Most people met William Stanford Davis as Mr. Johnson, which means most people met him decades into the job.
In episode five he sits down with Jazz Lintott and accounts for everything before that. The auditions that went nowhere. The ones he was almost right for. The rent that went unpaid and the things that got repossessed while he kept going anyway. He tells it without a trace of self-pity and with the comic timing of someone who has had a long time to work on the delivery, which is its own evidence of how he got through it.
He is just as good on the craft. What the best actors he knows all do before they ever arrive on set, why preparation is the one part of this job nobody can take away from you, and what changed the day a show decided it wanted more of him than it had originally asked for.
Up Next in Season 1
-
Adjani Salmon
Before Dreaming Whilst Black was a BAFTA winner, it was an idea Adjani Salmon had no reasonable basis for believing in. He decided to make it anyway, then spent years finding out what that decision would actually require of him.
In episode four, he talks with Jazz Lintott about the kind of ambit...
-
Steve Carr
Steve Carr got his first feature by flying to Arizona, sitting down with Ice Cube, and telling him what was wrong with his script. He had never worked on one before and no real idea how the job was done. He got it anyway.
In episode three, he walks Jazz Lintott through a career assembled almost e... -
Mena Massoud
Mena Massoud sent in an audition tape and then heard nothing for half a year. While it sat unwatched, he was bussing tables and sleeping on a borrowed air mattress in a friend's closet. Not long after, he was Aladdin, in a film that took more than a billion dollars worldwide.
In episode two, he s...
