We were lucky to catch up with Stan Kowalski recently and have shared our conversation below.

Stan, 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.

I wanted to become an actor since I remember. Two years ago I had a great opportunity to join the American Academy of dramatic arts in Los Angeles. After first two weeks I realised that I have much more to learn to become a good actor. The school was the best experience in my life, I learned not only about acting but also about life. The amount of scenes we had to prepare was crazy and I found my strengths and weaknesses. I’m very good at drama but I still need to work on my timing in comedy. The school focused mainly on theatrical performances so we had to be big and loud. It took me almost two years to give a solid performance. My main problem was my voice. I couldn’t project enough for the audience in the back to hear me. My voice and speech teachers helped me a lot to fixed that issue. Another thing I was struggling with was my confidence. I would get so nervous before stepping on the stage that I couldn’t stay in the character, I just focused on my lines. When I fixed that problem, I enjoyed every moment on the stage.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Hello! My name is Stanislaw Kowalski, but you can call me Stan. I’m 27 and I am from small town in Poland. I wanted to be an actor since I remember. After high school I went for one year of acting course. After that, I knew I wanted to become an actor. My acting teacher told me that I need to leave Poland to experience more about life and learn English first, so I went to Australia for 3 years. After two years I met a Chinese director at a cafe, I asked him if I could play in any of his movies, he took my number and after 4 months he called me that he wants me in his movie. I played Italian mafiozo. After the shooting, I went to China for 3 months and then to Japan where I tried to play in anything there. While being in Tokyo, I played in many projects as a background. I booked one movie, I was so excited for this one. Unfortunately it got cancelled because of Covid 19 and I had to come back to Poland. I was very close on giving up my dream but then I got invitation to The American academy of dramatic arts in Los Angeles. I took it as a sign that this is the path I have to follow.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

I auditioned for many commercials and movies in my life. Sometimes I was very close to book one that I really liked but they decided to go with someone else. At the beginning it was hard, to be rejected. Right now it’s much easier for me to handle it. I’m not getting excited, I just do the audition the best I can and after, I don’t think about it anymore.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

At my acting school I had to play with many emotions. Sometimes I made then to real for me and then I didn’t know how to handle with it. I was stressed out constantly, overthinking every scene and being to hard on myself. After a year I started to have panic attacks. It took me a while to learn how to deal with them. I had to stop vaping, drinking coffee for a few weeks. I’m not vaping anymore, and I take much more time to rest. Also I learn how to portray emotions with making them feeling too real.

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