Acting & Empathy with Sharon Gardner

Speaker 1: [Music] hi I'm Melanie bar welcome to the she builted experience with Melanie you're here because you want to experience the life and business that you crave join me as I talk to women who have successfully built it a career and business that they love we dive into the topic of how they built it and talk about everything from Having the courage to make career leaps to the details of how to lead effectively create successful teams Implement strategies for growth and Infuse Tech innovation magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy so let's dive in moved by stories big and small with a vivid dream life Sharon Gardner's heart and Imagination led her to the stage where she could embody and explore characters and their worlds bringing wit to drama and depth to Comedy Sharon appears as glob tring philanthropist deline rism in the upcoming comedy me time with Kevin Hart and Regina Hall on Netflix and in thrillers the portrait and the death that awaits both premiering in early 2023 on major streamers Sharon has an extensive theater background and works in voiceover and commercials she's also a writer producer and Coach thank you for joining us today Sharon what Drew you to acting and did you always know that you wanted to be an actor I did my first play when I was six I've always loved jumping into characters just transforming and playing and exploring all the different aspects of being a person it's interesting because the key to our happiness at times can be making sure that we stay in touch with our inner child and it has to be so interesting to play all different kinds of complex and interesting roles and I think you mentioned you jump well between two different forms of acting I really love comedy and I really love drama if we think about our own lives and our own days we have pretty much a roller coaster of emotion throughout the day some of our lives are really funny and amusing some of them are awful and we have to yet choose to laugh about them or else we'll cry I find that we all as live as human beings on this range of experience and that to me is what life is Art is a distillation and a reflection both of life as artists we try to make work that has meaning for us and for other people and for me I really like to explore what's meaningful both that's really funny and truthful and that's really challenging and painful and truthful and then of course drama doesn't have to be only sad or morose or horrifying it can also be funny in fact the best shows that we've seen like for example succession right now is just you know fantastic drama but there's a lot of humor in it these characters can be absurd they can make jokes they can become jokes things they can do are amusing things can be so awful and then there are moments of real gravity as well I think that's to me that's life and I I really enjoy playing on both spectrums of Realms of experience when I approach a role I don't look so much at the emotion as I do at the character's desires life history complexities of character and the emotion is what comes up during you know the course of pursuing a goal or having a conflict and so the emotion kind of emerges through the text and through the experience obviously a piece of art has a tone everything has a tone to be able to jump into that and live in the tone creates the atmosphere of the peace and so once you have the tone of the show or the film or the text whatever it is then you explore the specifics of the human character and for me the pleasure is well there are many Pleasures but trying to live truthfully under the circumstances that my characters are in I don't use my own personal life to substitute for the the travails or the joys of my characters I try to really put myself in those circumstances of the character so really I find being an actor is an action of radical empathy how do I put myself in the shoes of another person and I think that's one of the gifts that I think maybe we've all been discovering most acutely in these past couple of years of being in the pandemic is that people have gravitated toward content be it on you know the small screen or be it in a in piece of literature that really resonates with them whether it's their own lived experience or somebody else's that they happen to identify with all good art whether it's kind of in the entertainment zone or whether it's in the Fine Art Zone connects us with other people and allows us to engage our empathy it's so true and in a a time when we felt so disconnected we were taking in so much content and so many stories I remember when a Netflix series would end that I really loved and you'd think oh this is over I have to find something else that I enjoy watching every day just as much you and I met through our children who are in second grade but when my twins were born I started watching crime shows and I I got involved because I liked the complexity of what was happening in the show and trying to figure it out but it also ended in 45 minutes they solved the crime and I could go to bed thinking that something in my day was solved but I remember watching NCIS and all of a sudden there you were I thought there is Sharon and you did such an incredible job in the role it was so much fun to see you can you share with us the different roles that you have played over the years I studied theater in undergrad and and then spent a decade in New York doing theater I like playing women who are very complex I love the concept of having a strong veneer of perfectionism there are a lot of women who live their lives that way but then who underneath have a great deal of interior struggle either because they feel isolated because they have pain they're hiding or they feel like they're not enough in the world and so they feel like they can't connect in a way that's authentic I love playing characters who have a real dynamic between their outer Persona and their inner experience those are really fun to play and I also find that sometimes the most fun characters are the villains as a text would have them typed because they create Conflict for the heroes I booked seven films in the last year and I just finished playing the mom of one of the leads in a film a thriller called the death that awaits and this character is a mother who is dealing with a really severe health issue and she's been trying to maintain the facade of having a perfect family and this commitment to her facade creates a great deal of isolation and liness for her because she has nobody that she can really connect with she can't say I know you think that we're really happy in my family I have two kids a beautiful house white picket fence happy marriage two dogs and a cat everything that she's supposed to want and yet she's got this health struggle with her her child that creates a great deal of anxiety in her sometimes she feels like my gosh it was me who failed as a mother she has all these thoughts about how this makes her less than who she should be now this comes out of her own wound a feeling like she's not enough some other woman might take it a completely different way and say oh you know what I'm going to start a campaign to bring awareness to this child's illness when they could go about it trying to raise money and bringing awareness to it for research and connecting with people across the country who are dealing with this struggle but this woman does not do that it's really interesting my character is written in a way to symbolize the way women of a certain generation where inner struggles had to be repressed where she is the emblem of that and so her young daughter who's 19 Rebels against this version of her mother and really charts her own course tries to find a way with her illness to have a full life anyway anyway and so there's a real motherdaughter struggle in the film it's really interesting women come up a lot against shs rosabel ta talked about this in one of our previous podcast episodes it's interesting because the woman it seems your character thought she should act a certain way so instead of doing what she felt she did what she thought she should absolutely a lot of characters that I play that are somehow representative of conflict or who created an obstacle for one of the leads those are opportunities for the audience to really engage with that character's choices right if I were in her shoes would I do those things that I make those same choices how would I pivot if it were me every role that you have whether it be a protagonist or an antagonist gives the audience an opportunity to have an act of empathy and say okay if I were this person how would I live my life given these circumstances that were created by the writer and shaped by the director and given specificity by the actor so interesting how your career involves so much human experience oh the gamut I don't think there's an emotion that I've not expressed in my career there's certainly characters I never played like I've never played an astronaut going to outer space which would be really fun I've never played somebody on a Himalayan track that would be really fun like there are lots of lots of actions I would love to play as as an actor um that I'm not done yet there's so many things to explore though as a naturally curious person I'm really intrigued by so many different things and so being an actor also in that way is fun that I get to play pretend all the time that I'm this person I'm that person I've had a million different careers in my characters right and that's so fun how it how it relates to your curiosity what do you like the most about what you do there's so many things I love about really tapping into the spirit of creativity for me I mean when I'm shooting a role for an audition which I do in my studio now I mean actors since the pandemic started we don't go to audition rooms to audition anymore we are rehearsing and self-taping in our own small Studios so when I'm in the zone if you will like in the flow of the creativity then I feel completely free I feel really like I'm engaging parts of myself in the safety of the mask of character character gives me a form and I can really let my my creativity be free within that form so it's really fun you mention liking drama and also comedy do you have a favorite I can't say that I do I had one of the best performances experien of my life in the last year working with Kevin Hart and Regina Hall on a film called me time that John Hamburg wrote and directed and first of all the script is hilarious and then we John is such a supportive creative we were on script for like the majority of the time we were shooting and then for like the last quarter of or maybe onethird of our our shooting experience we were able to just improv and we had so much fun and it was such a joy to be able to be in the moment with these really talented artists who are so brilliant at comedy and to just watch them and play with them together and just it's just it's so it was so exciting I love it the essence of being an actor you know is kind of like have you ever taken an improv class yes yes so you so you know so basically you have a creative ball and you toss it to someone and they catch it and they add a little spin to it they toss it to somebody else or back to you and it's a game of tennis but you have this Creative Energy and you throw it around the space and then you create an an elaborate Symphony you know really playing a great script is like playing a piece of music if you're a musician for me there you know you can dip in and out of tones and high points and Peaks and valleys and just the playing of it itself is so fun so whether that's drama or comedy to me it doesn't really matter it's what really matters is that you're working with people who love to play and it has to be fun to follow a script right and really dive into that character but also be light on your feet as it relates to the Improv precisely improv is something that happens in comedy all the time for feature scripts but if you're doing an improv like multicamera or sitcom there's a little bit of room for that but sometimes not so much because the multicamera script is tightly tightly scripted by these brilliant writers and they have beat setups and joke setups and everything is really tightly choreographed so you then it's playing the music that the writers have written you and really reading that and that in itself is a joy so you win these incredible roles how do you keep the motivation and the confidence to keep going when you experience some nose so I auditioned for Modern Family six times in four years before I actually got cast so I got cast on the sixth one I actually had a pin put in me a pin is when they when casting calls your agent and says oh we love Sharon she's one of our top two choices we want to put her on availability I was pregnant seven months and they were called me in for this role it was not a pregnant character at all and I just put this whole spin on it because I was pregnant I was like well I can't pretend that I'm not seven months pregnant so how do I make this work so I took an imaginative leap and they loved it enough to put a to give me a pen but they I didn't actually book it so then you're hanging you're like oh my God am I booking it am I booking it am I booking it and the was in this case no so every time you get it a serious deflation or you don't get a call back or you know you just go oh this is It's hard repeated nose and and at that time also was learning really to embrace the audition as the performance and actually even more now that that we're in this pandemic world where everyone's shooting at home I really commit a 100% to my auditions so that when I send an audition tape to Casting I feel that is the best performance that I can give of this role the knowledge that I have now sometimes CM will call me back and say actually here was some information you didn't know about or we'd like to try this moment this different way can you re ret tape it for us that's a callback but the majority of the stuff that I've booked in the last year has not come from callbacks it's come from booking the very first tape that I send in I send in what I consider to be a full performance so I invest in the character create the experience live truthfully in in the circumstances and then when I send the tape off I have to let it go so it's a practice and letting it go and then just knowing if it comes back to me then it's mine and if it doesn't well some other great actor is going to be getting it and they'll have fun with it and I can't wait to watch who it is and watch the performance and that's great advice for anybody in any career that they're in because we all experience those Nos and it's how do we pick ourselves up and keep going because the more you ask and the more NOS you hear the closer you are to yes that's correct the world is big enough the universe is big enough for all of us there's so many talented artists in Los Angeles the actor who's getting this role somehow her Essence resonated more with the producers and the director and the writer than mine and her performance was somehow just a little bit closer to what they envisioned than my performance was and more power to her I can't wait to see the work I always just want to see the work and that's such a great way to look at it believe in abundance when roles come to us and we're just perfectly right for them there's an alignment between what we're expressing in our personal search as as individuals and also an alignment with the characters own search and what they're working on in their own life I ask this question at the end of every episode because it is so important to bring joy to our daily lives magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy what is one tip that you can leave with us today about how you find and live your joy when I'm living in alignment with my vision that brings me joy the life that I'm living is Meaningful and I'm going to be making a positive contribution to the Great G conversation of life so that is really joyful for me I also love to tap into the the childlike Spirit of just exploration and transformation a play pretend part of it which is super fun I listen to a lot of music I was a DJ in college and I sing with a rock band we have a lot of music in my house all the time and so whenever I'm feeling blue I'll put on something really fabulous and I meditate so really getting into my personal place of ease my body is really important for me and from that place I often just feel the rhythm of Life the pulse of life that's underneath all of the circumstances that we have that pulse for me is always there whether you call it the force like Star Wars does or whether you call it God or whether you call it Buddha whatever you want to call it Chi there are so many terms for it I perceive it all to be the same thing whether you want to put a you know religious spin on it or not to me it's just the life force I look outside and I see the blue sky and the trees and we're lucky to live in Los Angeles where we have a lot of green and Sky I think I find join a lot different places I love how you bring the energy and the passion it's so inspiring thank you for joining us today can you please tell our listeners how and where they can find you yes I'm on Instagram at I am Sharon Gardner Twitter is Sharon Gardner Sharon Gardner IMDb will give you an update of my current projects thank you for joining us today I'd love to hear from you reach out to me at hello Sheil it.com on our Sheil it website or at Sheed on social thank you than you to my editor Rich trino who always makes us sound good until next time let nothing stop you from experiencing the life and business that you crave