Food in your teeth.

I often act with food in my teeth. 

No, not big pieces of green spinach in my front teeth that we all check for before our close-up.

Just some food that’s left there because I didn’t brush my teeth. I like it. I like it because it’s a secret. 

My secret. 

It doesn’t mean anything literally. I’m not advocating not brushing your teeth. That’s not the point.

The point is your privacy, your individual peculiarity, and how connecting to that, embracing it, letting it be, helps you act. 

It does me.

We are all bombarded with the notion of being ourselves and to see what that really means in little, ordinary ways might prove useful to you and your acting.

Donald Sutherland once said to me something like: ‘Take a piece of paper, write something on it - silly, poetic, cheeky, religious, rude - fold it up, put it in your shoe, go on set and act’.

These tricks can bring a vivid immediacy to your living in front of the camera.