Successful Actors Talk About Their Training featuring Paul Wesley

Paul Wesley

Flo Greenberg, Stuart Rogers, and Ivana Chubbuck

When I was a kid, I was really interested in acting, and I started doing some theater in school plays. I was living 45 minutes outside of Manhattan, and I wanted to segue into doing something on a professional level. When I was 15, I decided to join this workshop, run by Flo Greenberg, in Manhattan. I would commute to the city from Jersey every day.

I went for years. It was like boot camp. I just didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I just had all these emotions. I came from an immigrant family. English was my secondary language growing up, and in my household it was always Polish. I always felt like a pretty observant individual, and I had all these ideas of how to mimic things. I just had a general level of emotion, but I didn’t really know how to channel it. It was just a matter of having words on a page and applying those feelings. A lot of it came incredibly innately for me, which was fantastic. At the end of the class, we put up a showcase. That showcase attracted talent agents, and I got fortunate that one of the agents signed me.

In all sincerity, my greatest training at an early age was the first job that I got, on “Guiding Light.” I was pretty awful, and I developed some technique just by being around actors who had been doing it for 20 years. As I became older, I really wanted to take it to another level. I read all the Stanislavsky books. I read all the Meisner books. I did all this before I chose any kind of acting coach. I started auditing all these classes, and there were all these famous coaches that I didn’t connect with.

And then I found a guy named Stuart Rogers in the [San Fernando] Valley, who was sort of under the radar. I found that his work was really non-techniquey and more about spontaneity and being in the moment. It sounds so simple, but it’s really not. He’s a really solid, practical coach. He doesn’t make things heady. I have also used well-known teachers like Ivana Chubbuck for certain things. I believe in an assortment of techniques. I think marrying one specific technique is a flaw. You should always be open to change and willing to accept whatever advice people are willing to give you and be able to filter it.

Everyone has an opinion and everyone has an interpretation of how they would do a scene, and it really doesn’t matter. At the end of the day it’s all art, and if you’re honest in the moment and you make a commitment, stick to it and don’t second-guess yourself.

Paul Wesley has starred on “Army Wives,” “24,” and “Everwood.” Currently he stars on “The Vampire Diaries.”

via backstage.com