Actors on Actors — Exclusive Emmy Portraits 

Actors on Actors — Exclusive Emmy Portraits

As Variety held its fourth “Actors on Actors” studio in March, more than two dozen TV stars met up to celebrate the successes they’ve found working in the medium. Some already knew each other — Kirsten Dunst (“Fargo”) and Rami Malek (“Mr. Robot”) attended the same high school together (Notre Dame in Sherman Oaks) — while others such as Aaron Paul (“The Path”) and Tom Hiddleston (“The Night Manager”) were mutual fans meeting for the first time (and quickly bonded over a game of darts).

Jamie Lee Curtis: So here‘s the question, Is Gaga a character? Because your name is Stephanie.

Lady Gaga: I guess the thing is, what I am as Gaga really is what other people think Gaga is. It’s not necessarily what I am. Gaga is this stronger individual part of myself that I discovered being young in New York — loving music, meeting with young artists, working with musicians, with writers, studying the scene, and being involved in the lifestyle. I started to call myself Gaga was the nickname I had at my best. Curtis: But it’s a bit of a creation…. Gaga: It is a bit of a creation. But it’s other people that have created [it] through what I’ve made; their perception of what Gaga is, is a separate entity from me. What I am at any given moment is some sort of amalgamation of Stephanie — a young Italian-American girl from New York that’s an actress and a songwriter and a rebel — and what I’m creatively interested in at the time: the music and culture and lifestyle and art that’s influencing me as I’m reading and writing music. If I’m playing a character at the same time, I’m also that as well. I live a lifestyle of endless, relentless love for making my work. That informs me as a person in every way, all the time. It’s a quite difficult thing for me to answer, because I’m entirely Stephanie and I’m entirely Gaga. But I was also entirely the Countess.

| Actors on Actors presented presented by Shopbop / East Dane

Kerry Washington: Tell me about a challenging moment you’ve had as an actor and how you got through it.

Aziz Ansari: Doing “Master of None,” there was definitely more dramatic stuff than I’d done in my other work. I felt in my heart that I’d be able to pull it off, but sometimes I would read the scripts and be like, “I hope I can sell this.” The woman who played my girlfriend, Noël Wells — we would do a lot of rehearsals. I would just throw out the script and say, “OK, let’s just use this as a prompt. Let’s just say we’re having sex and the condom breaks.” We would improvise and record it, and do that over and over again, and use that to rewrite the scripts and find real moments. I think the show, overall, was a challenge for me because I’d never done anything where I was in everything like that, and had those dramatic moments as well. What was a challenging moment for you? Washington: For me, it was a little bit tricky. There was a moment when I had to really take off the producing hat. I’d worked really hard in the first third of making [“Confirmation”] to fight for a balanced story where you really felt pulled, not only in the direction of Anita [Hill], but where you felt pulled towards Clarence Thomas and Joe Biden — all of the players. Just making sure that it was fair and everybody was three-dimensional and that we weren’t playing these kind of political, iconic caricatures — that we were real people. There was that point where it was like, OK, now I’m avoiding the difficult, painful acting of being Anita Hill by going over the schedule with the line producer. I have to now take off the producing hat and focus on going to that place that she was in. It was scarier than I thought it was going to be, but exciting also to learn how to take that hat on and off as a producer and actor.

Courtney B. Vance: That’s why the show is so beautiful — because as a people we have gone through so much. I was seven and eight when Martin Luther King was shot and Malcolm X and Bobby Kennedy and John. How did our parents live, survive….

Tracee Ellis Ross: ….and hold on and thrive. This is the part that always baffles me. There are times when I think of being a black person in this country, and me being a woman. There’s a moment in your show when he says, “In 1988, that was not considered rape.” You imagine that at that time — 1988, I was alive — a wife was considered the property of her husband. How courageous of “Black-ish” to be touching on these topics.

Vance: Well, what a beautiful thing that on a television comedy seen by millions every week, we can talk about it. I mean for the longest time, as you know…

Vance: …we didn’t talk about it. Our parents talked about it, and we heard it, just like the children in your show. But now we’re watching that conversation happen on television in a context that we can actually watch — and all people can watch it. Black, white….

Ross: I think that’s one of the things that’s amazing to me. “Black-ish” is set in current times. So doing a police-brutality episode in current times, when kids are watching our show, it gives them an access point to have these kinds of conversations as a family. That’s one of the things I love: Our show is a family show. People watch it as a family. And we have all these different generations. It’s character-based, so we’re not touching on these things because they’re circumstantial or situations, but because this is what these people would be interacting with. What’s amazing to me watching “People v. O.J.” is how similar these topics are. How do you tell the stories with the nuance they deserve? Because these are topics that have so much nuance in them — so much gray.

Vance: I guess it began with “All in The Family” and “The Jeffersons.” Sherman Helmsley would come over to Archie Bunker’s, and that began it. Now we actually can see ourselves on the television, and just be riveted.

Tom Hiddleston: “The Night Manager” was a script that came to me about two years ago, and I was in the middle of shooting a period piece set in 1901, a gothic romance. It was so fresh and so real and so contemporary and so exciting, by page two, I wanted to be Jonathan Pine. I just felt like I understood this man. I understood the world he was living in. I understood his moral courage.

Aaron Paul: With film, you have 100-plus pages to really get to know the character that’s on the page, so then it’s up to you to create a back-story. But with TV, we did 62 episodes of “Breaking Bad,” and so it’s such a detailed narrative. You’re not confined to a two-hour window to tell your story.

Emilia Clarke: Season one of “Game of Thrones,” I did it all. I got raped, I came out of the fire, I was butt naked, fights, all of it. I was pregnant and then lost it, and then kind of gave birth to something else. Season one was the most challenging out of everything, but the naked stuff is always difficult. It’s weird – as the actor, I feel like you have to be the one who comes on and says, “It’s OK, guys. Everything’s going to be fine. You guys can chill. It’s not a big deal. You’ve all seen them.”

Jay Duplass: It is really weird, though, because it’s one of the few times where you can’t just be in the moment because it’s the most choreographed stuff that you have to do. Nothing really is going on. It’s basically like doing Pilates for a long time without any reward to come. That’s what you don’t realize when you’re having sex [on screen]. There’s no reward that’s coming at the end of this. You’re just like, “My core sucks, everything sucks.”

Felicity Huffman: Network TV has a reputation as being safe, and if you really want to walk the gangplank, you go to cable or streaming. But I think there’s a difference between limitations and boundaries. John Ridley and Michael McDonald have always been encouraged to do the highest level of their work and to tell stories that reflect the diverse nature of America we live in. And we never, never pull back on telling a harsh, ugly truth.

Jennifer Lopez: I feel like, if anything, our network was encouraging us to push the boundaries as much as we could, and tell the truth as much as we could, and be as shocking. Because you really can’t compete with cable in that sense; they can go so far with the violence, with the sex. But you realize you don’t need all of that to tell a great story or to show intense situations. They are just as intense when left to the imagination.

Billy Eichner: When you introduce yourself as one persona, especially when it’s a very loud, larger-than-life persona, which [Funny or Die’s] “Billy on the Street” is, it can be hard to convince people that you are something else. I was proud that in the initial response to “Difficult People,” people noticed that I could be a real person, that I could have quieter moments, and those could feel real to people.

Rachel Bloom: Aline Brosh McKenna, [the series] co-creator, found me through my internet videos. So going on the show, it’s really fun now because people say, “Oh, the musical numbers must be the hardest part.” But [with] the musical numbers, it feels like I’m just on the Internet again, except I have a budget. And I haven’t been the one to go to Target and buy the costumes.

Krysten Ritter: ”I’m usually really prudish. I don’t like doing sex scenes. It makes me really uncomfortable because oftentimes I feel that they’re gratuitous, or rely so heavily on the woman to be super sexy. But with Jessica (Jones), I always felt like the sex scenes came from such a place of character and strength, so it always made sense to me.

Sam Heughan: We were very aware that we didn’t want it to be gratuitous or explicit when there is an intimate scene. We always talk to the producers and the writers and work out how it moves the relationship forward or what it reveals about the characters. Our show definitely [has] a central relationship, so we learn a lot about the characters through their sex life.”

Kirsten Dunst: I think the best thing to have as an actor is a good sense of self and be grounded. The biggest challenge is working with other people who aren’t like-minded. We have to deal with so many different egos in this industry. The older I get, I’d rather not force myself into a situation that I know won’t be important to me in my life.

Rami Malek: As human beings, we’re constantly having these subconscious thoughts and telling ourselves the craziest things that if you really said out loud, they’d either be a relief to hear, or you’d realize just how crazy we all were. I think we’re always searching as actors to play the subconscious. And I have it right there, being whispered into my ear. So in a sense, it’s difficult, but other times I find it’s a bit of a luxury.

Thomas Middleditch: It felt exciting that when I would [perform] I would get that laughter and applause and approval — these are all sad things to want. I was always kind of a shy kid, but a real ham inside.

Patrick Stewart: There is a standing joke that I have with the crew on “Blunt Talk”: “I’ve never done this before! This is the first time!” I did a scene in a police interrogation room. I have snorted cocaine on camera. I played my first post-coital scene. I’ve been in prison. I’ve never sung rap songs before. So it is a constant delight to be having these new experiences.

Sarah Paulson: Looking into another pair of eyes can change everything about how you thought you were going to play a scene. When I was playing those twins, it was just me acting with myself. You know how sometimes you’ll be working on your lines, or be thinking about the scene, and you have it all down in terms of what you’re going to say. But then somebody will be playing opposite you and it will be not what you expected. It will change everything.

Bobby Cannavale: But [playing a two-headed character] has got to be maybe one of the top three most unique acting experiences anybody has ever had. Paulson: Certainly when I was a kid and I had dreams about roles I was going to play, I never thought about a conjoined twin. I can say I’m actually proud that I think we pulled it off in a way that I don’t find humiliating.

Rob Lowe: It’s funny, because the guys who were my heroes in terms of leading men growing up, ironically, didn’t do that. Redford didn’t do it, Newman didn’t do it. They were leading men, leading men, leading men. But when I got into that area of my life, I, like you, was drawn into [other roles]. I mean look at “Face Off,” which is just an amazing movie, and you’re amazing in it. What you’re doing with that, when you’re doing Nic [Cage] and Nic’s doing you, it’s unbelievable! It’s so great.

John Travolta: I actually asked Nic during the shooting, “Do you think this is going to work?” And he said, “Yeah, I do.” It was tricky, but because John Woo is such a great director and was so clever in the way he shot things, we really did get away with being each other by watching each other’s dailies, by deciding collectively as partners what we would be. I remember giving him ideas of how I would do it, and he would give me ideas of how he would do it.

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