What an amazing few weeks I have had. About six weeks ago, I landed the role of Cerimon in Shakespeare’s Pericles: Prince of Tyre. As many actors know, if you haven’t heard anything back within a few days of the initial audition, you assume you didn’t get the role, so it was with some surprise that a month after my initial audition, I got a call-back and a hefty monologue for which I was required to be off-book.
I struggled with this as Shakespeare isn’t necessarily the easiest thing to learn and the director wanted me to learn it as prose, rather than in the iambic tetrameter rhythm that this particular piece was in. Difficult but I did it.
So, i’ve just got back from an amazing week of performing Shakespeare in Italy over my birthday. I have to admit that acting is my all-consuming passion so spending my birthday not only in a beautiful, warm foreign country, but performing Shakespeare too, was just about the pinnacle of happiness for me!
The weather was fantastic and the crew were some of the most welcoming people I have ever had the pleasure of working with on set. They refused all our offers of help on moving kit (even things like bags, clothes or stuff like that) and were only too happy to ferry us about in the production vehicles and fetch/carry stuff for us. We felt like royalty.
The film was set in Bologna, Italy and paid for by the City of Bologna itself, so apparently we had free tours of the city, although most of us didn’t really have the time to take them up on this kind offer. It was my birthday on 10 May and the director gave me some time to go and explore the city and see the 50th Anniversary of the Lamborghini marque, although we only managed to catch a couple as we had to head back. Ice cream in the Piazza Maggiore with one of my wonderful co-stars was the highlight of my birthday celebrations (I declined to go out drinking in the evening, preferring to stay in and run lines instead. Rock’n’roll, people, rock’n’roll!)
The rest of the cast that I interacted with were incredibly talented and friendly and I feel like I bonded with them really well. I think it was the fact that we were a bunch of English actors in a foreign country where none of us could speak the lingo, although the crew were kind enough to teach us a few words (mainly expletives, as you do). I had a real sense of belonging when I was with them and even now, I miss them all terribly, cast and crew alike; we had so many laughs off set (and on one occasion on set, thank you Burt Reynolds from ‘Boogie Nights’)
It was an amazing time with some incredibly creative and talented people in a fantastic country with great weather. This is what I love doing and this is why I love doing it. My work seems to be picking up so I look forward to more and more of these incredibly experiences.
Damien Gerard 