Ep.1 :: Danielle O’Farrell is Making Conversation

Making Conversation

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WELCOME

To the first episode of Making Conversation!

Thank you for joining me for this inaugural episode. Today, I’m speaking with my good friend, actress Danielle O’Farrell.

(click on the media player above left to listen to or download the full audio of this interview)

Danielle was most recently seen in San Diego at The Old Globe as Audrey in As You Like It, the First Fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Clara in the 100th anniversary production of Pygmalion (featuring Robert Sean Leonard and Paxton Whitehead). Previously, she worked in Chicago with Remy Bumppo Theatre Company, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, American Theater Company, First Folio Theatre, Signal Ensemble Theatre, and many others. She has had the great pleasure of working with Adrian Noble, Lindsey Posner, Nicholas Martin, and James Bohnen. Danielle’s film and television work includes My “Boys,” the independent film “Farewell Darkness” and short horror film “Stay With Me,” and industrial work for McDonalds. She currently lives and works in New York City. And Danielle is one of those actresses who is always at the top of my list for a reading or workshop whenever I’ve got a new play.

You can find out more here: www.DanielleOFarrell.com.

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Danielle O’Farrell • www.DanielleOFarrell.com

CHELSEA: So, hi, Danielle, how are you today?

DANIELLE: I am well, thanks, how are you?

CHELSEA: I’m doing well. This is actually our second attempt at this, because yesterday I did not manage to use the software correctly, and did not record the entire call. But this will be even better though, because now I’ve got a first draft of my Terry Gross impression under my belt, and we can move forward with at least me being a little be more polished. So I’ve just given a little bit of an introduction about you, but why don’t you tell me what labels you use to describe yourself as an artist?

DANIELLE: I have always introduced myself as an actress. And I think I mentioned this when we were talking before, it’s interesting to me because I always introduce myself as an “actress,” my person as an “actress,” but my career as an “actor.” So when I’m talking about what I do in the business, I refer to myself as an actor, but personally, I guess I consider myself an actress.

CHELSEA: And lately, since you’ve been through grad school, a ‘classically trained’ actress.

DANIELLE: Mm-hmm. An actor that trades in doing classical things.

CHELSEA: Right, that’s your particular niche.

DANIELLE: [My] “brand.”

CHELSEA: Brand. Right. I want to talk first about geography. I think geography is going to be a big part of this Making Conversation series, because we all have very strong opinions about where we choose to live and make our work. And you are a great person to start this conversation off, because when we met, we were both living and working in Chicago, and then you went out to California for grad school, and you made theatre there for a couple of years. And now you’re in New York. So you’ve hit all of the major cities.

DANIELLE: The major markets, as it were.

CHELSEA: The major markets. So why don’t you talk about what kind of work you made in each place, and why that was the best place for you at that time.

DANIELLE: So when I was looking at colleges, I considered New York for a bit, but honestly, at the age of eighteen, after growing up in Nebraska pretty much since I was five, I think it was intimidating, and scary and far away. And I ended up at the Chicago College of the Performing Arts at Roosevelt University, because, just, all the doors opened the right way that I needed. I knew some people there that sort of got me in to see all the right people in terms of scholarships, and so I ended up in Chicago for my BFA. And then stayed in Chicago after school was over, partly because, it being Chicago, I was able to work while I was in undergrad. So, I think every gets out of school and thinks about, “Oh I’ll move to New York, Oh I’ll move to LA,” but I at that point had already been working Chicago for a year and a half, when I graduated from school, and had already made some connections, and gotten to know some theatre companies, and had some friends, and so I just stayed. I kept working for about five years. And I did, as we can attest together, lots of big parts in small theatres and small parts in big theatres, and festivals, and readings, and new plays, and all kinds of amazing formative things. Played a lot of Greek tragedy for an audience of seven people…

CHELSEA: Right, right. For which no one gets paid.

DANIELLE: For which no one gets paid, or, if you do — toward the end of my career I was making like $75 a contract, which was very exciting.

CHELSEA: Yeah, very exciting!

DANIELLE: I remember my first show when I was twenty, I think I made $50 for that. That was pretty cool. We ran for seven weeks and it was thrilling.

CHELSEA: And then sometimes people will say nice things about you, like, my favorite review of you ever: Hedy Weiss in the Chicago Sun-Times, “O’Farrell, with her red hair and creamy skin, can break your heart with her eyes alone.”

DANIELLE: Indeed. That’s one of my favorite things, too.

CHELSEA: If I were you, I would have that written on the wall over my bed.

DANIELLE: {laughs} It was a very, very, very nice thing for her to say. It was astonishing, and terrible in some ways, because I was twenty, and I thought “Oh my God! This is what being an actor is like! It’s fantastic!” So, I’m sure it, in some ways, got me started on this primrose path thinking it would always be this spectacular, which, as we know, it is not. But, yeah, it was amazing. So, I was doing lots of really fantastic work. And then, sort of hit a point where I was getting auditions for all the places I wanted to work, I was getting called back sometimes, but I wasn’t getting the jobs. And I think you can go a while on the sheer adrenaline and excitement of being an artist for the first time. Every night in Chicago that I wasn’t doing a play myself, I could go to the theatre and see somebody I knew in something I wanted to see, something exciting, something different. And I ran for quite a long time on the excitement of that. But I that think everyone, even those who are very successful, at all levels of their career, hits a point where you look around and go “Is this going to be it forever? Is this all there is?” And for me, that point happened around five years into my Chicago career. So then I moved to San Diego, and did the graduate program at the University of San Diego, which is working with the Old Globe, the big regional in SD. And it’s a fantastic program, especially for what I wanted to do, because it is focused on classical training. All Shakespeare, Shaw, Stoppard—heightened language stuff that I really particularly love and am passionate about. And then also, it’s affiliated with the Globe, so the big thing for me was that it wouldn’t take me out of my career completely for two years. So I ended up being at the Globe, and that was phenomenal in terms of training, and also in terms of the people I worked with, because again, I didn’t have to take my feet out of the professional world. The doors that were opened for me and the rooms I got to be in because of that would not have happened in Chicago. I would not have been able to work with these people, based on the career level I was at, at that point. And then I finished grad school and decided to come to New York, because the particular things I’m good at and that I care about mostly take place here. In terms of the opportunity and in terms of my ambition, and the level of work I hope to do and intend to do as much as I can, New York is the place for me to be right now.

CHELSEA: And the interesting thing about New York that actors know, but perhaps some other people that are reading or listening to this don’t know, is that a lot of theatres all over the country and even the world cast out of New York. So there are a lot of working actors who technically live in New York, but they—

DANIELLE: —are never there!

CHELSEA: Exactly.

DANIELLE: So yeah. It’s mostly just a mass of opportunity.

CHELSEA: Yes, the sheer volume of opportunity. In the movie New York, I Love You, one of the cab drivers says, “This is the capital of everything possible.” Which I love.

DANIELLE: Yeah.

CHELSEA: Staying in the conversation about auditions and auditioning, you’ve recently joined Actor’s Equity, which is the professional actor’s union. You were not Equity when you were acting in Chicago in your 20s. Why do you feel it’s important to be in a Union when you’re in your 30s in New York?

DANIELLE: Well, there’s lots of reasons for that. I am really grateful that I was not an Equity actress right out of school in Chicago. I think at the age of 22 it would have been really hard to work at an Equity level in Chicago, at any—

CHELSEA: —I think at any age. Yeah. I know actors in Chicago that are in their 40s who could be Equity, they have all of the points that they need, but they’re sort of like “I wouldn’t have as much work” or “I wouldn’t be able to work in the theatres that I love if I went union in Chicago.”

DANIELLE: Well, but the thing about Chicago especially is that there is such good, specific, amazing work happening at all levels. And the advantage of that, again, for me as a young artist, is that—I have a lot of friends, especially friends from grad school, who came to New York right out of school and did, you know, four shows or seven shows in the five years following their graduation. And I got to do seventeen, in the period between being twenty and twenty-seven.

CHELSEA: Yeah, the sheer amount of work that you can cram into your life in Chicago if you don’t care what you’re getting paid, is kind of staggering.

DANIELLE: Right.

CHELSEA: I remember having those conversations myself with friends that had moved to LA or New York right out of school, and—this is not in any way to toot my own horn, because I’m not saying that the shows that I was doing were the most spectacular thing ever—I would be like, “Yeah, I’m working on three shows right now. You know, I’m assistant stage managing one, and then I’ve got this ten-minute play in this festival, and then I’m volunteering in the box office for this other thing, all at the same time. What are you working on?” It’s just cheap to make theatre in Chicago.

DANIELLE: So cheap.

CHELSEA: And there’s so many people doing it that you can be working all of the time, in some capacity, if you want to be.

DANIELLE: Yeah. One of my favorite experiences that we actually did together was that play festival at The Side Project, where, I think you did the opening piece, and I had the opening piece for the second act. And it was a little fifteen-minute play, it was adorable and sweet, and artistically it was one of my favorite things I’ve ever done. I came to the theatre every night and fell in love with my friend Brett every single night, and it was just delightful.

as Jasmine with Brett Lee as in Black & White at the side project

CHELSEA: That was the festival, I think, where I had a piece that I was directing, by Brian Golden who I hope to have on this series a little bit later in the year. And there were something like 21 people in this 10-minute play. Which is— You would never— I mean, if you had to pay all of those people— We could barely fit them backstage! But if you had to pay them for every one of those performances, 21 people for a ten-minute play, I mean— That’s the kind of thing that does not get made outside Chicago storefront theatre.

DANIELLE: So the advantage of being non-Equity, especially when I was young, especially when I was in Chicago, was huge because I worked a lot. Literally, most nights I was sitting, you know, eighteen inches from the audience, looking at my lover who was breaking my heart. And it required such focus, and such vulnerability, and such— You know, you can’t fake it from eighteen inches away.

CHELSEA: Right. And it requires a lot from the audience, as well. Because there’s no hiding from the performers when you’re that close.

DANIELLE: Exactly. Yeah. So all of that said, one of the reasons I was really excited about the Old Globe program was that it would enable me to get my Equity card. Whether it’s earned or not, there is as sense of legitimacy conferred on you as an artist, as an actor, when you’re a union member. The opportunities available to you, the way that you are treated, should not be, probably, but is a little different. Actor’s Equity makes sure you that you won’t be kept waiting more than… an hour and a half, I think it is, for your audition appointment. Whereas, you could go to a non-Equity audition and be there five hours.

CHELSEA: All day.

DANIELLE: All day. Because they have all the power and they’re allowed to. Actor’s Equity will also watch out for me if I get hurt in a show. I twisted my ankle in a show at the Globe, and it was fine, it wasn’t a big deal, but any time I needed to go to the doctor, that was paid for by workman’s comp. I didn’t have to worry about it. Whereas, you know, a friend of mine got a concussion in a show in Chicago, and the small theatre would have loved to be able to pay for it, but they didn’t have that kind of insurance, they didn’t have that kind of resource to be able to take care of those medical bills. It’s also nice for me because we get breaks according to Equity schedule. So, again, you’re not going to be sitting there for five hours straight, or working on some heart-wrenching, difficult scene for five hours straight without getting ten minutes every hour and a half to get a breath of air. And you have recourse if you’re being treated poorly. So, the working conditions are inherently better than when you’re not Union. And then also, again, like you were saying, I don’t want to toot my own horn, it’s not like I’m saying things about my work specifically, other than that I work really hard. And I put a lot of myself into my work intellectually, emotionally, and I do my absolute best to go out every night and tell the story as best I can. There’s an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote that I absolutely love. It’s him writing to a young woman who is, I think, a friend of a friend. He says, first of all, it’s clear that you have talent, and talent is the same thing as having the right physical attributes to get into West Point. But, I just don’t know if you have what it takes, because, “You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner.

CHELSEA: Mmm-hmm.

DANIELLE: And I feel like, as an artist, I am for that every night. I try my damnedest to give that every night. To sell the depths of what I can offer, as opposed to just letting you see, you know, me be affected lightly by something. Unless it’s appropriate to the play and that’s what I’m doing. Money certainly isn’t everything, and money certainly isn’t the price of good art. Art doesn’t know money, in terms of quality. But, it’s nice that because I am a member of the union, when I am offering these things, when I am selling these experiences, I will be compensated in a way that makes my life easier.

CHELSEA: We also spoke a little bit yesterday, and we’ve spoken in the past, about how nice it is when you get to that point in your career—whether it’s because you’re in a union, or because you’ve just gotten to the point where you feel like you are owed the defined role of the professional. So, you’re an actor, you show up and you do your job, and you don’t have to fold programs, and you don’t have to do marketing—

DANIELLE: This is my Twelfth Night story—

CHELSEA: Yeah. You don’t have to, as you say, pick the ants out of the prop crackers.

DANIELLE: Right, exactly. When I came to grad school, the first show that I did at the Globe was Twelfth Night. I was playing Fabian. And it blew my mind, because I had spent all this time in Chicago— I mean, I would come to my shows at my Chicago off-Loop theatres with a bag of stuff. I would come in with, you know, clothes, socks, bobby pins, safety pins, with all the makeup I needed, extra earrings, you know, all these different things. And so I got to the theatre in San Diego, at the Old Globe for the first time, and I walked into this dressing room, and it was just me and this other girl. And we had a cot, and we had an extra chair, and we had all the hangers we needed, we didn’t have to bring our own hangers! And we had a sink in the room, and we had a bathroom across the way, and I didn’t have to clean either of them! {laughs} I had a dresser who told me that she would braid my hair for me every night. And I was just like, “You don’t have to, I can figure it out.” And she was like, “No, no, no, it’s fine, I got it.” And I just thought, Wow! This is amazing!

CHELSEA: And there’s something really beautiful about the everybody chipping in spirit—

DANIELLE: Absolutely.

CHELSEA: —Of the off-Loop theatre that you do when you’re younger, but then, I have found—and there have been times I’ve self-produced my own plays, and that’s something I’ve done to myself—you can’t do your best work if you have to concentrate on doing everything. And be worried about everything. Be worried about the marketing, and be worried about, like, where are we going to get another flat, can we hang stuff on this, or do we have the resources to go buy another can of paint? Is another company coming in that’s rented the space right after us that’s going to unhook all of our lights? You know, if you could just be the playwright, or the director, or the actor, and focus all of your creative energy, and all of your energy period, on doing that thing, then your work is invariably going to be better, because it’s more focused.

DANIELLE: Well, and this is going to sound kind of strange, but it’s also a feeling of respect. I’d like to think that everyone in Chicago, or in any small market, or you know, small theatres in New York, or in LA, would pay you this kind of attention and respect if they could afford it.

CHELSEA: Right.

DANIELLE: But for me it felt like a real acknowledgement that this is actually your job. Your job is to be an actor. And that was really validating for me in lots of ways, and really wonderful.

CHELSEA: So we’ve talked a little bit about how the circumstances of making work have changed, or the work situations that you find yourself in or that you seek out. How does your process as an actor differ, now, from the way you were making work five or eight years ago?

DANIELLE: I think, again, being in Chicago was great for me because it taught me to be gutsy. And it taught me to really commit. And it taught me, for better or for worse, to throw myself at something and see what happens. Which has served me well; that courage has served me really well. Grad school became a lot about the technical aspects of creating work. So—learning in Shakespeare all of the basic things you need to know to do Shakespeare: thesis/antithesis, the shape of a line. And then the more complicated stuff: builds, and sustaining thoughts, and all of the things that go into being able to technically deliver an idea that isn’t yours, a complicated idea that isn’t yours—

CHELSEA: In heightened language, no less.

Danielle with Matthew Bellows and Christopher Salazar in Measure for Measure (USD/Old Globe)

DANIELLE: Yeah, exactly. Poetic imagery, delivered in such a fashion that it is completely clear, and expressive, and seems like you thought it up all by yourself. And then, being brave enough to just go out there and listen and respond. I operate as an actor a lot on instinct, and what I’ve learned is that the more I learn technically, and the more capable I become technically, the more that serves my instinct, and the more my instinct is sharpened. Rather than it getting in the way. Which is really nice. The big thing for me about the way my work has changed is that, when I was twenty-two, I needed to say, “Okay, here’s my big moment, and I have to build to this moment, and I have to do this, and do this, and do this.” And all the while, doing my best to be present and listen, but with a little voice back in my head saying, “Remember you have to give that big speech in five minutes. So you need to make sure you can get there.”

CHELSEA: Right.

DANIELLE: And now, on my good days, on my best days, when my work is really something I’m proud of, it’s about the fact that I am comfortable enough and feel competent enough, and also trust myself enough to go out onstage, look at the other person, and put my attention completely on them. And just listen. And all of these really brilliant people I worked with at the Globe, they don’t push. They don’t throw a bunch of energy at it, and they don’t do anything really hard in the beginning, they just take their time, and listen and listen and listen and figure it out. And then all of a sudden, there they are, doing this completely honest, simple thing. And it’s astonishing. And the only thing you can do is keep listening and responding and hope that in thirty years you look like that, too. {laughs}

CHELSEA: You recently had a very interesting meeting with an organization that I had not heard of before: the Actors’ Fund Work Program. So tell me a little bit about that.

DANIELLE: The Actor’s Fund Work Program specifically exists because acting work is, and has always been, and probably will always be, project-based. So that will always end. Your show will close. It may be seven years, but your show will close. And what I love about the goal of the Actor’s Fund Work Program is that they want to help you find work—whether it’s a survival job, or a second career, or a primary career, or if you want to leave the business altogether—they want you to be able to find work that is meaningful to you, that makes you happy, and obviously will pay you enough to sustain whatever level of your life you need it to. It’s all free, which is astonishing as well.

CHELSEA: That is astonishing.

DANIELLE: They have a bunch of classes, so you can train in anything you can do with a computer, basically. They do a networking thing every week, so if you just need a job right now, you can go and hear from other people who have applied for other things, and see if anybody has something they need. I think they do once-a-month panels, where they have people who were members of the Work Fund and they’ve now started small businesses, or they’re teaching, or they’re involved in something else specific to them, that they can then come and speak about. So you can say, “Oh, I think I might be interested in teaching. I’d love to know more about that.” And you can go to the teaching panel and get more information.

CHELSEA: Great!

DANIELLE: So it’s astonishing, and wonderful, and heartening, honestly, because I think that the image you have in your head when you’re younger tends to be, “I will have money and it will always be okay.” And that happens for, like, probably twenty-five people. And so, I think when I was twenty-two I assumed that, eventually, I’d just be doing enough theatre that it would be fine. And that’s still the goal, and that’s still something I’m working towards, and I’d really like it and I’m hoping it will happen for me. But if it doesn’t, or even if it does and I want more stability, I need to explore what I can do in my life that will offer me that stability. And what I can do, again, that will be meaningful to me, that will be a useful way to spend my time. So that was really big for me, and I think a lot of artists when we hit the next decade of our careers, we get to the point where you sort of look around and say “Is this enough for me? Is this everything?”

CHELSEA: I think, too, when I was younger I underestimated the amount of money it takes just to live. Not even to live well.

DANIELLE: Totally!

CHELSEA: I was like, “Yeah, so I won’t make much money, I’ll just be poor and I’ll be happy.” And it’s like, yeah, in your mind you can live on ramen noodles, but in reality, you have to have some kind of quality of life. And then also, there are always going to be unexpected things: unexpected medical bills, unexpected plane tickets for funerals. You can’t just think, “I can totally stretch this little tiny bit of money that I have.”

DANIELLE: $17,000 a year.

CHELSEA: Exactly. “I can totally live on that! I’ll be poor and happy.” And it’s like, no, you’ll be poor and miserable. And, we’ve spoken about this before: in the periods of my life where I’ve been unemployed and I didn’t know where the next bit of money was coming from, I have been totally sapped creatively. You would think if you don’t have a job, you would just sit and write all day. But I’ve written nothing during those periods, because I’m so frantic about money, that I have no energy to write anything.

DANIELLE: It’s true. As an actor, when you’re starving, literally or figuratively, you can’t go into an audition and say, “GIMME THIS JOB I REALLY NEED THIS JOB!!” Because shockingly, no one wants to give you the keys to the car if you look like you’re so desperate you might crash it at any moment.”

CHELSEA: Right. {laughs}

DANIELLE: You need to be able to— and again, when I was twenty-two, there was such a romance and excitement in being really broke because I quit my second job so I could be an understudy. And, to be honest, because I’m kind of a fool and I really do love working, I’d probably do that again. But at the same time, it is not too much to ask of life, I don’t think, to have a place to live where you feel safe, and comfortable, where there is heat. {laughs} It takes a certain amount of money—it isn’t that much money, but it kinda is, sometimes—to just take care of yourself and have a fulfilling personal life. And I don’t think that your art should come at the cost of your personal life, always. Every now and then it will, and that’s just the reality we accept. But that shouldn’t be a decision you have to make every single day. And ideally, again, if you could find a way to make money that is fulfilling to you, or useful for your career, or even if it’s something totally stupid but you enjoy doing it enough that the time that you spend there is beneficial to your life, as opposed to something you get through just so you can go home and dread coming back, then—then that.

CHELSEA: Changing course here for a moment, I would like to talk to you about something we share a deep and abiding love for, which is fashion. But kind of, on a larger scale, beauty and aesthetics, and bodies for that matter. I believe, and I know that you do too, that fashion, or how you present yourself to the world, is actually not frivolous, but it ties into this artistic bent of liking to be surrounded by beauty, and feeling like you have the power to make beauty, to make yourself beautiful, and the way you present yourself to the world is beautiful and artful. And you once told me this great thing about how a person’s life’s work can be their life. Like, the beauty of your life can be your great art project. So, let’s talk about fashion!

DANIELLE: Well, I think I said this to you before, but one of the advantages of being an actor is that you can get away with being a little vain, because it’s your job. It’s my job to care about how I look when I go into this room—it’s not all of my job, but it’s a piece of it, to make sure that what they see is the best possible thing I can offer. And I think it does tie into bodies, especially for women. Because I’m really lucky that I’m finally coming into a part of my career where the body I have isn’t holding me back. I’m very—we’re both hourglass-y people—

CHELSEA: We are. We share that.

DANIELLE: And I, finally, coming into the next decade of my life, am happy about that and I like my body. And I like the person that I am in my body. And I don’t much want it to change anymore. I mean, everybody has things they don’t like about their body, but on the whole, I’m pretty comfortable with mine, and I only am striving to treat it better. To put better things on its skin. And be nicer to it; to stop putting Nutella into it every single day.

CHELSEA: Oh don’t! Never stop putting Nutella into it! Sometimes, though. Just a little occasionally. {laughs}

DANIELLE: Right, exactly. {laughs} But you know what I mean: let’s put some spinach in here, and chicken in here. Let’s be nice to my body because I’m going to need it for quite some time. As opposed to, when I was twenty-two—I dieted so much when I was twenty-two and twenty-five and at different points in my life, that I look at pictures and go, “Well, you were sure skinny. But you don’t look good. Because that’s not what your body’s supposed to look like. You were never supposed to be that skinny. So you look kinda weird, actually.” But when I was twenty-two and I was going out for all these ingénues, that was the way that I was supposed to look. Everybody else was that skinny, and half of them were people who were supposed to be that skinny. They were different body types than I was, and that was difficult for me. And it got in the way of casting, in terms of the things I wanted to do. But, um, you know, that’s the reality of what I looked like when I was twenty-two, so I consider myself very fortunate that as I’m coming into my thirties, I am able to look the way I look and have it be acceptable to everyone. In terms of my casting. And sort of continuing on that, one of the things we did in grad school was that we came to a couple of faux audition classes, and all dressed in what we would wear to an audition. And talked about, as bluntly as we could—although gently—what that particular outfit made us think about that person. And it was really useful, if occasionally difficult to hear, because you look at somebody who comes into a room, and their clothes are too tight or too loose, or they’re wearing something bright that’s distracting you from their face, or any of these things, and that’s what you think about. “That guy doesn’t know what he looks like, does he?”

CHELSEA: Yeah. I’ve sat in lots of auditions where I’ve wondered, “This person has no idea what shape their body actually is. How in touch are they with their body as an actor when they’re onstage? If they don’t even know what clothes fit?”

DANIELLE: And emotionally, if they can’t look in the mirror and be honest with themselves about that particular part, how are they going to be able to be honest with themselves when it’s much more important?

CHELSEA: Right, and it’s not like you’re just sitting across from this person on the bus. They chose this outfit to present the package of themselves to someone who has the potential to hire them, and this is what they came up with.

DANIELLE: Exactly. But a lot of times I feel like the advantage to being savvy about what looks good on you, is that you are showing people what’s useful about you. So, rather than going into a room into a big tent-like dress, which is very fashionable, and having people look at me and being like, “God, she looks chubby around the hips…

CHELSEA: Yeah, I can’t wear things that don’t have defined waistlines. I just look pregnant.

DANIELLE: Right. It’s just not going to work. For me either. And it’s such an important thing I think, again, to know, I’m going to put myself in this Betty Page dress, and what you think when you look in the room is, “Oh, awesome, she looks great!” You know, ideally, you’ll think that. But also, “She knows who she is. She’s not trying to hide anything about herself. She’s aware of what’s going on with her and she’s used it to her best advantage.”

CHELSEA: Right. And now moving on to the actual audition, or the actual conversation, or whatever.

DANIELLE: What’s she going to say when she opens her mouth?

CHELSEA: As opposed to being fixated on the outfit for the entire interview or audition.

DANIELLE: Distracted—again, not useful. This is useful, that would be not useful. But I also think—one of the things I love about aesthetics—you know, moving completely to the other side of it—is that the ‘living the beautiful life’ thing becomes about the fact that you can make any choice you want, in lots of things. My bedroom in New York, which I’m in right now—and it’s kinda messy right now—I spent a lot of time putting it all together and thinking about what I wanted it to look like, because this is where I’m going to be creating art for a couple of years at least, if not longer. And what I like about my room, too, is that any of my close friends would walk in and be like, “Oh yeah, this is Danielle’s room.”

CHELSEA: Right. Right right.

DANIELLE: {chuckles} There’s a chandelier in here. And a dressing gown.

Danielle in an ad for her graduate program that ran in American Theatre Magazine in 2013.

CHELSEA: {laughs} Yep.

DANIELLE: And rows of vintage-looking earrings. So. This is clear who she is.

CHELSEA: Wrapping up here: the Big Question. What is your biggest artistic goal for the next year or the next decade? Not just exterior accomplishments, but interior goals. How do you want to feel?

DANIELLE: {pause} That’s a big question. Um. I think—and we hit on this a little bit—the thing for me is to build an artistic home. Because I have just gotten here; I got to New York two and a half months ago. And have been getting all of my ducks in a row in terms of, you know, meeting with agencies and developing relationships with them, and casting directors, and doing the same. And meeting all these people at my showcase, sending out thank-you notes for that, that kind of thing. And also, my personal life: figuring out who I’m going to be when I’m in New York. And also, my day job. Where am I going to make money, and what can I do to make money in a way that will be efficient and productive and will not get in the way of my being an actor. I’ve been really careful to keep space open to be an actor in my life, in a way that I never have before. So, coupled with all of that, is that one of my acting professors—who’s a very, very smart, very accomplished man, said to me, “Theatre should always be the means to an end.” And at the time it threw me a lot.

CHELSEA: It’s so hard to hear because it’s like, “What’s the other thing?! I’m barely managing this thing! What’s on the other side?”

DANIELLE: “It’s so hard all by itself! Why on earth would there be one other thing beyond that that I’m supposed to get to?!” And so I think my goal for everything in my life for the next year, is to build my artistic home here, which means: my artistic home, my professional home—which involves those casting directors and agencies and theatres, coworkers, all those things—but also, my home. Getting my support system in place, getting my friends network together, finding the ways I want to spend my time. Dating. Building a network of people to be with me professionally, and a network of people to be with me personally and privately. I think the big thing that has been scary is that I am starting over now that I’m thirty. And I’m in an incredible place to do that, because my graduate program is incredibly well-respected in New York, and that’s great. And I have connections, again, and friends that I know from the work I did in Chicago, from the work I did in San Diego, even some friends from high school who are now working in New York theatre, which has opened doors for me as well. But it’s going to be doing this one more time. The good news is, I only have to do it one more time. And so I just have to keep working on making all that happen.

CHELSEA: Well, I think that you are in a fantastic place, both geographically and in your mindset and your life to make all those things happen. And I can’t wait to see what’s next for you.

DANIELLE: Thanks.

CHELSEA: And I’m so glad that we had this talk today. Thanks very much for making conversation.

DANIELLE: Oh no problem.

Thanks for joining us for this episode of making conversation. I hope you’ll join me again soon for another chat about making art in our thirties.