Terry Knickerbocker, an acting coach known for teaching the Meisner technique, brought his talents to Atlanta actors this week.
From May 6-9, Knickerbocker was in the city teaching a master class in partnership with Drama Inc., an Atlanta-based acting studio. Knickerbocker is the founder of the Terry Knickerbocker Studio in New York City, and has worked as a coach for actors such as Austin Butler, Daniel Craig, Michelle Williams, Zac Efron, and others.
Knickerbocker teaches the Meisner technique, which was developed by acting coach Sanford Meisner. Meisner was one of the original members of the Group Theatre, a legendary New York City collective founded by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg in 1931. Meisner’s technique, according to Knickerbocker’s studio website, emphasizes the actor’s imagination over their personal history as the primary source for their craft.
Rough Draft Atlanta recently spoke with Knickerbocker about his history with acting and his approach. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I know you started acting at a pretty young age. What drew you to acting and why do you think you ended up working in that space?
Terry Knickerbocker: My parents were both attorneys. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and my dad loved going to the theater and going to concerts, and so I was exposed to that early on. I don’t know, I’m not sure what your affinities are, or what you used to like to do – I have a very good ear. So music was very important, and I like the connection of musicality to acting and theater, and human storytelling. Which means, I have a good ear for accents, and dialects and things like that, and mimicry. You know, pretending to be like somebody else, or pretending to be a dog, or pretending to be like Uncle Bob.
Storytelling is innate to every culture in the world. That’s something that I love. My dad used to read me stories, so I think the pump was primed by some of what I was exposed to, and I also learned what I wasn’t good at. Some people are really good at drawing and stuff like that. I couldn’t draw my way out of a paper bag. So I just started to gravitate towards the things that I enjoyed. Then, in grade school, you have an opportunity to – you know, who’d like to be in this little play we’re doing? That became fun for me. I just enjoyed it, and I always have.
You eventually ended up training and working under William Esper, who was a mentor for you. What about him specifically appealed to you as a mentor? I’d love to hear you talk about what you learned from him and how that relationship helped bolster your work.
Knickerbocker: I came to him – it would be dramatic to say “in a panic.” I had gone to NYU – we just made a big jump from childhood to my mid-20s – but eventually, I was acting a lot. I got kicked out of college. I went to Boston University, but I never went to class … because I was always involved in acting. Like amateur acting, stuff that any student at BU could be a part of. They kicked me out, so I got a job … and I was doing all this auditioning and basically getting into everything I auditioned for. But I realized very quickly that I didn’t know what I was doing.
I said, I gotta get some training. I auditioned for NYU, which was a very good school for acting … and got in, and spent four years there with great teachers, great students, amazing experiences. Then I got out and realized fairly quickly that sometimes I knew what I was doing, and sometimes I didn’t. I found that that’s actually quite typical for a lot of actors, even actors who have had training, that somehow it’s not quite as clear as if you go to Berklee for music, or if you go to Juilliard for dance, or you go to medical school – like, it would be weird to have a dentist who some days knows what they’re doing and some days doesn’t know what they’re doing. But that’s how I felt. I heard about Bill and saw a man that he had trained in a play that I was working backstage. I just was blown away by the work, and so I went to see him … It was another two years [of training]. I didn’t think twice about that, which is different from the climate nowadays. People come to my school, if they think about coming to my school, the biggest hurdle for them is time. They don’t seem to think that a two year investment would make sense.
Bill had studied with Meisner – Sanford Meisner, who was one of the many famous acting teachers in New York, along with Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler, and a woman named Uta Hagen. He was teaching [Mesiner’s] work, which is incredible training. Bill himself was very sharp and could be very stern. He really cared about quality in the work. He was a great storyteller, and could be very funny. I just felt a strong affinity to him. At a certain point later, I had actually sort of gravitated towards directing, moved away from acting and was directing plays, and needed something to supplement my income. I thought teaching could do that, and then went to Bill and asked him if I could join him to train to teach. At first he said, “Well, I don’t need anybody.” Meaning it wouldn’t be ethical for him to train me if he didn’t have people that I could work with. I just said, “Well, how about if I just sit behind you until you ask me to leave?” And that was a 30-year experience.
You mentioned, obviously, the Meisner technique. I’ve read about it, and I did some techniques in a high school theater class once. But I wondered if you could explain in your words what the Meisner technique is?
Knickerbocker: The first thing I’ll say is that nobody cares what technique you use. No director cares, and no audience member cares. You don’t go and watch a good movie and go, “Hmm, what technique is Leonardo Dicaprio using, or Helen Hunt, or whoever?” At the end of the day, all good training should take you to the same place, the same mountain top, which is excellent work.
What makes the Meisner technique really useful and practical, and different from any other approach that I’m aware of, is that it’s foundational. When I went to NYU, the thing I did on day one was what we call scene study. That’s a very typical thing to do. You start out and you get a scene from “A Streetcar Named Desire,” and you start working on it. I didn’t know any better, so I went, let’s do it! You do have some experiences with that, but you sort of learn how to do that scene. It would be like going on YouTube and getting a guitar video of how to play Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” You could learn that song, but that doesn’t make you a musician, because you’re not learning the basics.
Meisner had been a trained pianist. He went to what is now the equivalent of the Juilliard School, the Damrosch [Institute of Musical Art] in New York. When he was trying to think of how to start training actors, he was looking for the equivalent of what musicians do – like scales, like arpeggios. No one goes to a concert to hear scales, but every good musician does them all the time to make them more musical and to ground them in the foundational steps.
[Meisner] came up with this little tiny building block, which maybe you’ve heard of, called the repetition exercise.
Yeah, I think that’s what we did.
Knickerbocker: So it’s not Chekhov. But it’s the beginning of something. It’s the seed of something, where I might look at you, and I’d say, “You have long blonde hair.” Because I’m looking at you, and my attention is on you, and that’s what exists right now. Then you’d say back to me, “I have long blonde hair.” And we’d sort of bounce that back and forth. It doesn’t seem like much, but it actually starts to ground you in, am I really with you? Am I listening to you? Am I paying attention to you? When I pay attention to you and you kind of come into me, how do I start to feel? Do I feel good? Do I start to get annoyed at you? It creates very organic improvisational skills. It’s sort of like juggling, the Meisner technique. You start with one ball – that’s not very complex. But it keeps adding things, where we start to get into imaginary circumstances. By the end of the two years, I felt that this training had answered all my questions and had really instilled in me a very solid toolkit, that allowed me to say, “You give me a script, any script, and I know how to turn that script into behavior, which is what actors do.” What kind of behavior? Behavior that is truthful, imaginative, that honors the writer, but also honors me as an artist and that I like. That I’m proud of. That’s a pretty great thing to be able to say.
You have your own studio now. I was reading an interview with you where you said that running your own studio has afforded you the chance to have a little more choice in who you work with, if it’s a good fit as far as student and teacher. What sort of things are you looking for when you take on a student?
Knickerbocker: Humanity. Longing – like a real yearning. The first question I ask a student is, “What are your goals?” Because I don’t want to just sell someone classes if what they need isn’t what we’re doing. Here in Atlanta, there’s a big focus on the business … because there’s a lot of work – Tyler Perry, and all these productions come here to do stuff. It has made this thing called local hires a very rich, robust market for local actors. They have crews here, they have actors here, they have agents here. Big movies like to come here because of the tax breaks that Georgia gives them, right? There’s work, and so the focus here is often on how to get work. You’ll find classes here on how to do a self tape, and how to audition, and stuff like that. I don’t have much of that at my studio. So if someone came to me and said, “I want to learn how to do better auditioning,” I’d say there are lots of places in New York to go do that. That’s not what we do. We’re here to train you, because what I’m hoping your goal can be is that you want to be the very best actor that you can be. Not better than Brad Pitt, but just the best expression of acting in your body with your heart and your soul.
You’ve worked with quite a few big names throughout your career, more recently Austin Butler in “Dune: Part Two.” I read that you had to do a lot of that over Zoom.
Knickerbocker: A lot of coaching is on Zoom! There are some people I’ve never met in person.
That’s so interesting to me. You must do it a lot, so I guess you get used to it at some point. But is that challenging? What is that like?
Knickerbocker: I mean, we had to figure it out because of the pandemic. Emmy Rossum, [has been] one of my clients for a long time. We’ve worked a lot in person, because she’s bi-coastal. She lived in L.A. and New York, and at first we worked in person on a lot of stuff, including the audition and the callback for “Shameless.” But when she got it, that was nine seasons in L.A.. They shot in L.A., I’m in New York, so we had to do it. We did it over Skype, not Zoom, but it’s very doable. I have the script in front of me. She has the script in front of her. We’re live, and I’m reading all the other characters with her while I’m taking notes as she’s doing the acting with those characters, and then we’re just shaping it together. So it’s doable. Austin was in Hungary, because that’s where they were shooting “Dune: Part 2.” We have worked in person. We started working together, I don’t know – 2018, something like that? He did a wonderful play on Broadway with Denzel Washington called “The Iceman Cometh,” and that’s when we first met.
In that same interview, you mentioned that villains are often a lot of fun to work with.
Knickerbocker: Always!
Are there any other types of characters or stories in particular that you have fun breaking into with an actor?
Knickerbocker: I like comedy. I don’t know how many movies Sam Rockwell and I have done – I’m gonna say 100, or more, and three Broadway shows, and stuff like that. Sam is one of my very best friends and one of my favorite actors, because he’s so interesting and can easily do high drama. He can be dangerous. He can have a broken heart. But he’s also got a wild sense of humor, so it’s fun to do comedy with him. His girlfriend, Leslie Bibb, is also a master at comedy. We have lots of fun together too. So yeah, I’d say villains and comedy are the two favorite things to work on. And tragedy. You know, broken hearts.
Over a decades-long career, what has been the most fulfilling thing about teaching for you?
Knickerbocker: I became a parent later in my life. I’ve got two young kids, a ten year old and a 2-and-a-half year old. That’s been the greatest joy of my life. Learning from them, and helping them grow and supporting their growth – my son was born at home with a midwife. And I do think that training an actor has some relationship to being a midwife … It’s thrilling when you watch someone who starts to put it together. They’re putting it together, and that’s just very special, to see them finding [it].