Understanding the Human Experience Through Acting with Actress Sharon Gardner

About this episode:

Bringing wit to drama and depth to comedy, Sharon appears as globe-trotting philanthropist Delphine Rism in the upcoming comedy "Me Time" with Kevin Hart & Regina Hall on Netflix, and in thrillers "The Portrait" with Virginia Madsen and "The Death That Awaits," both premiering in early 2023 on major streamers. Television appearances include "Modern Family,” "NCIS," "The Bold And The Beautiful,” "Passions," and "Cost Of Capital.” Sharon has an extensive theater background and works in VO and commercials as well. She's also a writer, producer, and coach and the mom of two children in elementary school. Sharon lives in Los Angeles with her family.

Topics Discussed:

• Why Sharon believes that being an actress is an action of radical empathy

• How she incorporates play and creativity in her career

• How she handles rejection and stays positive about her art

About Sharon:

Bringing wit to drama and depth to comedy, Sharon appears as globe-trotting philanthropist Delphine Rism in the upcoming comedy "Me Time" with Kevin Hart & Regina Hall on Netflix, and in thrillers "The Portrait" with Virginia Madsen and "The Death That Awaits," both premiering in early 2023 on major streamers. Television appearances include "Modern Family,” "NCIS," "The Bold And The Beautiful,” "Passions," and "Cost Of Capital.” Sharon has an extensive theater background and works in VO and commercials as well. She's also a writer, producer, and coach and the mom of two children in elementary school. Sharon lives in Los Angeles with her family.

Read a raw, unedited transcript of this episode:

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 that 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 in our own days, we have a 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 choose to laugh about them or else will cry. I find that we all live as human beings on this range of experiences. And that, to me, is what life is. Art is a distillation and a reflection of life as artists. We try to make work that has meaning for us and for other people. And for me, I 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 Saddam 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 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 or 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 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 the course of pursuing a goal or having a conflict. And so the emotion kind of emerges through the text and through the experience. So obviously a piece of art has a tone. Everything is a tone, to be able and to jump into that and live in the tone creates the atmosphere of the piece. 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 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 the small screen or be it in piece of literature that really resonates with them, whether it's their own lived experience or somebody else's, if they happen to identify with it. So, 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 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 and 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. Our children who are in second grade, but when my twins were born, I started watching crime shows and 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 and they solve 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?

Yeah, I studied theater in undergrad and then spent a decade in New York doing theater. I like playing women who are very complex. I love the concept of having kind of 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 book seven films in the last year and I just finished playing the mom of one of the leads in a film thriller called The Death 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 loneliness for her because she is nobody that she can really connect with. She can't say, I know you think that we're really happy and 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 wounds, a feeling like she's not enough. Some other woman might take it a completely different way and say, You know what? I'm going to start a campaign to bring awareness to this child's illness, and 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 the 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 wear inner struggle tend 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. And so there's a real mother-daughter struggle in the film. It's really interesting.

Women come up a lot against shoulds. Rosabel Tao talked about this and 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 obstacle for one of the leads, those are opportunities for the audience to really engage with that. Characters choices. If I were in your shoes, would I do those things and I make those same choices? How would I pivot, if it were me? So 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, OK, 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. I don't I think there are certainly characters in there play like I played an astronaut going to outer space, which would be really fun. I never played somebody on a on a Himalayan track that would be really fun. Like, there are lots of lots of actions. I would love to play as an actor, but 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 and that was 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.

And it's so fun how it how it relates to your curiosity. What do you like the most about what you do?

I don't even know there's so many things I love I think that 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, 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, 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 gives me a form and I can really let my my creativity be free within that form. So, it's really fun.

You mentioned liking drama and also comedy. Do you have a favorite? I can't say that I do I had one of the best performances experience 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 it was, first of all, the script is hilarious. And then we, John is such a supportive creative. He we were on script for like the majority of the time we were shooting. And then for like the last quarter of maybe one third of 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 were so brilliant 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 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 spent with. 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 space and then you create 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 towns 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 doesn't 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 dove into that character, but also be light on your feet as it relates to the improv.

Precisely improv is something that that happens in comedy all the time for feature scripts. But if you're doing an improv like multi-camera or sitcom, there's a little bit of room for that, but sometimes not so much, because a multi-camera script is tightly scripted by these brilliant writers and they have these set ups and joke setups, and everything is really tightly choreographed. So then it's playing the music that the writers have written you and really reading that. And that in itself is the joy Do you have a favorite moment on set or a favorite character that you have played throughout your career?

So you win these incredible roles. How do you keep the motivation and the confidence to keep going when you experience some no's?

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 my opinion, is when they when casting calls region 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 never called me in for this role. There 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 it to give me a pin, but they didn't actually book it. So then you're hanging. You're like, Oh my God, my looking at my book and my booking. And the answer was this case, no. So every time you get a, a serious deflation or you don't get a callback or, you know, you just go, Oh, this is, it's hard, repeated notes. And at that time also was learning really to embrace the audition as the performance. Actually, even more now that we're in this pandemic world where everyone's shooting at home. I really commit 100 percent of 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. Given the knowledge that I have now. Sometimes casting will call me back and say, Actually, here's some information you didn't know about, or we'd like to try this one with this different way. Can you retain it for us? That's a callback. But the majority of the stuff that I booked in the last year is not 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 the circumstances. And then when I send the tape off, I have to let it go. So it's a practice in 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 no's and it's like, how do we pick ourselves up and keep going? Because, the more you ask and the more no's you hear, the closer you are to yes, you right?

That's correct. I mean, the world is big enough. The universe is big enough for all of us, and there's so many talented artists in Los Angeles and 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 wasn't, 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. I really believe in abundance.

Yeah, I really do. When roles come to us we are just perfectly right for them, there's an alignment between what we're expressing in our personal search as individuals and also in alignment with the character's search and what they're working on in their own lives. I asked 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 greater conversation of life. So that is really joyful for me. I also love to tap into the childlike spirit of just exploration and transformation. to 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 always 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 through my body is really important for me, and from that place, I often just feel the rhythm of life the pulse of life. It'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, Chee. There are so many terms for it. I perceive it all to be the same thing, whether you want to put a religious spin on it or not. To me, it's just the life force. I look outside and I see the blue sky in the trees. And we're lucky to live in Los Angeles, where we have a lot of green and sky. I think I find joy in a lot of different places.

I love how you bring 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. I am Sharon Gardner. Twitter is at Sharon Gardner. Sharon Gardner IMDb will give you an update of my current projects