"You can trust my answer. I have the neurodivergence that makes it very difficult for me to lie. With Kendall, there are some nuggets that Molina says-the actor who played him was a tortured soul who was closeted. Well, who was a closeted actor at that time? Montgomery Clift. Let's bring in the tortured soul of Montgomery Clift. So, I watched The Heiress to get that emotional texture and throughline."
"For Molina, because of their lived reality in the prison, I lost about 45 pounds in 50 days, so it became this fasted moment. But I mapped it out where, in that time, I would be shooting the musical, so I could put it into overdrive for Molina. My commitment was on creating Molina in this genderqueer, genderless form, because I wanted their physical form to be less of the conversation than their spirit or personality."
An actor developed two distinct characters through careful study of mid-20th-century film performers and deliberate physical transformation. Neurodivergence informed the actor's approach to truthfulness in performance. Kendall drew on the emotional texture of Montgomery Clift and movement inspirations from Errol Flynn and Gene Kelly to inhabit a mid-Atlantic 1940s–1950s screen style. Molina required a significant weight loss of about 45 pounds in 50 days to reflect prison reality and was performed with a fasted physicality. The actor scheduled shooting of musical sequences during that period to intensify Molina's expression. Molina was conceived as genderqueer and genderless to emphasize spirit and personality over physical form. The musical numbers introduced choreographic and technical demands new to the performer.
Read at San Francisco Bay Times
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