Acting isn’t hard work the way, say, coal-mining is, but it ain’t easy. Among the most difficult aspects is learning one’s lines. One doesn’t want to screw up a take or, if they’re on stage, suffer a crippling brain fart in front of a paying audience. Each thespian has their own method for memorizing dialogue, some more out-there than most. For instance, the way Pedro Pascal is, by his own admission, absolutely deranged.
Per Deadline, the Mandalorian actor took part in a SAG-AFTRA Foundation roundtable with his fellow Outstanding Performance by Male Actor in a Drama Series nominees. At one point he told participants Billy Crudup, Matthew Macfadyen, and Kieran Culkin that he betted he could “show you a psychotic physical example of what I now have to do to learn my lines.”
And indeed he did, busting out a paper that looked straight-up like a cipher made by the Zodiac killer, with letters divided into rows. “This is like a psycho first letter of every word,” he said. “You see the letters, right? Basically, I’m the Unabomber.”
Pascal then attempted to further explain how it works:
“You use the first letter of each in these towers or columns, I guess, and it’s this very, very tedious way of making yourself learn the line so that you’re not making choices. It’s not even sort of artistic, it’s just this really technical way I’ve had to acquire because of that terrible experience of forgetting my lines.”
What did his fellow actors think of it? “Gibberish,” concluded Culkin, agreeing that he’s the Unabomber.
But hey, whatever works for Pascal, who said he learned to use this the hard way, after a “horrible experience” doing Much Ado About Nothing for Shakespeare in the Park in 2014, when he blanked on one of his lines. You keep doing you!
You can watch the full chat in the video below. The weird line reading business begins around the 20-minute mark.
(Via Deadline)
