How does your experience in stage acting translate into television and film acting? Is there any significant difference, and do you prefer one over the other?

I love these questions, and I think about them constantly. Succinctly? I don’t really know, and I’m sure I’ll never quite figure it out. Less succinctly, in theater, we rehearse all together as a company for 2-4 weeks in order to carefully craft the performances that we’ll be tasked to revive eight times a week for however many months on end; and every show is another rehearsal, just in front of a paying audience providing real time feedback. On set, conversely, we mostly prepare on our own beforehand, and, if there is rehearsal at all, it might be 15 minutes with the director on set with props and costumes for the first time on the day of the shoot. The real “rehearsals”, I’ve found, happen while we’re already shooting (no pressure!)—daring to try different things with my scene partners with the aim of capturing the one take (or one moment of one take) that reads as most truthful to the characters and their given circumstances, and then we never touch that scene again. That difference feels like galaxies apart to me, but I’d like to believe that both mediums ultimately employ very similar investigative tools for seeking truthfulness in performance. So the more deftly I can learn to wield them from my time on a theater gig, the more readily and reliably I can use them to find various truthful takes when I’m acting on camera. In theory. I think, additionally, the collaborative sense of play one needs when making theater has been a boon for me on sets—anything that reminds me to have fun and not take myself too seriously. Further differences abound, but I try to focus on the similarities in the homework while trusting that I won’t miss the forest for the trees and, say, deliver a proscenium theater sized performance on an extreme close-up or a close-up performance on a Broadway stage. But then again it’s art, so who’s to say that choice wouldn’t work brilliantly somehow somewhere. We learn the rules to know when to break them.