Inside the Actor’s Performance [Interview]

Sir Edmund Hillary is reported to have said that the reason he and Tenzing Norgay climbed Mount Everest was “because it’s there.” Acting is not mountaineering (except maybe when someone’s making a movie about Everest), but longtime acting teacher Terry Knickerbocker has likened Daniel Craig’s post-James Bond career to tackling challenges not because he needs to but because they’re there. Knickerbocker founded his own studio to coach actors and has worked with Craig on multiple “Knives Out” films and on Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer,” which had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on September 3.  

The idea of acting coaching can conjure all sorts of wild ideas, from warm-up tongue twisters and diction coaching cliches from “Singin’ in the Rain” to physical and improv exercises done in an NYU black box theater. But whatever the method, the goal is always about finding a way to build behaviors that help actors get at the truth, or truths, of whoever they’re playing. For Craig’s tortured expat Lee in “Queer,” all he and Knickerbocker did was talk over Zoom (even though they were both in Brooklyn at the time). IndieWire reached out to Knickerbocker to ask about his work with Craig and the misconceptions of what coaching is and isn’t. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

IndieWire: Taking “Queer” as an example, I’m curious how you go about working with an actor. What gets them to a place where they’re “ready” to get on set? 

Terry Knickerbocker: It always depends on the actor and how they like to work and what problem they’re trying to solve. I’ve worked with Daniel before, on “Knives Out 2” and on “Macbeth” on Broadway. He came to me with this, that Luca Guadagnino had approached him about it, and said it was the only project he was taking on for a whole year. So we had a lot of time. 

You know, it’s not casting that you would normally assume. It’s an art film, a labor of love for sure, and we spent a lot of time on it. And so, I think the first thing we needed to do was really understand the character’s journey, which is very much based on William S. Burroughs, and this gossip or lore that he might have killed his wife in real life, and what it was like for him to be queer. It was complicated, it was controversial, and it required a lot of steeping ourselves in the world of that context, and the world of the novel itself, and the script, and really taking time. Daniel would say that one thing he did not want was to present a cliche gay man in terms of whatever those tropes are.  

Yeah, that sort of affect that’s become Hollywood’s signal for queerness for a really long time. 

Right, which you could see if you went to Christopher Street or wherever. Even Truman Capote had some of that affectation in real life, or Tennesse Williams. But Burroughs was actually a very arrogant, masculine-presenting kind of fellow. So there were things Daniel didn’t want to do, based on an assessment of Burroughs and the character in the film — because they’re the same, but they’re not. 

So what did you both diagnose the character as? 

A fundamentally lonely person — and a very intelligent person, and a person who had a lot of opinions about people and culture and art and writing, and someone who was his own worst enemy, in a way. He was constantly alienating people and pushing people away and at the same time, I think the core of it is this is someone who wants to be loved. In a way he wants a boyfriend, but he really wants love and he finds this boy who isn’t even necessarily willing to admit that he’s queer, in the story, and going that adventure and having such a wound in his heart that the drugs and the alcohol were very much part of. 

How do you explore that? Is it just playing with the text and trying different reads, or are you doing other things to get to that understanding of the character? 

It was all on Zoom. Usually, with Daniel, the first session is just a conversation with me having read the script — we just did this again for “Knives Out 3” — and we’ll get the lay of the land and see what he’s looking to do. Daniel’s British, and the British acting system training is different than the American system, in some ways, and language is very important and how you shape that language, how you carve that language out. And there were some very long speeches that we wanted to do. But I think mostly it was about, “What are the circumstances and the relationships?” That’s the main thing we’re looking at. 

So sometimes I asked if he could get something from Luca and his team about what this cafe looks like? Because obviously Luca was also working with designers and prepping the film, so can we see some of the world they’re trying to create? How close are the tables at the cafe in Mexico City? Because ultimately, we’re trying to create behavior, right? 

It’s always a conversation with Daniel, and what I tend to do with him within those conversations is work in chunks — in workable chunks — and we’ll work for an hour and a half to two hours at a time. I will have the script, he has the script. I will play all the other characters and try to give him something to work off of, and I’m taking notes, and we’ll get through a couple scenes, or maybe just one scene, and he’ll do his thing. He’s doing whatever he’s doing, and he’s not pushing. He’s not trying to make a fully-fledged performance. He’s dipping his toe in the water. 

I think of it sometimes like getting a custom-made suit. The tailor will measure you, they’ll put something together, and you’ll go see them again. They know they need to do more nipping and tucking, and you’ll need two or three or four appointments before it takes full shape. So we’re playing around with it, and I’ll give him some notes, but it’s very much a dialogue. It’s not like I’m the director. I have an idea, but Daniel’s not afraid to say, well, actually, I see it this way. And I’ll go, “Oh yeah, absolutely, great idea.” Because at the end of the day, he’s the one who has to do it. 

We mapped it out that way. Then there were some things he kept wanting to return to, some more difficult scenes and speeches — because it was a lot of text and to get an audience to stay with a character in a film where you have a monologue that’s a page long because that’s how it was written, by a guy who’s a literary guy, that’s tricky. He wanted to make sure that it felt active and alive and relational to whoever the guy happened to be talking to. And it’s also quite fantastic because it’s drug-induced, and it’s Burroughs, and it’s weird. I’ll be very curious to see how it’s received. 

Hopefully well! Are there any other sort of approaches into character or things that you all tend to think about when you’re tailoring the suit? 

Daniel comes prepared to work, which is so great to have a partner to work with who’s intelligent, who I don’t have to do all the work for. But every project has its own requirements. Sometimes we’ll get into something related to backstory, which some people don’t really think about. But coming with, like, what could have happened, did Burroughs kill his wife or what was it like to be queer growing up in the early and mid part of the 20th century? Or in “Knives Out 3” — I have to be careful about spoilers — but what can we reveal about Benoit Blanc that hasn’t been revealed before and that’s supported by the script? How does he become the great sleuth that he is, but also be a human being, and who is this human being? 

Rian Johnson has written an incredible script that you don’t really want to edit. Like, a lot of film writing, you do want to edit and actors do that. It’s very different from plays, which you don’t touch a word — you better not. So when you have a great writer like Rian Johnson and a great character like Benoit Blanc and this formula that’s kind of Agatha Christie, how do you make it so an audience feels compelled to watch it? We’re trying to not just honor the truth of a story, but how do we make it interesting — and interesting primarily to Daniel, right? What’s going to keep his attention? He’s working because he wants to work and he loves telling stories and playing interesting characters. 

I have to say, I have such respect for him for taking on “Queer.” He did not need to do that job, you know? Something about the challenge of taking on a role that he could easily get caught out in, that all kinds of communities are going to care about, he did not need to do that. But something about working with Luca interested him and something about working on that character, which is a departure for him. I don’t think he’s ever played anybody like this as far as I can see in his body of work, and to say, “Yeah, I’m going to do it, and I’m going to go all in on it”? I love that.