Actor

Kathleen Cooke: Tell me about yourself and how you got into this business?

Fred Applegate: I told my parents when I was seven that I was going to be an actor. Everybody starts somewhere! There isn’t quite the ladder that there used to be. It used to be there was a really good network of non-equity theatres, summer theatres and dinner theatres. That’s really dried up to a great extent, and the regional theatres have even compressed a bit. They’ve gone star-oriented. I don’t mean to be discouraging, I’m just trying to give you a perspective. Even at the Guthrie Theater, where I started, they’re looking for people who’ve worked on Broadway.

I got my equity card in 1980 doing “Bottom” in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Now, they’re likely to go to New York to look for someone to play “Bottom” So I was lucky to hit it back then. The work weeks in New YorkChicago. When I was there, 30 plus years ago, Steppenwolf was just getting started and many of those actors have all gone on and done tremendous work. are so high, it’s probably a good idea to head to a major market and try to work with a small company, perhaps in

You should always consider the option of getting together with people who you admire and trust in making something happen. Make a theatre. Do a small production of something. Scrape together whatever money you can. If you can do a production of a play for $5,000, do it. And then do another one and build up a reputation or either plug into whatever connections you have developed. Up the street here in Los Angeles there are a few theatres that have apprentices. Do that, or, if you don’t have the connections to do that, find some people you trust and make something happen on your own.

KC: What do you think of acting classes?

FA: I don’t really endorse a lot of classes because it’s so hard to actually find one that will benefit you. They’re out there, but you really need to be careful. You can’t just walk in and trust anyone. You have to decide what you want from the class and then you have to find the class that will give you that. You need be the informed consumer and confident in what they’re teaching you.

I would say if you don’t have any onscreen experience, do find a class that will have someone give you a script, work with you on it, put you in front of a camera every class so you can watch what you look like on the screen. That’s good. You can see what’s too much, what’s not enough.

I worked with a director, Michael Langham, who was one of the people who founded the Guthrie. He kept jumping up and yelling at us, “first thoughts, first thoughts.” What he meant was if you think about what you’re going to say, you’re either unsure of what to say or unsure of whether or not you want to say it. You’ll see a lot of acting on television, especially really bad acting where the person will first think about what they are going to say and then they’ll say it. In life we don’t do that. We only do that if we’re lying. You can watch an entire episode of some very popular television shows and it really appears as though every single person is lying or has some hidden motive. This is what people mistake for drama. The drama is the story unfolding, not everybody’s hidden motive.

KC: What are your thoughts on extra work?

FA: That depends on your personality. It’s a good way to get on the set and learn what’s going on. It takes a certain stalwartness, because it can be boring. You just have to accept that you’re there for a purpose. You can make some money doing extra work and you can learn a great deal about what happens on a set. It’s kind of your entrée onto a lot, and you can learn a lot about the business.

Keep a positive attitude about what you’re being asked to do. The funniest thing you come across is someone just starting out for whom certain things are beneath them and it’s laughable. You’ve got someone in their twenties and they’ve already decided what kind of work is good enough for them. Why would that be? (laughs) It’s a great way to learn and if you need the work, it’s good money and it is still part of the craft you are trying to learn. If you can’t bring that attitude to it, that positive attitude towards your work that you’re doing, don’t do it.

Really don’t do anything you can’t bring a positive, productive attitude to, because that will be people’s impression of you and they will remember. People remember people they don’t care to work with again much more vividly than people they do care to work with again.

KC: When did you feel like a real actor and that you had “broken into the business?”

FA: It could have been naiveté or my ego, but I guess I always thought I was a real actor, because I was always okay with where I was. I had ambitions to move forward in the craft or in terms of the area I was working, and the size of the role or the complexity of the role, but, I always felt like I was doing my best. Not to be confused with doing well, that’s for other people to decide, but I did always feel I was doing my best and I was putting my best effort into it. I was satisfied with that. Every next step is your big break. You always think of your most recent big thing as the “big thing.” But really, when I got out of college and got a job in a leading role in a musical at a theatre, that actually paid me money, that was huge. They paid me $170 a week, which in 1977 was actually livable. I shared an apartment over a hardware store with another actor. Our rent was $110 a month, which he reduced when the ceiling in the bathroom fell in. We told him we’d clean it up and he wouldn’t have to replace the ceiling if he’d knock the rent down a little because $10 a month was eating for three days.

When I was working there, I met and married the woman that I’m still married to, and I like to refer to as my first wife. We were married in ’79 and we’ve been married 27 years. We moved to Minneapolis, and I had a friend who had gone to Yale and then on to the Yale Rep and was at the Guthrie. She kept inviting Cherie and I to brunch and would also invite the associate artistic director of the theatre. After three or four brunches, auditions came up at the theater for a production of Midsummer Nights Dream and he agreed to have me in because he had gotten to know me socially through my friend. I recently just saw her in New York doing a wonderful play on Second Avenue.

She really was responsible for me getting my audition at the Guthrie. My audition got me the job and my work in that show got me hired as a resident in the company for three years. But without someone believing in me and lining things up for me I would never have been seen. However wonderful I might be or well suited to the part, they wouldn’t have seen me because I wasn’t an Equity member and they didn’t know me.

I worked there for three years, and then we moved to California. When I got to California, my best friend from college was working at MTM and he brought me in as a courtesy and their casting director saw me. I read for just a “general.” By that time I had done enough commercials that I was SAG, so I had that hurdle jumped. I had a commercial reel and I had my theatre résumé, but I had no TV work.

A casting director at MTM had me read a part that had been cut from an episode of Newhart. Later that week, she called me and said they had put the part back in and I was the only person who had read for it, did I want the job? It was four lines, a “five and under”. I was a bus driver and pretty much just had to walk in and say one thing and stand in the background. And I did it. I managed to walk on and say one thing. I said it as well as I could.

Tom Postan was very nice to me, and he came up and put his arm around me and said, “you’re doing fine.” He played the handyman, a great guy, and he helped me calm down a little bit because I was pretty excited. Julia Duffy, who was one of the stars of Newhart, lives in Edina, Minnesota, and had come to the Guthrie and had seen me that summer. She had recognized me on the set of Newhart and asked me if I had been in the Guthrie Theater Company that summer. She said, “I saw you. You were wonderful. I want to introduce you to the producers.” So, Julia Duffy introduced me to the producers and the head writers and told them I was a wonderful actor from Minneapolis and had just moved to LA. That was tremendously helpful. Again, it was another person who had seen my work and had the courage to believe in me and say: I know this person and his work is good.

When you hear about how business is all based on who you know, well, it’s true. It is based on who you know, but there’s two points here. One is I defy you to show me a business that isn’t based on who you know, because if you have a choice of hiring someone who comes recommended by someone you trust or hiring someone who you don’t know and none of your friends know, which is the sensible choice? You’re going to go with someone who has worked with someone you trust, did a good job and regardless of what it says on their résumé, he is good to work with and has a quality product. That’s who you go with. So once you have that, yes it kind of is who you know.

But, it’s who you know, and it’s also what they know that matters. I know a lot of people who are actors of really searing brilliance, but nobody can work with them, so they don’t work so much. You have to remember that your whole reputation is what carries forward, not just what winds up on the film.

KC: Many actors believe that they are beautiful people, are nice, and are really want do what you’re doing, but I keep hearing you say, “work.” Explain what “the work” is?

FA: Unfortunately, there are opportunities for people who are enthusiastic and pretty. You can see the results of that on television all the time. I used to think television was bad and offensive, now I just think a lot of it is sad. I don’t know what they’re doing.

I did a show that lived a very short time. I was a minor character. There was one guy I knew I would work with again and I looked forward to it. His partner, the girl, would never work again, and I could tell you that from Day 1. She showed up in her Lexus half an hour late to the table reading, on her cell phone, and left early for some other appointment. She thought simply showing up was all she needed to do because she was young and she was pretty, and she had a nice, healthy ego. In six episodes it was cancelled, she hasn’t worked again, and that was five years ago.

When you first start doing television, you think, if this goes all seven years, that’s 19 million dollars! Well, what if it only goes seven weeks and you bought a beach house in Malibu? You lose it and you lose the Porsche and you lose your friends. That happened to a friend of mine, a very nice man and a really good and talented actor. His show was to premiere the night a war started. The television coverage of the war wiped out the show, and it never got its legs, and it failed. Good show, really nice guy, talented, but the war knocked it off the air. He did everything right, bought a house in Malibu and a Porsche and he lost them both.

KC: You have a very successful career, marriage, and family, how have you kept all that together?

FA: I have no idea. No, that’s not true. I do know. It’s the church. Whatever else happens in life, whatever else has been going on, whether the career has been going well or not, whether the money has been going out faster than it comes in, which seems to be the way it goes most of the time, the center of our lives has always been the church. Because, when you get more money you just open the valve a little farther, and it just pours out even faster.

I think whatever has happened, whether my wife and I have been sitting around the table, (and we’ve done this,) talking about a time table or a deadline for when we would have to sell the house, we would walk into the door of the same church and sit with the same people and worship the same God in the same way. So, the bottom couldn’t fall out. All the aspects of life could change, but the essence of life couldn’t change because the center of life was always in the center.

I almost can’t tell you how important that is. If that’s something you have and something you can grow, that’s wonderful. For some who don’t have it, it’s going to be hard to understand what I mean. But that is something you can find with a community of faith, with church and a relationship with God. You realize that everything else is okay. However much turmoil there might be, however hard it might be, it’s just accidents of life, not the center or essence of life.

KC: What if you have a passion for acting and you don’t ever seem to be getting any breaks?

FA: I think it’s almost presumptuous of me to try to give advice to people in that position, because everyone’s experience is different, and their tolerance for failure is different. I know a lot of people who get into that place and don’t come out. I can’t imagine how devastating that must be, how painful it must be. At some point you have to grab yourself and say, you know what, I need life, and this aspect of life isn’t working for me. It’s not giving me what I want, it’s not giving me happiness, and it’s not giving me success. It’s not giving me money that I need and I need to find another way to satisfy those things in my life.

Oddly, just as there is a talent for acting, there is a talent for working as an actor, and they’re not always the same thing. They’re not even related. You can have a very talented actor with no gift for working or finding work and they’re stuck. The best example of that is going to an amateur theatre or even a college theatre and there’s a non-theatre major in a significant role and they’re brilliant. They get it, they have ease, they command the stage, their language is beautiful, they have a sense of the style and you’re just fascinated by them and drawn into their performance. But, they’re studying mechanical engineering and have no interest in acting. They’re someone with a tremendous talent for acting, but no passion for the business, for the work of being an actor.

This is good for the rest of us, because they are the consumers of our work. People have to come and see the plays. I think this is where the schools are falling down a bit. Everybody is supposed to be a performer, the schools aren’t teaching people to consume the arts. It’s as if everybody can be a dancer. Well, they can’t, but everyone can appreciate dancing and I think that’s where we need to be building people.

KC: Tell us some of the things you’ve worked on and what you’re going to be working on in the future?

FA: I have done eleven pilots, five series, and did over 150 episodes of television in the last ten years. It paid for the house and it was nice. All those things are fine, but I just felt like I wasn’t being the actor I started out to be and I needed to go back.

It wasn’t what I set out to do. I wanted to act on stage. Although television went very well, I was only happy when I was working on the stage, working six days a week, ten hours a day, forcing myself to be creative. So I set my sights on that and sort of walked away from television. I did a couple plays locally and then wound up doing Cogsworth, the Clock, in Beauty and the Beast in the LA company. The man who cast the LA company of Beauty and the Beast was then casting the New York company of the first revival of Sound of Music and he brought me in for that, which I got, and that gave me my first Broadway credit, which was very important.

In 2001, a friend of mine called and said they were casting the first national tour of The Producers. It was Gary Beach, who won the Tony for Roger DeBris, and he said, “you have to get in on this.” Again, it was someone who believed in me, making me aware of an opportunity, and also telling the director and the producers, you’re going to be seeing my friend Fred Applegate, he’s going to be fantastic, and you’re going to love him.

I started working on that in 2002, I did the tour as “Franz” and understudied the lead, “Max,” the Nathan Lane role. When we got to San Francisco I did “Max” for a week and they were very happy. Then, the man doing it on Broadway Louis J. Stadlen, injured his back and they had a twelve week gap before Nathan came back with Mathew Broderick. They pulled me off the tour and told me, we want you to do ‘Max’ on Broadway. They called me on Friday and said we want you to fly on Monday and open in the show on Tuesday. So, I did that for twelve weeks, and it went very well, and then I went back to the tour.

After working on the show for two and a half years, I decided I needed to rest. I went home and about six months later, they called and said we want you to take over the show on Broadway again. Which was great, actually there’s a little side bar here because I was a little cheeky and called my agent, and I said, they’re offering me New York, but they’re only offering me six months and I was hoping for a bigger commitment from them than six months.

My agent called them and a few weeks later. They had called back and said, “all right, we don’t want you to take over the show in New York anymore, we want you to take over the show in London for a year, and be there in a week!”

I wound up going to London and living in South Kensington for a year with Cherie and our youngest son, Ethan. That was really extraordinary, really extraordinary.

Now, Mel Brooks has written a musical of Young Frankenstein and I’ll be doing that in the fall on Broadway.

KC: Do auditions make you nervous?

FA: I find that auditions don’t make me nervous anymore because I generally know the people I am auditioning for. How has that’s changed over the years? When you start out, you start out going to “open calls.” I recently did a reading of Young Frankenstein in New York, and there was an “open call” on the same floor that our reading was on. The line went out the door of the tenth floor and down ten flights of stairs, out the front door of the building, down 53rd Street, to 8th Avenue and went around the corner. That’s an “open call.” The ten flights of stairs seems like a lot, but you go up those so slowly, it doesn’t matter. Then, you get a casting assistant who judges you either a vegetable or an actor. If they think you’re an actor, you get to see another casting director at the “invited call back”, which out of 1,500 people might be 600.

You have to keep stepping over these hurdles before you get even considered by the casting director. With the work I’ve done, and the credibility I’ve built up, I now bypass some of the steps. I will go in and see the producers, the director and the music director, writer, and composer. The casting director will be there facilitating the meeting and I will be very glad he thought of me, suggested me, and brought me in.

Yet, that has a price. You don’t have that little safe room, where the casting director can steer you away from the things they don’t want to see. If you do your audition first for the casting director, the casting director can say, “you know, they don’t want an accent,” or, “they really are concerned that this is going to come out funny sounding,” or, “this is meant to be a serious moment.” The casting director can give you the skinny on what they would like to see. Without that, you’re going in and you are who you are whether you get it right or you don’t. Casting directors can be a tremendous help to you.

It’s a little more risky but it’s a little more heady to fly that high. It gives you a bit of a rush, and it makes you glow a little bit. Everybody knows that you’re just out on your own, it’s a little exciting in the room. If people feel excited when they’re seeing you, they think, “I want that in my show, I want that feeling!”

But you have to manufacture that as well. From the time you walk through the door, you have to show them what they want. That includes that you are the person they want to have on stage because you are confident, comfortable, and you are available. You know what you are doing, how to handle yourself, and that you’re charming and people will enjoy working with you. The whole audition is a performance!

Then, there’s the reading from the play. That’s the acting part. When I go in, I’m always very careful to first gauge how people want to be greeted. Sometimes, they just want you to say a general hello. You talk to the music director, or the accompanist, you do your piece, and you’re polite. Sometimes, there’s a more cordial atmosphere where you do actually say hello to the people you’ve known a long time and you get introduced to people you don’t know. You have to sense that out. It’s exciting, but it is scary.

KC: How important is it for an actor to have an acting coach with them all the time?

FA: It depends how you personally work. I know people who have had acting coaches with them on sets because they want someone who’s paying attention only to them. They have a relationship with them and can say, “you’re way over the top, you need to pull it way back because everyone else’s work is a lot smaller than yours” or, “I think you need to be more emotional here, because of this and this…” Someone who understands your work and can feed it back to you, sort of like your own personal director. That type of coach does a lot of good. I find it irritating, but that’s just me. My personality is not such that I would be able to have that kind of relationship on set with anyone other than the director. If I fail, I want to fail on my own terms.

KC: What’s the acting process for you? When you get a script, do you read it out loud three or four times? When do you memorize it?

FA: In general, I read something until I can hear the voices of the characters. Out loud or to myself, whatever. I just read it and read it and read it and read it and read it and read it… until I can hear my character’s voice thinking the lines. We did a workshop of Lisa Loomer’s new play and I think I read it fifty times before the first rehearsal. The whole play I probably read ten or eleven times and the scenes I was working on I would read maybe thirty more times until I could actually hear people’s voices having a conversation. Sometimes, I will read a play and be right there, bang, the people are talking. Sometimes, I’ll have to read and read and read and read and read and read and read before the voices start to make sense. Sometimes they don’t, and at that point I say, you know what? This isn’t for me. Thank you for your interest, but I’m just not responding to this material, and I move on.

Television is different because you have to be memorized when you show up on the set. You have to just memorize the lines. In theatre, I try not to memorize until I’ve associated the other actors and their voices with their lines. And even then, I keep it pretty loose until we get some sense of the space, or until I know what the set looks like, what the room looks like, where the furniture is, what kind of movement patterns are available. I try not to memorize the lines because I want to associate them with the physicality and the human relationships that are also part of the dynamics of the scene. A line will make sense one way when you read it, but then some actor will read their line back to you and it will fire off ten other associations and all a sudden that line doesn’t make sense the way you memorized it. So then, you have to un-memorize it and memorize it a new way.

Which brings up the whole subject of memorization. I have actually figured out the answer to the question, “how do you memorize all those lines?” You don’t. You remember them because someone says something that reminds you, then another actor will say something or something will happen and it will remind you of the thought. You will express that thought, and that thought will be the line that you’ve had in your head. But you don’t memorize the whole play: you only memorize one line at a time. And other helpful things help you to remember what the next line is and that’s really how it’s done.

However, you will work with people who have just memorized all their lines from the beginning of the play to the end and say them in order and that’s just jaw droppingly boring. Lines memorized in order with a layer of attitude, whether the attitude de jour is with concern, with panic, with passion, or whatever… it’s bad acting.

Generally by the end of the third or fourth day you should not be carrying your book, unless your part is huge. You have all the information in your head from your reading, and once you make those initial associations it should all start to come out. In a four or five week rehearsal process, if it’s the end of the second week and you’re not able to get through a scene without calling for a line or looking at your book, you’ll be fired.

I have lots of little people living in my head and they’re really helpful in reading the plays to me. For television, especially, I’ll have Cherie read the other parts so I can hear myself and get a sense of a little bit of movement because television is such a compressed process. Everything has to be done very quickly. In a play or musical I won’t have anyone help me. I’ll do all of it in my own head. When I do it in my own head, I can make really big mistakes and not embarrass myself in front of my wife.

KC: Can you recommend a book that has helped you with your career?

FA: For acting, I’ve read a lot of acting books and most of them are just head scratchers. Confusing, nonsense… they’re just not related to what I do at all. Uta Hagen, I would recommend very highly. I attended a master class with her and she was fantastic. She really gets it. Respect For Acting is a great book. Any acting book with any acting method or theory, whether it’s Sandy Meisner or Uta Hagen or Stanislavski - take what makes sense to you. If ninety percent of it makes no sense to you, that’s fine too. Take the good ten percent.

It’s almost like your relationship with God. God is infinitely vast. I have a relationship with God, but why would anyone else want to have my relationship with God? That’s mine. That’s my little tiny slice of God. You can have your little tiny slice of God and it’s a very different slice, but it’s the same God. Anyone who says you have to understand someone else’s approach to acting doesn’t get it. You don’t have to understand their approach to acting, you have to understand you’re own approach to acting. You have to inform yourself by gathering all the resources you can. Read Stanislavski, it’s fascinating by the way and not what people think, so read it all. Don’t let someone pick the passages for you. He is the father of the Method. Standing in front of the mirror making faces, practicing expressions to see how they would look when you did them on stage, well, I like that idea. I do that. He used to have swordfights with himself in the living room. It’s a really good read, but read all three thick books. The only book that I feel confident in saying is utter nonsense is Boleslavsky… don’t read anything by Boleslavsky. Well, read Boleslavsky see if you can.

I guess my favorite books are a couple that are really old. Robert Edmond Jones The Dramatic Imagination. It’s nearly a hundred years old. Anthene Seyler wrote a book called The Craft of Comedy, it’s again a very old book. It’s an insight into a brilliant mind. Read the essays of Susan Sontag, to be humbled by how not-brilliant you are compared to her. I just finished re-reading her collective essays about art, about theatre, about literature and it’s just a staggering. A lot of tragic aspects of her life, but such searing brilliance. It’s really inspiring.

So, my two final pieces of advice for actors who are just starting out are:

One: After two weeks of rehearsal, you’re not in love, and you don’t have a new best friend.

Two: Hang up your pants.

And when you really understand those two, you’ve got it made.