Oscar Isaac Whenever he receives a script he’s interested in, there’s one thing he does first: he sends it directly to acting and voice-over coach Gerry Grennell.
“It’s usually like, ‘I think this is interesting, I wonder what Gerry thinks’.”
As Isaac told The Hollywood Reporter explained that Grennell would typically send detailed notes back to the actor, considering areas such as what he would be looking for in a role, how he would function as a performer and Man interacts with the work, and whether it offers him something new to explore. “By this stage, he knew me pretty well,” Isaac said.
But the star isn’t the only one looking for the idea of the unassuming, charming, funny and especially chatty Irishman before embarking on a new project.
For almost 11 years, Dubliners have quietly amassed a clientele A list of the best who’s who of Hollywood, including multiple Academy Award winners and some of the biggest names working today. Several people default to Grennell when preparing for the role (though he humbly suggests he use “gimmicks” to convince them of his worth).
with Isaac – who he has worked with for over a decade, including his Inside Llewellyn Davis and his meteoric rise since then to become one of the most popular leading men in mega-budget studio tentpoles and prestige art films – Grenell had been with Marlon Brando, Meryl Streep, Natalie Portman and others have collaborated, Sean Penn, Tom Cruise, Josh Brolin, Cillian Murphy, Bruce Wayne Reese, Anne Hathaway, Matt Damon, Brian Cox, Ewan McGregor and Orlando Bloom. Johnny Depp and Andrew Garfield are regular collaborators (“If you have enough Lucky to be taught by Gerry, you should listen,” Garfield once said), as did the late Heath Ledger.
When Ledger was invited to play in The Dark Knight , help him check and develop him as the Joker in the Batman movies performance. Most recently, Grennell collaborated with Pedro Pascal prior to The Last of Us, And for the upcoming Indiana Jones and Wheel of Fortune another regular, Boyd Holbrook (who describes Grenell as an “absolute legend”). Fellow new Oscar nominee Paul Mescal is one of the new clients for his upcoming film Carmen chatted many times.
Isaac joked that he was “worried” about adding any further fuel to Grennell’s profile, and for good reason.
“He’s my special wizard, like a gnome, and he creates all my art for me,” Isaac said. “And no one can ever know!”
While he may often be introduced as a “performance coach”, and his long list of honors is primarily “conversation coach”, or more succinctly , “coach,” a label that Grennell himself admits is a misnomer.
“I’m not really an acting coach. I might be a facilitator, or maybe you could call me a talker,” he told from his home in the Irish capital. THR says he also runs regular intensive workshops for budding young stars at the Bow Street Academy (he did this by designing its – and Ireland’s – first-ever year-long The screen acting course helped build the school). “But movies don’t have those categories, productions have to have names. Honestly, I don’t care what you call me at all”
But sometimes he’s just there to help actors perfect a particular accent and that’s all Start.
Grennell, who founded an experimental theater company in Dublin with some friends as a young man, said he quickly realized that while acting “was something I could talk about,” it wasn’t his where the skills lie. While the stage may not beckon, he does have a growing fascination with the art and science of acting—”about what happens to your state of mind when you’re in a performance situation”—which was developed while studying music in Germany( He plays guitar), which focuses in part on the psychology of performance.
This would eventually draw him into a teaching job, as did his diagnosis of repetitive strain injury early in life – which affected his vocal abilities. While at his theater company, he was introduced to the Alexander technique—a movement training method employed by many actors and RSI sufferers to reduce tension and improve postural habits. Realizing that he still had much to learn, he traveled to London, first to attend the four-year Alexander Technique teacher training course and then to the Central School of Speech and Drama.
His teacher, Julia Wilson-Dixon, was there – herself a renowned dialect coach (she and Robert De Niro de Niro) Collaboration Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , Glenn Close Alber T. Nobbs and Eddie Redmayne The Theory of Everything
) — discovered Grennell’s talent for accents and invited him to work on A job she can’t do.
Grennell’s first movie was the 1994 TV series A Man of No Importance, starring the “delightful” Albert Finney, follows a poetry-loving bus conductor 28 )s Dublin wants to perform Oscar Wilde’s Salome with his passengers. Primarily hired to help Finney and co-stars Rufus Sewell, Tara Fitzgerald and Michael Gambon polish their Irish brogues (though, he admits, being Irish, Gambon’s brogues are already solid), he ends up “working with everyone”. )
More gigs to come soon, but soon he goes beyond just fine-tuning the accent (as he did on Streep 2001’s dances at Lughnasa and helps her get the soft northern chants of County Donegal. His obsession with acting—not just how to make a sound, but how to use it—began to surface in his conversations with actors.
“By definition, it would Show up, because once you open your mouth, that’s the performance,” he said, explaining that the rhythm and intonation of a particular accent has a huge impact on how they’re delivered.
” Tone is driven by emotion, not intellect, and then, if my palette of emotions is the equivalent of a painter’s palette of colors, then I need to know what I’m doing with these things.”
The first one to really make his way to full-fledged performance coaching is Ledger, who will be met via a somewhat ridiculous star map, a start 11 summer in Ballycotton, Ireland.
Filming TV series Divine Rapture , possibly stopped after only two weeks as it emerged that the production company’s escrow account did not exist, an unfortunate feature that proved to be a major turning point for Grennell.
Not only did he work with Marlon Brando (despite his insistence that “you don’t work with Marlon”) and take every opportunity to “interrogate his genius,” but he also developed a close friendship with co-star Depp, and the two People made connections between scenes through music.
With each new creative talent drawn to Grennell’s orbit, Depp – at the time the hottest star in independent film One (thankfully, thanks to his then-relationship with Kate Moss) – decided to take his new friend for a spin, and the two collaborated on more films (including, much later, Alice in Wonderland , Grennell helped reduce the 11 accent to Depp originally wanted three of the Mad Hatter, one with hints of Ireland).
The duo’s earlier projects were 2010’s Jack the Ripper gothic horror From Hell , filmed in Prague, where he meets Ledger, in His first lead role in A Knight’s Tale was filmed there.
“He came on set and we had a chat and then I went to his set and started talking and it was really nice – we Got along really well,” said Grenell, who was quickly invited to join Ledger as the young Australian’s career exploded from Four Feathers to Brothers Grimm , Brokeback Mountain ,
Casanova and The Dark Knight . “It became a very close relationship—he would send me scripts, we would discuss them, and whenever I wasn’t working on something else, he would let me work with him.”
While filming in Texas, Grennell got a call from a friend saying he had been cast as the Joker and moved with his family to Brooklyn to be closer to the star. Lived with Ledger in London during filming).
” Grenell recalled. “But by definition, if you think of topics like The Dark Knight and Your specific role, no matter what you’re talking about, it will be influenced by elements you might be curious about. So my job is to be a listener, but also a provocateur, to put a few pins in the area and see if they respond. “
Pushpin – plus a great extensive study of personality traits, researching case studies and reading and re-reading scripts, examining all the characters to help “build your vision of yourself” — will culminate in Ledger’s unnatural but iconic voice as the Joker.
Grennell is working closely with the cast on his final film, Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, the two shared an apartment again while filming London. Grennell later explained to the media how he would see Ledger with the serious battling the insomnia that ended up causing him to die at 1998 at 1998 just the age of 30, which he described as a “desperate loss”.
Like Ledger, Isaac is an actor who was quick when they first met on the set of 2013 Madonna’s box office failure Just think of Grennell as a friend and uniquely skilled collaborator WE Grennell has been mentoring co-star Abbie Cornish, and Isaac says he found more in him than just A like-minded spirit prone to “compulsive misconduct”, but an independent individual who was “totally disarmed and genuinely authentic”.
They soon began collaborating, Isaac noted Grennell transforming his relationship with the Alexander technique – which he had taught in acting school – into something deeper and more spiritual.
“He talks about being a performer with the world and space relationship—how you relate to the material, how you relate to the character, all of that stems from the Alexander technique and is even more deeply rooted in the nature of consciousness,” he said.
Isaac claims, Grennell’s impact on his work was immediate, and he was constantly present by email and phone as his career took off. “There are very few projects I do without him. ”
For Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic Dune, arguably his most important role to date, Grennell as Isaac offered ways to train his voice to stay in the “chest” like he wanted Duke Leto Atreides to be. But he also delved into the role, concluding that Leto was a character who knew himself very well in the desert. Fate’s leader on the planet Arrakis, and requires “extreme pragmatism” as he seeks to achieve his goals before the inevitable. Isaac says it was this conversation that led him to a relationship with Velen. Newa talks, and in a scene with Rebecca Ferguson’s Lady Jessica, gives the Duke the line to resign, “I think we should have had more time. “
In a recent letter of credit which has become one of the outstanding representatives of 2013, Grennell Help Pedro Pascal prepare for HBO’s critically acclaimed video game adaptation The Last of Us , which he was unable to visit as usual due to the pandemic Set on location in Canada, but talking to the actor online before filming (like he did with Mescal, shot in Australia with Carmen).
Part of his conversations with Pascal revolved around the believability of relationships between characters on screen. He said his job at the time was to “analyze how you create a environment” and ensure viewers don’t automatically disbelieve any intimate moments they see. An element of the answer, he claims, lies in “the relationship you have with yourself.”
Similarly, Grennell’s credit as a “coach” on the show probably doesn’t quite cover his range of activities, remote or not.
With ridiculous levels of self-deprecation, Grennell has repeatedly gone to great lengths to downplay the potential he might give the actor. anything from his skills or repertoire, despite the ever-increasing list of major projects and repertory names on his resume (not that he ever updated them – a friend was on his IMDb page when he heard them Added credits, while he does have a LinkedIn account, Grennel l said he “can’t remember the password.”)
“Honestly, I’m a load of bullshit. I have to be defenseless about what I say, and there’s going to be a lot of bullshit,” he said of his conversation. “But every now and then, there might be something of value. It might turn on a light in an area of interest.”
He said that, with or without his intervention, his co-stars All excellent, similar to thoroughbred racehorses.
“They were trapped in a particular way where nature allowed them to navigate a world of open, free and unbiased expression,” he said. “Out of my naiveté, I just sat there in awe, soaking it up. Every now and then, I got a chance to bask in their sunshine.”
But for Isaac and now banging For many of his stars, Grennell has been a key figure in giving them the creative tools to spark the sun, by keeping them coming back (and more A-list recommendations coming fast and plentiful).
“What he did was open up avenues of expression in a really interesting way,” Isaac said. “He’s never been prescriptive. For some guys, that’s what they want, they want you to be like ‘tell me what shape my mouth should be when I make that sound and I’ll take care of the rest . ” But the fun of Gerry is that it’s like a toy box full of fun stuff.”
