on two hours of sleep, you have to shoot six scenes. Sometimes, the trick is not minding that you just shot a day of scenes you aren’t very proud of. Sometimes, the trick is not minding that you just shot a scene you’re incredibly proud of. The trick is not minding, so that you can keep moving forward.
While playing Sarah Cooper on “The Republic of Sarah,” I felt growth in this area. It was the first time I was leading a show and had that weight of professional responsibility. But I also have felt my resilience grow while working on low-budget short films, or while listening to someone’s honest feedback on an early draft of a script. I have felt it grow every time I’ve read: “They are going in a different direction.”
We can learn this trick any time and anywhere. There is no period between jobs that doesn’t make us stronger in some way. There is no role in a cast, or job on a crew, that doesn’t require this fortitude. Most importantly, there is no point at which choosing to not mind the discomfort can ever hold us back from being even more vulnerable. We know vulnerability is uncomfortable, but we still choose this path. Why? Because the feeling of overcoming the discomfort, and those moments of honest self-expression we get in exchange, are worth it.
This story originally appeared in the May 13 issue of Backstage Magazine. Subscribe here.
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