We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Brett Schaberg a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Brett, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
To perhaps fall into a cliche answer, the work of learning the craft of acting, or any artform for that matter, is a continuous one. The journey to my current understanding of acting has been a fairly long road, filled with plenty of speed bumps and wrong turns. It has been a gradual realization that the best art we artists can make comes from the most vulnerable parts of ourselves. It requires engaging in relationship with the person or persons across from you. The ability to let go of “making choices” and simply experience what is happening in any given moment. It requires honesty in life, and experiencing all the highs and lows involved in life, to bring characters to life on-screen or on the stage. As my wonderful acting coach, Alice Carter, says: “If you want to change your art, change your life. If you want to change your life, change your art.” This has impacted me greatly, and continues to do so as my journey goes on.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
When it’s all said an done, I’m a boy from the Midwest (Michigan, to be exact) that fell in love with acting, at least my idea of what acting was at the time, and made my way to LA to follow that passion. I’ve done work mainly in TV in my time here, while continuing to work on the craft in weekly acting classes. I do also have a twin brother, who much like myself, has chosen this rollercoaster of an industry, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ve been blessed to have opportunities to work with him and see him grow tremendously as an actor. What I most look forward to is the chance to bring an ever growing understanding of acting to future projects I work on, and most of all to do it with all the people I’ve met out here.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
One of the worst habits I had developed from my time attending school for acting and moving to LA was an idea that I had to present and idea of how something is meant to look. For instance, in a scene where a character is meant to get emotional or have an outburst of anger, I would approach it with this notion of showing the audience what being emotional or angry looks like. Along these same lines is the belief that there’s a way to do something right, or to perfect something before letting the cameras roll. To loosely quote my acting coaches mentor, Roy London: “Trying to be the right thing while the camera is running is great. But having figured it out?… I promise you, does not a star make.”
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
Again, at risk of sounding pretentious, it’s simply to make great art and to do it with people I respect, admire, and love.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://pro.imdb.com/name/nm7781318?s=c0c82b74-5c0e-1abe-5503-bba463ec5eb5&site_preference=normal
- Instagram: @brett.schaberg
