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Tell us about acting teachers.
JENNIFER: I had a few teachers in college whose job is was to break you down and make you cry. Once, I had just finished doing a scene, and the teacher threw a dime down on the stage and said, "Pick up that dime and go call your mother and tell her you'll never be an actor."
FRANK: I had a teacher who once looked at an actress after she'd finished a long monologue, and she wasn't very good in it. There was this long pause and he looked at her. He said, "Is it that you've secretly chosen another profession while I wasn't looking?"
The smartest thing a teacher ever said to me was "Act in spite of your neurosis, not because of it. Act to overcome the things in yourself that you think are terrible. Don't use them as the reason you're acting."
BRYAN: I've gone to so many different acting teachers. It's funny. Listen to what Goddard says in class: know the lines, know what they mean and mean them when you say them. If I would have known that earlier. Think of all the money I wasted! [LAUGHS] When we have to do scenes for Goddard's class, we work hard because we know that he's gonna be brutally honest.
FRANK: We're in a time now where everybody's too forgiving of each other and everybody's too politically correct. Nobody really does ream you out in the way they should if you're not good. Because how are you gonna get any better if you don't?
KRISTA: Spencer Tracy always said, "Know your lines and try not to walk into the furniture." You know the actors who were in the acting class? They were actually taking out notebooks and writing down everything Goddard was saying. Because it's an acting class. And it's great. I've never really taken a class. I've been coached by acting coaches before, but I've never been in a class, so this was really cool for me to do.
What was it like shooting UNSCRIPTED?
FRANK: I shouldn't actually say this, but life on the show was unglamorous. We didn't have trailers and all the usual stuff you get. But it was really kind of fun, with everybody piling in the back of a station wagon and going to the next location.
KRISTA: It was all sneaky. Sneak attacks.
BRYAN: Guerilla style.
JENNIFER: In one episode I was dressed up as the Statue of Liberty and Dragon [Erik Weiner] was dressed up as Uncle Sam, and we were protesting outside of Paramount Studios. George and [executive producer] Grant Heslov were across the street hiding behind a bush with cameras. So one of the bigwigs goes into the lot and starts talking to the security guard. The security guard starts walking out towards us, and we ran through traffic across the street, jumped into the van and sped off.
What does the show say about being a "struggling actor"?
FRANK: The point about being a struggling actor is that it never stops. There's this cliché that you're a struggling actor, and one day you'll get to a point and you won't struggle any more. You struggle till the day you die. That's part of the game. It's a myth to think that you struggle when you're young and somehow you reach some magical place and you don't struggle any more.
BRYAN: I think of struggling like when you struggle to pay your rent. I've been there, you know.
KRISTA: When you have to wear something really low cut just to make a paycheck, just to pay the rent, that's struggling. Getting the right jobs, that's a huge struggle too, at least for me. I'm grateful for the things that I do, but I struggle to try to get really great roles that I can feel good about that I'm proud of.
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