I was always involved in the theater.
My father's a playwright
and I grew up with a heavy theatrical influence (chuckles)
or a theatrical household, I guess.
And I started backstage doing summer stock
and it took me a while
to actually get up the courage to get on stage.
I was a little shy about that.
But I slowly did plays in high school
and then I went to college
and I was a theater arts major in college.
And when I was, when it became time to make a decision
of whether or not to try and work professionally
or go to a training program,
it was very clear to me that what I needed
was to go to school.
I had been to the theater a lot.
I went to the theater all the time
with my family and on my own,
and was an active theater goer.
And I noticed that there would be these wonderful ingenues
who I'd watch over a period of time
and they'd be so good and so alive and so emotional.
And then they'd get to a certain age
and they'd kind of dry out and you could see
that they just didn't know how to help themselves
get to the next phase of their work.
In a lifetime being in the theater,
you could tell they just sort of, their resources ran out.
And I wanted to make sure that
that didn't happen to me (laughs)
because I knew that I was a creative person.
I knew that I had good instincts.
I knew that I loved the theater
and that it was clear that
that's where I wanted my life to be.
But I thank God I was instinctive enough
to know that I needed to be trained
so that I could learn how to help myself
as the years rolled by.
And so Juilliard, there were about five programs
that were really hot when I was in college
that everyone looked to
and Juilliard was my last choice, actually.
I had heard terrible things about the school.
I had heard that it was snobby and elitist.
I had heard that it was, they called it the "jail yard."
I had heard that it was,
that you go and you become a robot
and I was interested in other programs actually.
But I applied just to get
as many auditions under my belt as I could,
and used it as my warmup audition
for the other schools.
And oddly enough, I went
and I remember sitting there thinking,
"Well wait a minute, this doesn't feel so bad here.
It doesn't, it feels like a school
and it feels a little institutional and all of that."
But the students who were the monitors
who were helping us through the audition process
were really nice, genuinely nice
and the audition process, though terrifying
and really you just wanna vomit
the whole time you're going through it,
everyone was, there was a good atmosphere there.
It was active, it was alive, it felt good.
And oddly enough, the other schools that I went to
that I had my sights on,
I didn't like it there.
Just the atmosphere just didn't feel right for me.
And when you look to go to a drama school, they're all good.
They all are really good.
And they offer very specific things.
And I was just lucky that Juilliard accepted me
because it was the right program for me.
It's not right for everybody,
but I was really, really lucky to get in.
So I was wrong
about all my preconceived notions about the school.
I was right about some of them.
It's tough and it's really hard
and you give up your life for four years,
but it has a great heart.
The school really has a good heart.
- [Interviewer] Talk to me a little bit about the audition.
- I was at Brown University and there were a bunch of us
who were auditioning during the same day
and it was my birthday actually.
And I had a piece from "Shivaree" which was my modern piece,
my contemporary monologue, about a belly dancer. (laughs)
And I did Hermione from "Winter's Tale" very badly.
And it was very much like "Flashdance."
There's a table and there are three teachers who are there
who you don't know who they are at the time.
But for me, I think it was Robert Williams,
Liz Smith and John Stix and Harold Stone,
I think that's who it was then.
And I did my pieces and I said, "Thank you very much."
And they said, "Thank you very much."
And I left the room and your adrenaline starts to go.
And you just think,
"Oh I made it through without completely messing up."
And then you wait.
And then what they do is they post a list on the wall
with the names of those people
who were being called back for the afternoon.
And I remember sort of waiting and waiting
and someone came down and they posted the list
and I think there were four names on the list.
And there were a lot of people there
and people just swarmed that bulletin board.
And I slowly walked up and my name was on that list.
And I just sort of turned away and I went to a hallway
and I found my friend who was with me.
And I said, "My name's on the list,
I'm actually on the list."
So then I had to wait
until 5:00 that afternoon for a callback.
You've been told or you hear through the grapevine
of everyone else who's auditioning,
that once you go through your callback
they usually put you through a rigorous improv thing.
They make you improvise some event or something.
So I finished my two pieces
and I remember it was Michael Kahn stood up
and said, "Well, so does anyone need to say anything?"
And there was a deathly silence. (laughs)
And they said, "Thank you very much, Laura.
Thank you very much."
And I think I was the, there was no improv.
And they didn't ask me to sing a song.
They didn't ask me to do anything.
They just said, "Thank you."
And so I said, "Thanks."
And I remember thinking, I love that theater so much.
The space, that theater in the school is so lovely
and it felt so good.
And I remember just thinking,
"Oh God I hope I get to come back here. (chuckles)
I hope I get to do something here."
'Cause it just felt good.
The place just felt right to me
but I really didn't think I was gonna get in.
And then a few weeks later I got a letter
and actually my other two friends
who I went to college with also got in.
So the three of us all went together, which was great.
You arrive at school and you're thrown into what you know
is gonna be an ensemble for four years.
You don't know each other,
you're from all over the country.
I think I was the only person from Manhattan.
I was the only person from New York City in my class
other than maybe one other person,
and everyone was from all over the place.
We all had vastly different backgrounds.
We varied in age
from people who were right out of high school
to people who had been out of college for a while.
And you're gonna spend
a lot of time with these people. (laughs)
You're gonna get to know them really, really well.
And even scarier, they're gonna get to know you really well.
So, and I was very lucky.
I had a great class, I loved my class.
We fought, we went through periods of time
of hating each other and loving each other.
That all ebbs and flows as time goes on,
but you're profoundly bonded.
I mean, I am bonded to a group of people
who I might not see them for years
but they're a classmate of mine (chuckles)
and your feelings towards them are very, very strong.
And most of us are friends for life.
And whenever you get on the phone
with someone else from your class, it's like,
"Have you heard from so and so and what are they they doing
and where are they and how are they and what's going on?"
And there's the jealousies and the love affairs
and the bickering and the friendships
and the friendships that fall apart
and the friendships that come back together.
It's an enormous thing for a group of people to go through.
And you're there, you can be extremely supportive.
And really my class was so talented.
I loved more than anything sitting in those classrooms
and watching my classmates work.
Those acting classes were thrilling
and watching people take a step forward
or break through something, break down a wall
that they'd been pounding on for a long time,
or watching them grow and develop
and get stronger and feel better about themselves.
And it was remarkable.
It was really incredible.
And I miss those rooms.
I find that I miss that kind of concentration.
I miss that pure concentration that has nothing
to do with the business or growing older
or how much money I'm making
or rent or family or anything like that.
It is a really pure time
and you become completely dependent on
this ensemble that you're thrown into.
Oh, third year is hard.
You've learned so much.
And you're literally,
you're saturated with new information about yourself
and what you can do and everything that's available to you
and your body's been retrained
and your voice has been retrained
and you've learned how to look at text in a different way
and you've learned how
to work with your fellow students in a certain way
and you sort of, it's different for everybody,
but for me, I just, I didn't know what to do.
I felt like I couldn't walk and talk at the same time.
I just hit that wall
and it was ungodly painful, ungodly painful,
and it's not an unusual thing to happen.
It happens usually to everyone
at one point while they're there.
And for me, it was third year, for me it was Shaw.
We did a production of "Heartbreak House"
and I had stagefright for the first time in my life.
I had panic attacks.
I was bursting into flop sweats,
I got on stage and I wanted to go home.
When I was on stage I would look
at my sweet, wonderful classmates
and just be thinking about what I had for lunch that day
as opposed to being in the scene.
I was just overwhelmed, completely overwhelmed
with everything that I had learned
and with a sort of understanding
that I had to take a step forward
and I was really scared.
And fortunately, I somehow worked through it.
But I thought about leaving.
I mean, I thought about,
I had such self-doubt at that point
thinking, "You know everyone's been very nice
to me for all these years and they've been supportive,
but I can't do this.
And who am I kidding (laughs)?
And they made a mistake when they accepted me
and I should just leave." (laughs)
But I was, and I laugh about it now,
but at the time it was no fun.
And I was able to work through it and...
But third year you are just,
you don't know where to turn.
You've saturated so much
and it just hasn't absorbed yet.
So you just feel like you're out of body,
you can't quite function
the way you know you want to and can function.
It's growing pains is what it is.
It's intense growing pains.
- [Interviewer] Thinking about the experience
that you expected it to be
and what it really became for you.
Do you feel that you are,
do you think you were pretty much on the mark
about what you were gonna get from it?
- Yeah, I was, I was pretty good about that.
I knew.
I knew that it was gonna be really hard
and I knew there was a lot about it
that I didn't know and didn't understand
and wouldn't know until I got there.
I did not go to Juilliard expecting to be crowned
with laurels and told how wonderful I was.
I really knew that it was gonna be hard
and I wanted to be pushed.
I wanted to be spoken to honestly and directly
about what I needed to work on and what I needed to address.
I was hungry for that and extremely appreciative of it.
Wasn't easy. (laughs)
It wasn't easy.
But, invaluable.
Why you go to Juilliard,
what you take from it, how you use it in the future
is a very personal, personal thing.
Everyone's experience there
is wildly different and wildly personal.
And you can talk to, and as I'm sure you have,
you can talk to 20, 30 people
and everyone will have a vastly different take on it.
And it will mean wildly different things to them.
But the one thing I can tell you
is they'll be passionate about it.
What Juilliard has to offer is fantastic.
It's not for everybody.
And just 'cause you know there are so many actors I know
who have not had a stitch of training and they're fantastic.
They're fantastic.
It just depends on what you want I guess
and what gets you excited about doing what you do.
I mean, everyone can get very precious
about being trained or being not trained
and it's fantastic and it was certainly right for me
but there are a gazillion good actors
who've never stepped foot in a classroom.
So it's just a choice.
It's just one choice.
- [Interviewer] Do you find when you're doing roles
or running up a hillside in "Congo" or,
(Laura laughs)
- [Interviewer] Where does this Juilliard
training kick in to these movie roles?
- Endurance more than anything else, I think.
It helps you with a sense of endurance.
It helped me that way,
knowing that I was as prepared as I could possibly be,
that I would know how to help myself out if I got in a jam
and that I would continue to enjoy it more than anything.
It's about having a reservoir of creativity
that doesn't desert you so that when the business
is tough and hard and painful,
you still are connected in a visceral way
to what you do and that you still enjoy it
and it still is fulfilling.