Audition Accents, MacGyver, and The Facebook Gods
Nappoholics Anonymous is a weekly column featuring twelve random thoughts by actor Tony Nappo. Some are funny, some are poignant, some bother him, and some make him weep from sadness while others make him weep for joy. Here are his thoughts: unfiltered, uncensored, and only occasionally unsafe for work.
1. Ninety percent of the time, when I tell my agent I’m wrong for a part and I shouldn’t bother auditioning for it, he talks me into going and I book it. It happens especially with accents. I’m not bad at them, I’m just not crazy about doing them for auditions. I don’t feel good about them until I’ve had lots of time to make them something I don’t have to think about anymore.
I had an audition about a month ago for a role with a British accent. Instead of going through the usual dance with my agent, Rich, I had a good friend who has an English accent record the lines for me and I drilled them until I felt semi-comfortable with them. There were only a handful of lines, anyway. Long story short, I booked seven days on a Netflix series and made a ridiculous amount of money. Like, stupid disgusting ridiculous money.
I think the point of the story is fairly clear. I’m single and wealthy. Or maybe the point is to go to all of your auditions because you never fucking know. They both work.
2. Fuck Yeah of the Week:
The Musical Theatre Company’s Mitchell Marcus is recognized as one of Canada’s Top 40 under 40.
3. I’m not saying that show MacGyver was way overrated, but I was in a dressing room that didn’t have any Kleenex in it last week so I blew my nose in an Always with Wings that I found lying around and nobody threw me any fucking parade.
4. Classic Me:
I wrote this in the wee hours of the morning after Donald Trump was declared the next president of the United States, after having just been shot in the face in the middle of the night, in the middle of the woods, by Kim Coates. Me, not Trump.
5. I flew to Montreal for a job last week and the abscessed tooth I have been ignoring got inflamed. The upside was that it took me pretty much the entire flight home to eat my little bag of smoked almonds.
6.
Yes, fuck cancer! But DO NOT fuck with Canada’s Healthcare System!
7. The success of Crow’s Theatre’s excellent production of The Flick, clocking in at around three hours, provoked this next thought – I have never heard anyone ever say, about any show, in my entire life, NOT EVER – “I don’t think it was long enough.”
8.
Whenever I see something like this, I remind myself that Trump isn’t what’s wrong with people. Trump is just a symptom. People themselves are the disease. I mean, what the fuck is wrong with us when it’s even possible that this would be printed on a T-shirt for a child to wear publicly?
9. An actor who is very good and who I have always liked recently asked me if I have ever hired a media person to do publicity for me when a film or show comes out, to make sure I get promoted properly in said project. Below is my response (the “haha” off the top is in regard to the statement in his ask: “I know you’re shy about sharing your opinion on anything but I thought I would reach out anyway”).
“Haha!!! I know people who have done that. I do all my own media shit. Basically, I think it’s a complete waste of time and money. Nobody fucking cares. That’s the bottom line. The people I know are more likely to see my Facebook page than any blurb or newspaper article. Imagine yourself reading an article and the name William Hamilton is mentioned. If you don’t know William Hamilton, it doesn’t mean anything. You won’t retain it. The folks who have produced the show/film will do their best to market the fucking thing when the time comes along. Until then, take a lot of selfies on set that you can share at a later date on Instagram or Facebook or whatever platform and when the production starts releasing promotional shit, you just share it with the comment “I’m in this. It was so great, I’m so lucky, blah blah blah” or some shit that you really mean. “I grew from this… this was challenging… hey, you know who’s an asshole? This guy!!” Or whatever.
Hope that answers the question. Don’t waste your money. Nobody gives a shit about us in Canada. And they won’t ever. Unless you book a significant part in a series that has success outside of Canada, this is the way it’s gonna be for the rest of your life. So unbuckle your seatbelt and put some soothing music on the radio and, as Dennis Hopper once said to me, “enjoy the ride.”
10. Artist of the Week:
This piece is simply titled Sam. I chose it for its obvious connection to the theatre world, even though it’s an older piece painted by Andrew Scott in 1988. Andrew is not only an amazing visual artist but happens to be the drummer in the band Sloan, as well as the husband of one of my favourite actors and people, Fiona Highet. I’ve known Andrew for a couple of decades now. We aren’t particularly close but I respect the shit out of him as an artist and a man. His canvases, at least those I’ve seen, are mostly large like this one here – which I believe is 5 x 3 feet – and dominated by single images surrounded by empty space. This painting’s black-and-white palette stands out from his others, which are principally done in blue and white, and, also unlike this piece, mostly focus on some form of life that isn’t human. His subjects often include dogs, birds, bucks, and I think even a cat or two. He takes these animals out of their natural space and blows them up in poses that are meant to evoke human traits and emotions, shining a spotlight on them. He demands that you pay attention to the subjects, in the same way, I imagine, they demanded his attention as an artist. We the viewers are left trying to figure out what each of the pieces says just as Andrew worked through what the subjects said to him in the first place, or, perhaps, what life is saying to him through these subjects that he feels compelled to communicate and share.
Sam is a painting of the great Sam Shepard and says a lot to me about both the subject and the artist. I’d sum it up simply as “cool as shit knows cool as shit.” It’s also very cool to me that Andrew, a man who has spent so much of his creative energy as a collaborator in one of the country’s most successful bands, has found a way to also share his voice as an individual. I think in some way each one of his pieces could be considered a visual representation of a drum solo. A lot of his pieces, including this one, contain movement; a kind of blurred or out-of-focus element which implies, at least to me, just how quickly each of these isolated moments goes by and how easy they are to miss. Or maybe they aren’t meant to be solos at all but are like drum lines which have been removed from the context of any given song and isolated, the same way he has isolated his subjects from their worlds and served them up on large, very focused canvases. You can see more of Andrew’s work at andrewscottwork.com.
11. Guest Mom of the Week: Courtesy of Celine Tsai
12.
I am facing a real conundrum here. I met this guy the other night and I knew his name and face because he always pops up on those “people you might know” things on Facebook. I’m sure I had even looked him up at one point because he had looked kind of familiar to me. It was funny and not awkward at all to tell him how much effort had gone into me NOT being his Facebook friend, which seemed just fine with him. But here is the tricky part – I loved the fucking guy. So charming and funny and self-effacing – “I specialize in playing the mistake women have made in the past or the mistake they are presently making” – but at this point it feels like I have committed so much effort to not friending him that it would somehow confuse my existence too much to now attempt to friend him. Cary Shields, who was there that night and the reason we crossed paths, suggested I just block him, which seems harsh but also might make the most sense. Why???!! Why Facebook gods??!!!!! Why must you always be testing my resolve!!!??!!??
Tony Nappo
Tony is Italian, he’s from Scarborough, he’s an actor, he’s a father, he’s a really good house painter, and he doesn’t believe that most things matter, ultimately, at all.
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