11-14-2011, 06:59 PM
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#20 (permalink) |
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Agent
 
Join Date: Dec 2010
Location: baltimore, MD
Posts: 24,834
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Ian Harding
Georgetown Prep (high school) and Carnegie Mellon University I graduated [from Carnegie Mellon University] in 2009, so I was there from 2005 to 2009, a four-year training program. I really wanted to be an actor, and I knew that in high school. I went to an all-boys Catholic school where athletics was king, and though I was athletic, my classmates pretty much came out of the womb playing their respective sport. So I got into theater there. And that's when I really realized I wanted to be an actor. I told my dad this, and he said, "Okay, great, cool." Mom was hesitant: "I don't think you're not talented; I just don't know what the entertainment industry is like, but everything I've heard about it is that it is very hard, and the life of an actor is brutal. So, do you want to do this?" I'm like, "Yeah, that's the only thing that I want to do and pretty sure it's the only thing that I can do." She responded, "Great, well, you're going to go to college for it. You're going to get a degree in it, so if the thing blows up in your face, you can teach." I auditioned for all these schools, and I got into most of them, luckily, and CMU ended up being the best option, and so I went there and graduated, and my mom is very proud. They teach a little bit of everything at Carnegie: Method, Meisner, mask work, stage combat. Not even a little bit of mask work—a whole semester of mask work. I took ballet and jazz. There was a focus on the entire body, the entire mind, and a focus on purely the text. I kept a journal throughout the entire process, and I literally came up with a checklist of things—of questions, of thoughts about the script, the character, the environment—that have helped me over the years. We had, I think it was called Text class, where we simply studied objectives, beats, tactics—in other words, the very intellectual side of the script. This helped because I could apply it immediately in real time to what I was doing. I have an audition tomorrow, and I've used some of the stuff that I learned in that class my freshman year. I think ballet would be the best example of something that seemingly I didn't need, because I don't have a ballerina's body and I'm not sure I would ever play a dancer like that. In that sense it seemed useless. But in reality I had it for a year, and it put me in my body, and in an unconscious way I learned more about how my body works and moves in that class than in almost any other. But [ballet] also teaches you to stick with it. I'd get up every morning going, "I hate going to ballet." And it's not like the teacher was pretentious or unkind—he was fantastic; it was just every single day, I thought, "This is useless." And right when you get to that point of "I'm done. I'm going to drop the class, fail, take summer school," that's when you have to go in and do it again. And that's when it's the most rewarding, ultimately. There are a few potential side projects in the works right now, and whether or not they pan out is completely out of my control. Something I learned in school, apart from the old cliché of "Hurry up and wait," is "Do your own work," as in do the work that you have control of, and the rest is completely out of your control. Surrender is a good lesson. Ian Harding currently plays Ezra Fitz on the ABC Family series "Pretty Little Liars." Before that, he was Jamie Hunter on "Hollywood Is Like High School With Money." He has also appeared in "Love & Other Drugs" and "Adventureland." Successful Actors Talk About Their Training
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~Jen    i want klaroline to happen |
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03-08-2012, 02:58 PM
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#24 (permalink) |
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Hollywood Star
Join Date: Nov 2006
Location: GA//Tanks 2 Krysie 4 my blinkie & PM me for MSN friend requests.
Posts: 9,935
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^Was a little shocked by that. But knew something like that would happen sooner or later.
I didn't know he did Ballet. He's def got the body for it. A few eps back, I thought he was being wishy washy, but when I got caught up w/ all the eps I missed I saw why he did what he had to do. Which was give Aria space and her family some time, too. But of course, they couldn't stay away from each other.
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"But I don't want perfection; I don't actually believe in it. What I've learned along the way is, work with what you have; embrace what you've been given. Don't fight against it." Drew Barrymore  ~Resa and I are:  ~Team Shriya~ ~Team Photography~ |
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04-27-2012, 01:59 PM
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#27 (permalink) |
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Intern
Join Date: Feb 2011
Location: Michigan
Posts: 703
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^^ Someone needed to go off on her dad was his hypocritical self. I hate how he was blackmailing ezra acting all high and mighty when he did the same thing and he made aria keep it a secret. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
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