We recently connected with Mari Blake and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Mari, thanks for joining us today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

I really can’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in creative pursuits, particularly performing for friends and family members, so it’s something that has always been with me. Being born in NYC, I was put into child modeling at six months old because my older brother had been a child model for years and I think we both enjoyed the novelty of that experience. It felt like a natural progression to move into performing on stage.

I had my first theatre audition when I was four, but production (rightfully) thought I would be a little too young to take direction, so I didn’t get to perform in front of a real audience until I was five. It was a musical theatre review and it made me fall in love with musicals. All through out my childhood, I performed regionally in musicals and plays and although I guess I was technically doing this professionally, it felt like more of a hobby from my perspective.

I took a break from theatre in middle school and returned to it my sophomore year of high school, which was the first time I actually realized that people could go to college for acting and eventually go on to have a career in it. At first I thought that I wanted to go to school for musical theatre, because that’s mostly what I performed growing up, but I ended up at Elon University to get my BFA in acting, which was definitely the right choice for me. While I was at Elon, I became much more interested in film than I had ever been before and being in an acting program allowed me to study that in addition to stage craft.

It’s been a whole journey, years in the making. There are still times when I question if this is the right path for me, but ultimately I know that I would miss it too much if I shifted to another career.

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?

I consider myself mainly an actor, although I also dabble in writing, directing, and modeling. I do equal parts theatre and film and I love both of them. The more I learn in each medium, the more I am amazed by how they compliment each other. I used to think of theatre and film acting as totally different things, but the more I work on both skills, the more I realize that “truth” is “truth” and in a way, it’s universal.

Since graduating with my BFA, I have worked tirelessly to create a community of artists for myself in NYC and I have been lucky to collaborate with so many amazing, interesting, dedicated people. As any actor would, I aspire to be someone who is open to new possibilities and projects that will challenge me to grow. I definitely chase the feeling of novelty – of having the opportunity to work on something that feels really unique and like something that I’ve never tried before.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

Whenever I’m in a rehearsal room, I always think to myself: “this is what I’m really in it for”. I’d be interested to know if other actors feel that way because I’m really not sure. I think there can sometimes be this misconception about actors that we’re in it for attention or applause or that we’re self-centered drama queens who desire praise above all else. I’m not saying that praise isn’t nice, because it certainly is, but the more I work throughout my career, the more I realize that what I love above all else is the acting itself and the presence/clarity that it brings me.

And I think the most ideal place to feel that is during a rehearsal process – or in an acting class – when you have this freedom to play that is sometimes diminished during a performance when you’re feeling a bit more pressure. I just have a lot of fun. I see a lot of actors who have social media bios like “I play pretend for a living” and it’s kind of a cliche that makes me lovingly roll my eyes, but it is a bit like that. There is a unique and childlike joy that acting brings me that I really don’t think I could get anywhere else.

But despite the seemingly regressive childlike nature of the art form, I’ve also grown so much as a person because of my acting journey. When I graduated from my BFA program, I was sort of floored to realize that although I definitely learned a lot about acting, I felt like I had learned more about parts of myself: the things I was hiding, the ways in which I’m comfortable or uncomfortable in front of others, the stories that I wanted to tell. Acting has helped me become more free and more in touch with the person I am. That’s an incredibly healing realization.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I think the biggest thing I’ve had to unlearn is rigidity. Prior to studying acting college, I never had any formal acting training, so everything I knew, I had picked up on productions along the way. Especially starting out as a child actor, I always knew what was expected of me and I was able to meet those requirements: show up on time, know you’re lines, learn your blocking, practice, practice, practice. Professionalism was something I learned young and is still something that I pride myself on.

That being said, we started off with Meisner training in college, which involves “repeating” and is all about staying in the present moment and reacting accordingly to your scene partner. Repeating was such a foreign concept for me, because it didn’t involve learning lines or rehearsing how you were going to say something ahead of time and it was truly so terrifying as a first timer. I felt really out of control. Looking back on it, it was the beginning of a really important change in my skillset. Unlearning that kind of rigidity and fixation on perfection has lead to my becoming a much more spontaneous and interesting-to-watch actor. And it’s also made acting a lot more fun.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.mariblake.com
• Instagram: macaroni_blake
• Youtube: Mari Blake

Image Credits

Mark DePasquale, Jelani Paul, Nick Grimaldi, Eddy Kwon, Jonathan Barbee, Tiffany (Hazel), Andrew Abballe