Free James Gandolfini: The Real Life of the Man Who Made Tony Soprano by Dan Bischoff Page A

says. “I don’t know how to say this—it was like he wanted to be Troy Donahue. And I of course could see that he could be much more than that.”
    Learning you’re not Troy Donahue is not, perhaps, the worst news a serious young actor can hear. But learning that, for stage purposes, you are not you is an essential step toward becoming an actor. As Roger Bart had been trying to tell Gandolfini ever since Rutgers, it’s the strange synergy between an actor and a part that makes a career. What Bart saw in Gandolfini was an ability to play against his intimidating heavy stereotype. And to make that work, he’d need training.
    Gately’s reputation was based on teaching the Meisner technique, a variant on method acting developed by Sanford Meisner after he had worked with Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg at the Group Theatre in New York in the 1940s. It evolved, ultimately, from the Stanislavski system. Meisner became one of the first teachers at The Actors Studio in New York when it was founded, in 1947, by Elia Kazan and Robert Lewis. The technique was first developed for the stage, but like all method acting, its greatest impact has been on film acting.
    Meisner technique begins with a series of exercises that are used to heighten observation and influence actor responses through repetition. Two actors will stand in front of the class and begin a dialogue by repeating each other’s comments—“You’re nervous,” for example, followed by “I’m nervous?” “Yes, you’re nervous,” and so on, in order to elicit spontaneity from the actors. The exercises build over time until they generate enough natural interaction to support a dramatic text.
    One of the first exercises Gandolfini encountered was “threading the needle”—literally, threading a needle in front of the class. It looked a little nuts, but he also thought it was like a challenge, a dare: Could he do something like that? “I was immediately interested and scared to death,” Gandolfini told Beverly Reid of The Star-Ledger . “It really made me very nervous—and I was shocked by that, really. So I ended up staying two years.”
    “He brought just the tiniest needle with the tiniest eye you can imagine,” Gately says, “and he couldn’t do it to save his life.” If you think that should be easy, try it in front of a group of observant strangers. The idea is for an actor to develop an ease on stage or before the camera that make it appear as if he or she is acting as naturally and confidently as they would in real life.
    That sounds all nice and dry and practical, but actors—often the ones who quit the technique—describe the training as difficult and even psychologically invasive.
    The best joke about method acting ever told came from Laurence Olivier, on the set of Marathon Man, as he waited to do a key confrontation scene with Dustin Hoffman. Hoffman had just been running around a track to recreate the situation of his character, who had been pursued through the city only to wind up, sweaty and disheveled, at the mercy of Olivier’s Nazi dentist. As Hoffman sat, huffing and puffing, waiting for cameras to roll, Olivier is reported to have said, “My dear boy, have you ever tried acting ?”
    Studying the Meisner system, its practitioners say, isn’t like that anymore, if it ever was; those stories about retrieving buried memories to evoke real emotions, or living like a blind man for a month to play King Lear, are all exaggerated. They are remnants of the 1950s fad for shamanlike authenticity in artistic expression. There are tricks any actor uses—as Gandolfini himself said, staying up all night the night before, or putting a sharp rock in your shoe, will help you simulate anger. What contemporary method actors do have in common is not so much a set of techniques but a conviction that acting has a serious purpose. To do it well you must prepare your mind to convey emotion clearly and immediately. And doing that requires a certain