I don’t usually talk about specific actors on the blog but I heard some amazing things in an interview with Terrance Howard on NPR this weekend. I heard the 12 minute version that aired but went and listened to the 40 minute uncut version via the NPR website. (The broadcast version is there as well.) I haven’t been following Howard’s career with any devotion but I may just do so now to see what he is thinking. He seems to have a real sense of his place in the world acknowledging the bonds that run back to his actor/musician great-grandmother, Minnie Gentry, to his mother through him and down to his son. Despite his success, he does a lot of carpentry work professionally and pro bono. His greatest hope seems to be that his son will become the scientist that he wanted to be before acting deflected him from that path.

I am not quite sure if his explanations of scientific matters are completely accurate but I am impressed by his intellectual curiosity and rigorous pursuit of knowledge much the same as I was in Danica McKellar.

What grabbed my attention most was his observations on one consequence of acting being that you insulate yourself from life and begin to observe. In the interview he reflects on this in relation to his mother’s death just two weeks ago.

Starting at about 24:00 full version of the interview-

“As an actor, the saddest thing. You stop experiencing moments. You start watching them as if you are storing them for future reference. … It’s like when I was sitting there with my mother for the last two weeks. There were moments when I couldn’t turn that actor off where I was watching her. You know. And wondering what was going through her mind…And trying to stop myself…”
[…]
The actor sometimes takes over in places that you don’t want it there. Maybe I was just afraid to face the emotion that was happening so then I began to watch.”

This state is difficult for people to deal with, he says, and as a result, “And I think that’s what happens to a lot of actors, and therefore they get hooked on drugs because they’re desperate to get away from not feeling. They want to be excited or something.”

I can empathize because I have had similar experiences. I have difficulty enjoying performances because I analyze how effects are being accomplished or I wonder what is happening backstage. The technical director at work often thinks about how he could improve the lighting for shows or events like weddings. But even outside of performances in real life, I some times realize I am watching myself experience an event. I can’t recall doing so during a something as highly emotional as watching someone die. Certainly, I haven’t filed it away for future use the way Howard suggests he does.

I don’t know whether to pity him for not being able to feel or envy him for being able to insulate himself from negative events. I suppose if he is equally unable to fully experience joyful events, then it is a net detriment.

But I wonder if every vocation doesn’t hold a similar threat. Had he become a famous scientist as he planned isn’t there a chance that he would instead be talking about how science removes the wonder from his life. That he can’t enjoy the rainbows, blowing bubbles and sunsets without analyzing the forces that went into creating them. Perhaps he might talk about how science has isolated him from those he loves because he can’t experience the world with the same joy and wonder they do. As interested as he is in science, he still looks to explain events and occurrences in terms of grandness and wonder. He talks about a soap bubble existing because the universe is finite. Commenters to the NPR piece talk about surface tension.

Even as he looks upon the road not traveled with some bittersweetness, perhaps the lesson he and all of us should take away is that engaging in other interests in the manner of professional-amateurs, we can avoid those aspects which might remove the joy from the pursuit. By pursuing acting as a career, Terrence Howard may have taken on an obligation to examine and distill life in order to advance. By pursuing science out of love, he is not necessarily responsible for defining his relationship with it in a specific way.