Today we’d like to introduce you to Lance A. Williams.
Lance, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
It sounds incredibly cliche to say “I’ve wanted to act since I was a kid.” In truth, most kids want to be a cop, an astronaut, maybe a doctor, ninja or prince. I wanted to be all of them.
I was five the first time I had someone really open up the world of acting to me. In typical five-year-old fashion, I couldn’t sleep because there was still so much playing to do, but no one else was awake except for my grandmother. Once I finally got the nerve to shuffle through a crack in the bedroom door towards the fantastic sights and sounds of her movie, to my complete shock, she didn’t send me back to bed. Instead, she took me on her lap and began to explain the scene – in detail. What was this man motivated by? Why was he doubting himself? Who the hell was he to begin with and why did any of it matter? Five years old and all hair, I couldn’t articulate what I knew years later which was the simple truth – I loved movies, and they’d never be the same after that night at Grandmom’s apartment.
Fast forward, I’m eighteen, facial hair and graduation are rapidly approaching finally (on both counts)! We’re doing our local show of West Side Story, where I played Bernardo. My classmate enters stage right, chasing after a basketball from some part of the upper west side beyond the curtain where the Jets hoop. Before the ball can roll into my territory I enter stage left. Applause rips through the crowd from friends, family, and classmates, and I grin. Completely taken out of character, ego fully stroked, and loving every second. Until, I focus on my classmate opposite me, and he’s IN IT. Lost somewhere in the racial tension of our gang rivalry, present, living, committed. And my grin faded to shame. Somehow Jon had done it, he had captured the thing I saw as a child. Despite the crowd, despite the chipped paint from a set that had heard too many west side stories, despite how good of friends we actually were in class. I admired him for it, and the phrase “hard work beats talent, when talent doesn’t work hard,” crossed my mind. It was time to take what I loved seriously.
It’s now 2011, I’m watching Richard C. Bailey critique an actor’s behavior in a Meisner class. He’s relentless and weaving through the layers of suppressed emotion and “walls” put up by this student like a spider unweaving a web. I’m floored. During the break, with a throat full of eagerness, I ask if I can give this activity a try? There was no smile, no soothing humor to overture his answer – “No.” The students worked hard, it wouldn’t be fair. I knew what he was saying. Two years later, I enter Richard’s studio space, in the midst of an activity for emotional prep. I sit at a table ready to write this letter as my activity, but what waited for me at the table wasn’t just paper and pencil, but every obstacle, and moment of pain and joy that I had hidden from in one way or another. I welcomed it, and I performed. To this day, I credit Rich for giving so many of us space to not only learn how to act but to love ourselves and this career that so many don’t consider a “real job.”
I’m twenty-eight. Several short films, music videos, commercials later, I’ve been bound, tortured, and killed several times (mom is a big fan of those…), felt the terror of a rolled ankle while running in six-inch heels while portraying my dream role as Prince, I’ve picked brambles from my feet after sprinting through West Texas for a western, and now I’m standing crossed from Denzel Washington hoping to God he laughs at my string of jokes and I don’t get shushed into the “no zone” never to work again. It goes well, and we dive back into blocking the scene, but the volume gets turned down on everything for just a moment. My mind sprints from my Grandmother’s lap, past adolescent curiosity for movies, towards a half-assed perception of what success and self discovery meant, leaping over every relationship moments before they were swallowed up by my career so that I could get a new perspective on how necessary those endings were, steamrolling thousands of rejections to make way for the thousands more to come, and stopping gently as a tracking shot on my mark moments before “Action!’
Has it been a smooth road?
It’s easy to slip into pessimism and get all self-deprecating when we look back on the path towards acting, but we miss something in doing so. This career offers more failure than most, but in an odd case of “misery loves company” I watched so many friends go from a timeline of graduation pictures with the twenty-first-century badge of honor, a degree, held high to a post decrying secondary education because jobs are scarce. I knew how they felt to get so many no’s and found comfort in a sort of silent empathy that was at the same time healing. Most folks think rejection comes in the form of employment or bookings, sometimes it’s friendships ending, a relationship falling apart at the seams, a swelling distance between you and family due to distance and a nagging tunnel vision for victory. Your personal life takes a beating, but in the most peculiar way, it helps. As a creative, you’re better for the journey, so it truly isn’t the triumph but the struggle that we need. Embrace it.
Please tell us more about your work, what you are currently focused on and most proud of.
I am an actor who also writes. I don’t think I could ever truly pick one over the other, but at this stage, I’m known for my acting since my writing only sees the light of day for my close friends who I can handle ripping it apart without imploding into 125 characters or less. IF anything sets me apart, it’s simply my approach which I attribute to my father who equipped me with a busy mind that’s always dissecting and a work ethic to bring it all to center.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
Short films will become a regular option in theaters. It sounds ridiculous – who would want to drive to the theater, watch forty minutes or less of a movie, and leave? Anyone with an hour lunch break, single parents, parents with an expensive babysitter, and anyone with a dwindling attention span because they’re used to content that lives inside of the window that is quite literally only a minute big. Offer reduced pricing, market it as a sort of appetizer or nightcap for the person on the go, and drop in name talent/directors and like Field of Dreams, they will come.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.lanceawilliams.com
- Email: lancewilliams09812@gmail.com
- Instagram: @golancego
- Twitter: g0lanceg0
Image Credit:
Harris Davey Photo (@harrisdaveyphoto), George Lee (@onegungutty), Stephanie Kewish Photography (@stephanie.kewish.photography), Blue Photo NYC (@lmorganlee), Sony Pictures, AMS Pictures
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