Missi Arrives - Advice Dispenser

- by Missi Pyle

So Hello and Welcome to The Film E -- The Missi Experience! I'll be guest-blogging for the next 24 hours.

First of all. I always feel a bit like a con artist or something when I am interviewed. I read other actors interviews and I always think. Oh thats how you do it. Thats how you say it. I feel often like a charlatan. Other actors - they seem to be super picky. Or somehow more artistic. But me, I will pretty much do anything. I say yes to literally 90 percent of jobs that come to me. I am so happy and truly shocked to be a working actor.

WITH MEKHI PHIFER ON SET

I was on a set yesterday with Mekhi Phifer. We are doing this crazy low budget Virus movie and we have to wear hazmat suits and helmets and tape or gloves on and we were doing this scene where we are leaving the safe compound and going on a mission to find uninfecteds and we go through this tunnel and we are on this shitty bus whacking stunt people with rubber bats and crow bars and I was just laughing because its like -what the fuck are we doing? We are grown ups who leave their home and go to work and play dress up and make believe. And its awesome.

And then after like 11 hours you get so tired. And you get pissy and want to go home but then its like: 

I am getting paid for this. 

God. I don't know how anybody makes it as an actor. Really. I look back at my journey. And I think about how much LUCK had to happen. But you know what they say about luck. 'When hard work meets opportunity...'

I went to North Carolina School of the Arts and it was an incredible school.  But before that I ended up in a small town in Tennessee called Germantown. This was after my parents divorce. My mom married a German dude and we moved there. Totally unrelated. He was probably the only German in all of Germantown. Anyway, This school randomly had this magical Drama program led by this man Frank Bluestein. He was this gothic southern Jewish man. He is truly one of the most incredible humans I have ever met. I wouldn't be where I am without him. He just never would accept the words "I can't". So they left my vocabulary.

And I guess that would be my advice to young actors:

AS GOOD AS IT GETS (1997) at the very beginning...Take the words "I can't" out of your vocabulary.

And work hard. Harder than you think you need to. And try not to compare yourself to other people in the room when you are auditioning or, really, ever. You are uniquely you and that is what everyone is looking for. Someone who is genuinely just themselves. I think.

Anyway. thats it for advice. Oh and move to Atlanta. You will get mountains of work there. 

previous Missi...
Gone Girl & Nancy Grace

Missi Meets Nancy - A "Gone Girl" Mirror

Editor's Note: As previously noted, The Film Experience is proud to hand over the blogging reigns to the actress MISSI PYLE from Sunday afternoon to Monday afternoon. But here's an early bit from the woman herself before she seizes full control!

I just interviewed Nancy Grace for The Hollywood Reporter.  It came out yesterday. I was so nervous. What if she thought I was a dick. You know? For lampooning her. But she was totally flattered and really charming. 

This is that interview.

How I got into character for Gone Girl? I googled Nancy Grace. (I don't know how any of us did any research without the internet. Its crazy.) I only really knew her as a caricature. This is the first video I watched to do research. It's Nancy interviewing Elizabeth Smart. Elizabeth gently lays into her for bringing up painful things from her past and Nancy dodges it pretty well...

And I thought. Yeah. That is her. She is a master and getting you right to that point where you might explode. Thats what I tried to do in the film. That and wear a LOT of leather.

More on Gone Girl. Missi returns tomorrow through Monday to talk Oscars, her favorite movie of all time, and life as a working actor. Don't miss it.

Celebrity Guest Blog: Missi Pyle Attacks !!!

The one & only Missi Pyle does The Film Experience. 

The Film Exp "The Missi Experience" kicks Off Sunday December 14th at 1 PM EST. Pass it on and be here... Missi will.

NYFF: Gone Girl's Gone Wild

Tonight marked the opening of the 2014 New York Film Festival with the world premiere of David Fincher's Gone Girl -- here's Jason's take on the film.

In the deeply darkly funny world of Gillian Flynn's bestselling murder mystery Gone Girl, Nick and Amy Dunne's wedding vows are like cliffhangers or dares - in sickness and in health, for richer, for poorer, I do... she does, he does... what exactly? All manner of unspeakables, it turns out. The book's at its sharpest as a ghoulish fun-house mirror reflection of deranged marital compromise - the hollowing out of our interior spaces for the exterior presentation of platonic ideals; a jack-o-lantern propped on the front porch with a pumpkin pie in the oven, all is pretty and home and sugar and spice on the windowsill... save that horror show, smashed glass coffee tables, mopped blood, behind closed doors. And what happens when the nightmare tumbles out into the street for all the world, and all the world's cameras, to see? Who pulls the mess back in once its spilled, and how...

David Fincher's Gone Girl is at its best when it has everybody grabbing their pails and their shovels and frantically trying to scoop up those spilled Humpty Dumpty pumpkin guts and make sense of it. For a two and a half hour movie it's shockingly spry on its feet, bouncing from Clue One to Clue Two in its own emotional kind of scavenger hunt, trying to piece together the What Went Wrong And How, and in its finest moments it vibes on a surprisingly loose Coen-esque sense of danger - as the sharp tools in the shed try to stay one step forward and find themselves in up to their necks, there's fun to be had in their catch-up, watching games change and rules rewritten mid-play.

[more...]

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Monologue: "My name is Charlene. What are you wearing?"

Time for our Monday Monologue...

Missi, Uggie and Jean DujardinOne of the unexpected joys of this year's edition of Endless Awards Season has been the presence of the very funny, very talented Missi Pyle. She's kind of blink and you'll miss her as "Constance" the 'Lina Lamont' silent star archetype in The Artist. But she's been everywhere at the events. That's oddly appropriate given that she always seems to be blink and you'll miss her in movies but she makes the best of it. Often when I see her in that big ball of joy that is the cast and crew of The Artist (winning makes the joy part a lot easier) I think back to my favorite moment in her filmography to date.

She was the comedy MVP of the oft-delayed and then underseen and weirdly trashed Spring Breakdown (2009) which is much funnier than it gets credit for. Her MVP status says a lot since the three leads Amy Poehler, Parker Posey, and Rachel Dratch have been known to wring laughs from even the weakest material. Somehow Pyle steals the show out from under them.

Pyle plays Charlene a Spring Break junkie well past age appropriateness for the Endless Summer cruising and bingeing. She takes this trio of new girls under her drunken wing.

After a particularly booze-fueled night she stumbles home with her new friend Gayle (Amy Poehler) and goes all weepy pontificating drunk. 

Every spring this place she flares up like a cold sore and I'm back for more, you know? The kids and the sex and the booze. And you think it'll go on forever but it's like one of those videos, you know, of a fireplace that you put on your TV.

And, like, no matter how close you get to the screen it's never going to warm you up."

Suddenly then, she's all nonsequitor.

Her moods tilt and slide around like formerly coherent thoughts sloshing around in alcoholic waves.

I just wanted to be a stylist to the stars.

[Suddenly high pitched] 'You think so?' 

Oh hello there fine fella! Who is this?

She veers towards... a tree.

"Oh honey, that's a tree," Gayle tries to stop her but Charlene is already making her move. 

[To the tree] My name is Charlene. What are you wearing?

[Glancing to the side. Suddenly crying] I love him!

 
[To Gayle] Don't touch me. Please touch me. Thank you.

Let's just stay here for awhile.

Pyle keeps this comic train hilarious, frisky and sharp even as it jumps right off the tracks careening towards its next blackout: Crying jags, weird bursts of horniness, pickled blood stream, and yet she's weirdly touching.

It's comic magic.

It's hot mess tragic. 

Her name is Charlene. I love her!