Acting

The Best Acting Performances Are Influenced By Animals- Jean-Louis Rodrigue

Filmcourage

Published

July 31, 2024

[Watch the video interview on Youtube here]

Film Courage: In your book Back To The Body you’ve talked about how you’ve studied animals. You’ve also incorporated that into physicality with actors/speakers?

Acting Coach and Specialist in the application of the Alexander Technique Jean-Louis Rodrigue: Yes, I find animals to be powerful guides into behavior. When an animal is interested they do it completely in their bodies. You can see a dog with the ears, they go up, their noses get wet, their eyes get very opened and then you see the whole spine pointed in the direction where their interest is all the way to the tail.

Animals have a way of communicating with their whole bodies that is so beautiful but so useful for our character. Sometimes literally scripts will say She is like a bear and sometimes they name their name Bear. I think there’s a show called The Bear right now.

The thing is, animals do react and express behavior more clearly than humans. I get the actors to choose one or two animals that seem closely involved in the life in the script or the story. I have them study the animal in every detail:

-The weight

-The shape

-The color

-The kind of movement that they do

-How they sound

-The environment

-The relationship

-How they eat

They study everything. They do it with me. I create an environment where they can transform into the animal. We’ll have music at the same time that helps them to move the way the animal would but definitely it’s always related to the character, always related to the character. They collect a lot of photographs and drawings. I’ve had some actors literally draw the animal. If they have the talent to do that and if not, they just make a collage of the character with the animals…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).

About:

Jean-Louis Rodrigue is an internationally recognized acting coach, movement director, and specialist in the application of the Alexander Technique to film, theater and television. In film, he coached actors and collaborated with directors in Passion Fish, Vice, J. Edgar, Life of Pi, W., I, Tonya, and many more. In theater, he collaborated with director Larry Moss and former NFL player Bo Eason in his play Runt of the Litter and playwright Pamela Gien in her Obie– and Drama Desk– award-winning one-person play, The Syringa Tree, both in New York and internationally. Jean-Louis has worked on- and off-Broadway and at major performing arts institutions such as Berlin International Film Festival, Cirque du Soleil, Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute, Getty Villa, Geffen Playhouse, Royal National Theatre, Piccolo Teatro di Milano, Verbier Festival, Royal Shakespeare Company. For the past 34 years, Jean-Louis has taught at the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television and the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. Jean-Louis lives in Los Angeles with his husband, Kristof Konrad.