One afternoon, a week or so before the movie shoot in Hawaii, I accompanied Wu to visit her acting coach, Craig Archibald, in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Archibald, an affable Canadian in his mid-fifties, greeted us at the door of his Spanish-style duplex home, where he lives and teaches. After serving us generous mugs of tea, he turned to his client. “So, tell me how you are doing,” he said. Wu drew a long breath and curled herself into a deep red sofa.
“I’m having a day,” she said, pulling a notebook and a pen out of a black leather backpack.
“O.K., so, a day,” Archibald said slowly. “Business day or personal day?”
“Both,” Wu replied. She had spent the morning writing in her journal, which, she said, always gets “rather emotional,” and had done a number of interviews for the imminent release of “Hustlers.” Archibald asked if she planned to see the movie, and she laughed. “I don’t like to watch myself,” she said. “All the exposure just makes me yucky.”
Archibald, who has the soothing voice of a mindfulness-app guide, had a therapeutic habit of repeating Wu’s words, as if to make sure that she had heard herself and given adequate weight to her own ideas. I got the impression that a significant part of the work was buttressing Wu’s confidence, letting her work out thoughts and emotions in a protected environment. Wu has been attending coaching sessions with Archibald since shortly after she arrived in L.A.—long before she could afford it. During her waitressing years, she’d bring audition pieces to rehearse, but now she looks to Archibald for help inhabiting a character she’s playing by inventing a backstory or developing an interior world.
Wu told Archibald that she had yet to meet the woman who would be playing a younger version of her character, Grace, in “I Was a Simple Man.” “I’m concerned, because I don’t know how she sounds,” Wu said, haltingly. “She’s not an actress, she has never acted before.” (“Oof,” Archibald said, with raised brows.) “We’ve done so much on Grace’s spirit and her inner life,” Wu went on. “But that’s all work that we’ve done that isn’t in the other actress.”
“You can talk to her, you know?” Archibald said. “She’s gonna be very respectful of you.”
“Will she, though?” Wu asked.
“Of course she will,” Archibald said.
“No, she won’t,” Wu protested, without conviction.
Wu’s intensity brought with it a certain distractibility. When a lawnmower began rumbling outside, Archibbald apologized and explained that yard work was normally done in the morning, but the crew had arrived late. Wu almost vibrated with agitation. “Oh, my God, it’s just so loud!” she exclaimed at one point, as if the mower had been dispatched expressly to thwart her concentration.
Archibald moved us to a quieter room to resume the exploration of Wu’s role. He told me about one of the techniques they use. “Very often, it’s helpful for actors to see themselves as either a plant or an animal,” he said.
“Animal work is a big thing,” Wu said.
Archibald explained that choosing an animal that a role resembles “helps you feel the essence of it.”
