When actors slack off

Well I acted.

I must say I'm pretty please with myself. I was so worried I would be paired up with a real actor and I'd look like a dildo that I practiced every night for a week leading up to the shoot. I took my script to the gym to memorize my lines like two dozen other actors on the treadmill and I tried different interpretations of lines in front of the mirror. I created a backstory. I starved myself to not look fat.

That didn't really work, though. Know that potbelly that French chick talks about in Pulp Fiction? I've got one. It's not a fat thing because I had it even when I weighed nothing in high school, but it came across on camera. Alas.

Anyway, I prepared the way I saw my actors prepare for Game Night because I didn't want to embarrass myself in front of my scene partner.

I don't care if it is a Youtube video shot in a storage facility with one little handcam and a lone lightbulb in the ceiling. It's a film and I'm going to treat it as a film.

So here's the irony in that: my scene partner did not prepare at all.

I'm pretty sure he read the script once. He didn't have his lines memorized, he didn't even know how to pronounce many of the words, and it was pretty obvious he wasn't really thinking about the meaning of what he was saying because he was too busy reading to concentrate on actually acting.

I'm not saying I was the world's greatest actor either but damn.

I skipped a party the night before to make sure I was rested and able to get up early to run through my lines one more time and do some crunches. He stayed up late and got three hours of sleep even though he was sick. So on top of not knowing his lines he was also coughing and sluggish and tired.

The shoot took twice as long as it should have because we kept having to stop so he could learn the lines. I have a feeling a large portion of the edit will be on my side of the table because he spent so much of the shoot staring down at the sheet of paper in front of him.

The thing is, when he was forced to memorize something so he could stand up and move, he did a good job. He would have been a decent actor if he'd just prepared. And when we went off the script and stayed in character and he improv'd after the scene was done he was okay. But if I said anything other than what was on the page while we were shooting he stopped, completely paralyzed by the unexpected lines.

Now I'm even more appreciative of the cast I had on Game Night. I've seen what happens when an actor doesn't give a crap about your film.