▲TV series "Crazy"
Since the hit of the TV series "Crazy", Zhang Songwen, who plays the gang-related leader Gao Qiqiang, has frequently appeared on the hot search because of his pure acting skills. Zhang Songwen was once selected as the 2020 Charismatic Person of the Year by Southern People Weekly, and his reasons for winning the award are now more conclusive: "Zhang Songwen can satisfy our imagination of ideal professional actors, keen to observe, good at thinking, maintain strong sensitivity and memory, bring this into the role, and convey it through the role." He travels with many living beings and also provides guidance to the juniors of the industry, such as lamp bearers, hoping to find some dignity and seriousness in this profession in today's society. ”
This article was first published in Southern People Weekly
Mother
Actor Zhang Songwen sat in a seat on the inside of the hotel restaurant, his yellow leather jacket taken off and draped over the back of the chair.
We ate in the hotel restaurant. In winter, he went to Hangzhou to participate in the recording of an acting variety show, and then rushed to film. In the past three or four years, the characters he has created have often been mentioned - Gu Jianhua, the old-fashioned and serious teaching director Gu Jianhua in "Summer in Xixiaohe", the inferior and flattering Director Tang in "A Cloud Made of Rain in the Wind", Zhu Yongping, the small owner of the aquatic farm hovering between the old and new families in "Hidden Corner", and even the greedy and cheap old Jia Fa in "The Dragon Riding Monster" popular in Guangdong 15 years ago.
▲ "Hidden Corner"
He has been discussed a lot, and there is more scrutiny from the outside world, but he tries to maintain the way of professional actors, try to refuse interviews, reduce exposure, and always feel that it is better for professional actors to keep some distance from the audience, otherwise, it is easy to distract the mind of pondering the role. Finally met, but because the program team gave a temporary notice to record and was in a hurry, the interview was moved to the restaurant, moved to the room and moved to the dressing room, but he always answered and confessed seriously, talking about his father's advice, about missing his mother and friends, and also talking about his vulnerability and fear as an actor.
"Some time ago, a friend asked me which places you filmed and wanted to go back again, and I blurted out Shaoxing." As soon as he sat down, he began to say, "Maybe it's because I think it's nice to walk there." It also has a special significance, it was the last place where my (previous) agent and I worked, and we took a photo together on the West Little River. ”
"Then he died."
The agent sent a message to Zhang Songwen two days before he suddenly died, and the last message said that pressing a certain acupuncture point could reduce blood pressure, "because he thinks my heart is not good." Unexpectedly, he died of a heart attack. For a year and a half after that, Zhang Songwen didn't go to filming, just stayed at home. He was in a bad mood, the agent lived in his house for seven or eight years, and he died at home, and he always felt that there were memories of the other party everywhere he looked.
The house he rented was located in Shunyi, Beijing, in a village outside the North Sixth Ring Road, and in winter it was particularly desolate, the trees had lost their leaves, and the wind chimes in the yard would ring when the wind rose, and he would tie a wind chime in the yard every time a relative or friend died.
"But in this case, staying at home will be more emotional..."
"I let it, I let it. In fact, I have not adjusted it until now, and I often remember the things I experienced together when I encounter something. It comes and it comes. He went on to say of his mother, "My mother died when I was very young, 13 years old. Strangely, I miss my mother not in my teenage years, but now. ”
It started three years ago. Three years ago, Zhang Songwen turned 42, and he began to miss his mother more and more. He knew why, it was exactly the age of his mother's death, "I'm older now than she was when she died." I miss her a lot, and I think hard about it. But the memory became blurry, so blurred that there was always no cause of the specific thing that went through the end, only a picture, and even when I thought of her one day, only the outline remained.
"How could I have forgotten what my mother looked like." He went to look through some old photos, thinking that maybe he was too busy with his livelihood to think about her much. In order to verify some memories of his mother, he also set up a WeChat group to pull the children of his mother's relatives into the group. His cousin said, "Zhang Songwen, do you remember that one year you and your aunt - 'they called me mother aunt' - when you came back for the New Year, you said what you wanted to eat fried dumplings, and if you couldn't make them that season, my aunt asked us to go up the mountain to find you [the materials], and my aunt and my mother made it for one night, and the rice dumplings made that night were very sticky and scorched in the pot." ”
He forgot all about such things, and as soon as everyone talked about it, they all came back to life. He does not avoid any emotions that follow, firstly, he feels that he should not avoid as an adult, and secondly, he is an actor, "People can naturally block some things that they don't want to recall, but it seems that being an actor can't be like this." "As long as (the audience) can interpret that my performance is real and sincere, I think the vast majority of the audience will be able to accept you and will not spit on you." But once they interpret your performance as hypocritical, false, unobtrusive, and skillful, the audience is actually very disgusted. Isn't this the most valuable thing about actors? ”
▲Photo/Chen Jin
actor
Zhang Songwen decided to learn acting at the age of 25. Although many reports describe that he suddenly decided to go to Beijing one afternoon, bought a plane ticket (afraid he would regret waking up the next day), quit his good job (he worked as a tour guide for five years, became an excellent employee of the company, and paid more than 10,000 yuan a month), sold his belongings overnight (30,000 yuan of furniture was transferred to a new colleague for 1,000 yuan). But he thought it was his deliberate choice. Before deciding to study acting, Zhang Songwen worked as a printing factory worker, beverage salesman, hotel waiter, tour guide, etc., and he kept asking himself if he was passionate.
"It doesn't seem to be."
However, Zhang Songwen's "pessimism encountered in acting" is actually much greater than in any industry, "very bad." After the end of the school, the years after graduation were terrible, but the stark reality told me that this path was difficult to follow. "When he was ridiculed in school because of his strong Cantonese accent, he went to the corner of the playground every night to read a newspaper to practice his pronunciation; After graduation, he was denied because of his physical appearance, and in 2003 he interviewed more than 300 crews, and was rejected five or six hundred times in two years. He earns 1,900 yuan a month, but he has to pay 2,500 yuan in rent, has to borrow money, and has to buy vegetables every day until the evening, because some market vegetables will be sold later. He often remembered that in the past, when his mother bought vegetables, she would take a small ledger to keep accounts, "It's not so loose money." "Also, don't get sick, you will be very homesick when you are sick.
"I tried many times late at night to think about whether to go back to my hometown first, not rent a house in Beijing, go back to do something first, and settle the living expenses. Every time I think about this, the ghost messenger will receive a call the next day, 'Zhang Songwen, there is a crew here, you can come and see you,' and I rushed over. ”
One year, he lived in Xisanqi, outside the North Fifth Ring Road, and one day at noon, an assistant director sent him a message, saying that the director would come to the crew at about 3 p.m. and could meet. He hurried to make lunch and met at a hotel near the People's Liberation Army Museum, a journey of nearly an hour and a half. After a while, the deputy director sent another message that the meeting time was changed to 1 o'clock, and he immediately went out to take the subway, transferred a few buses, and received a call, "The director is leaving, why haven't you arrived yet." ”
Originally, he got off the subway and was about to take a taxi, so he simply ran as soon as he left the subway station. Da Xia ran two kilometers to the first floor of the hotel, just in time to see the director get off the elevator and come out. But he couldn't breathe, let alone speak. Sweating profusely and his clothes drenched, he stood there breathing heavily to calm his breath while watching the director walk past him. "The assistant director called me: fucking the director is gone, you still don't come, tomorrow. I said okay, sorry, there was something today. Actually, no, people have already arrived. I just think that going to see the director on that occasion, seeing it in vain, is not my actor status. So the next day the deputy director called me and said, the director may or may not come today, you are ready, I told you to hurry up. I didn't even bother to tell him, I was already waiting under (the hotel) at 8 o'clock in the morning, today I will wait from 8 am to the evening, any time you ask me where I am, I will tell you that I happen to be near the hotel. ”
"When I did this, my intentions weren't that great. The intention was that I was eager for this opportunity. So today's memory, can it be understood that I should love, and if I don't love it, I should not be able to support it to do this, right? Zhang Songwen said, as if to confirm himself, and repeated, "It should be love." ”
Talking about another time when talking to someone on the phone at home at three or four o'clock in the morning, he suddenly found himself saying a sentence with a very strong accent, he thought why he suddenly jumped out of this sentence, is it too long to practice, so he took out the line school book and began to practice, "In the process of training, I wondered, will those actors practice every day, but people will not tell you, only I can't practice." I can't ask each actor what methods he used to succeed, and I can only say that I may not love it enough. Later, the screenwriter Shi Hang invited him to participate in a reading at the Gulou West Theater, and he read a passage from Shen Fuyu's "One Person", and Shi Hang listened to it and said, (he) seems to be able to play the role in this book tomorrow.
For a long time, Zhang Songwen made a living as an acting director, so there were many students, he watched a girl from the beginning of the ambition to the age of 30 still not receive too many dramas, need family help, but he will not say things like "why do you want to be an actor", because this is how he came over.
"Actually, I didn't feel bitter at that time, which is very strange. I felt that there were many such people around me, and when I went to the running group, I was rejected, and I was not rejected alone, but thousands of people were rejected that day. Why didn't I feel sad when I think back now? You are one of many beings. He accepted all this, and even now in the TV series fire, he still doesn't believe that there are many people who pay attention to him, and sometimes he feels that the same person who praises him is good, "It's a person who is there desperately playing all kinds of people to praise me, to create a feeling that I have a lot of traffic." ”
"I really hope that those who are dead will one day be able to wait until the flowers bear fruit." Zhang Songwen said, "I don't believe too much that heaven is fair. Because I have met many people who have spent his whole life in idleness, and all his diligence has not been rewarded. And I feel lucky that it only took me 20 years to get it back. ”
▲Online drama "Detective Chinatown"
secret
After lunch, Zhang Songwen picked up the yellow leather jacket on the back of the chair, and the group went back to the room to rest for a while before going to the next building to participate in the recording.
Before the festival, he sent a message to his father, saying that he was coming to be the acting director. Father asked, what is that for? He replied, and after the actor performed on stage, we commented on him as a teacher and gave some advice. His father replied to him a long message, he took out his mobile phone and read: "It's not easy to be a judge, you need rich work experience, point out problems, and get to the point, from the perspective of our audience, the actor, understand the acting skills, what role you are, what role you have to be like, even if there is only a small role shot, you have the right to play him vividly." Usually, review colleagues should affirm the good side of others, but also point out their shortcomings. ”
Many times, Zhang Songwen seems to act according to his father's instructions. His father had a great influence on him, and after his mother's death, they became more "respectful and everyone felt that each other had become one of the few relatives in the world."
In 2019, Xiamen, Zhang Songwen wanted to give a 20-minute speech at the Golden Rooster and Hundred Flowers Film Festival Education Forum, giving him the title "How to be an actor needed in this era", but he didn't think about what to talk about until the moment before he took the stage.
Before the speech, he sent a message to his father, who went on a business trip to report safety, and his father replied to him: "Okay, work hard, and do a good job of unity with colleagues." In daily communication, his father, who was a soldier, told him this for twenty years.
In fact, my father did not know what he had acted in and what he had done over the years. Some time ago, Zhang Songwen asked him if he watched "Hidden Corner"? Father said, on which station? A, iQiyi. My father looked for a long time on TV and asked, "Which channel is iQiyi on?" Zhang Songwen: When did you go to the central set? ”
Like his father and his neighbors, he still doesn't know what he does, and the village where he lives "seems to be asleep" by 9 p.m., and probably won't have seen his TV series and movies.
But occasionally news still reached my father, asking him, why did you pick up rotten vegetable leaves? "I said I hadn't picked up rotten vegetable leaves to eat. My dad said that people say that after you finish filming "Hidden Corner", you still have to pick up rotten vegetable leaves to eat. I don't know what to say, they cobbled together all kinds of news from my previous years. My dad said why are you picking up rotten vegetable leaves to eat. I said I hadn't picked it up. He didn't know how to explain it, and he couldn't laugh or cry.
The reply that his father gave him before the speech, he didn't care on weekdays, that day he suddenly carefully read every word, and said on stage: "I don't know what kind of actors are needed in this era, I only know what the definition of good work is, so next I want to talk to you about how an actor works well." "It took 20 minutes in one breath.
"I hope that I can really benefit a group and help others, I hope that my appearance can play a small role in a variety show, and I hope that the movies and TV series I perform can bring a little thinking to others." Sometimes I also wonder if I think highly of this profession, maybe this era needs this profession for entertainment, but I always hope to find a little bit of its seriousness in the entertainment society. Zhang Songwen said.
In the past two years, he has also participated in two performance variety shows, "Acting School" and "I am an Actor 3", both times he proposed to the program team that he didn't want to discuss anything unrelated to performance, "I just want to discuss performance", "The producers on both occasions agreed, they may also know that I am a relatively boring person, think that then you can seriously talk about acting." They also said that a lot of our audience likes to talk about performances seriously. They said yes to me and I would participate. So in these two shows, I threw out a lot of cognition and aesthetics on the performance, and I think there are many people who will see it when they discuss, some people agree, some people disagree, I am very happy. ”
It was almost time, he was about to leave to record the show, so he got up and changed into a coat, walked over from the sofa and turned back and said, "Did you see that yellow leather jacket just now?" It was my agent's clothes. Every time I felt particularly valuable or honored, I would wear my dad or my agent's clothes. ”
Suddenly smiled slyly: "This is a secret. ”
He wore this leather jacket to the premiere of "A Cloud Made of Rain in the Wind" and recorded his first video course show "Acting in Light and Shadow".
"And the yellow dress I wore in the first episode." He walked out of the room and walked to the elevator, "My dad bought it for me." My dad always thought that the clothes I wore were not good, and the last time he went back to Shaoguan, he said that he bought a dress but it didn't fit, so he gave it to me. The elevator came, we walked into the elevator together, and he continued, "You know that father and son don't seem to express it directly like that, it's strange. Going down to the first floor to get out of the elevator, he pointed to the white coat on his body, 120 pieces, and the black shirt inside, 80 pieces; Then the white shirt with the bottom inside, 12 pieces, bought 10 pieces on Taobao. He laughed as he spoke.
▲ "A Cloud Made of Rain in the Wind"
Persimmon tree
Walking out of the hotel, the wind blew from the lake, and I said that Shunyi was already very cold. Zhang Songwen said that yes, the Chaobai River has frozen. Then he pulled out the photos on his phone, showing the ice patterns on the river and the lonely plants on the shore, and he likes to record the changes brought about by the seasons.
Once a friend told him that when he put a goose feather on the ground that day, it would float up at 4:36 p.m. He found a goose feather and put it on the ground—"I'm just curious about everything"—and it floated. When he was shocked, he went to see the small beetle crawling out of the crack of the tree. When the frost fell, he got up at 5 o'clock in the morning and stared at the vegetable field slowly turning white, and he could see the frost every morning after that day. "I thought it was amazing, the seasons change, and I really wanted to see what the seasons change."
He grows vegetables, grows flowers, hundreds of pots of plants grow at home, and plants make people happy. One year I wanted to go home for the New Year, in order to solve the problem of watering plants, I bought five large barrels, two or three hundred threads, put water in the bucket and put it in a place higher than the flower, took a yarn from the bucket to the mud, and when I came back, there was nothing at all, he called this an automatic flower waterer.
There is a persimmon tree in the yard, and the picked persimmons will be left on the windowsill for a few days before they become soft and sweet. The windowsill is bright and narrow, and the persimmons are squeezed into a straight line, which is very pleasing. In previous years, there were 300, but this year there are not many persimmons, and only more than 20 have been harvested. Zhang Songwen thought that maybe there was not enough watering and fertilization, but he also heard another saying: persimmon trees are more than one year and one year less.
"A lot of people keep asking me what does this have to do with acting? I said that I didn't think that far, it was my hobby. It's just that in the process of observing the changes of the seasons and observing many scenes and plants in nature, I believe more that the world has rules, and the more I believe in laws, the more I believe in logic. He knows that the seeds will not germinate until more than ten days into the soil, and then they will grow in more than ten days, and of course they may never germinate, "and when I am willing to understand the laws of these things in this way, I think I may not be so frustrated with things." ”
"I said to you just now during the meal, will you succeed if you work hard? I don't think so. The most helpless thing in the world is that hard work may not succeed, hard work is only used to appease myself, I have done my best, everything is hard to do my best, and the rest is resigned to fate. "He has so many reasons to testify about this, so it is with plants, so with his mother's illness, so with his career as a professional actor." I once said that I may slowly become an adult, and I think there are three signs of adulthood, the first is whether you can accept things that cannot be changed, and the second is whether you can use your ability to change those things that can be changed. The third is the hardest to do – how do you tell what can be changed and what cannot? I actually don't have the ability to tell. So it's to go back to the saying: do your best, resign yourself to fate. ”
Slowly talked about the performance again, talking about the time he played a eunuch role, a very small supporting role, in the filming scene senior Wang Qingxiang asked him the logic of the character, why did you enter the palace? He replied, "My family is poor." Ask him again, can't you have children if you enter the palace? Don't want to pass on the family? He couldn't answer. "When you play a role, you don't ask yourself, and you blush when you let others ask for you, you know? And it will feel ashamed. So now I play the role and generally can't ask me, I have outlined how his mother beat him when this character was three years old, can you still ask me? ”
When filming "Hidden Corner", director Xin Shuang felt that his ideal professional actor looked like Zhang Songwen. He said that Zhang Songwen stayed behind the monitor in addition to filming at the filming scene, chatted with him, and once took out his mobile phone to show him photos, which contained many photos of the daughter of Songwen's role in the play, some wrote "Happy Birthday Baby", some wrote "Daughter's first swim" and "Daughter's first time going to school". Later, someone in the crew asked Zhang Songwen, is this really played by your daughter?
"This method may still be a bit clumsy. I had to hypnotize myself in this way, believing that my daughter really died in the play. I may not be a good actor either, and I don't know how other actors build emotional substitution, but this is my method, and I think it's real. That's where the logic comes from. Although this clumsiness caused him a lot of trouble, when he first acted in a movie, he painstakingly designed the action of taking a pistol out of his trouser pocket for the character, but he made a joke because the pistol was stuck; starred in the background characters of a dinner table, set many atmospheres and premise, and were driven out of the shooting scene by the director.
But he maintained this clumsiness. Every time he goes to a strange city to film, Zhang Songwen will find time to take the bus and walk, speaking of Shaoxing, which is a small river full of willow trees, hotel breakfast twelve stir-fries; When it comes to Shanghai and Nanjing, it's Sycamore; Speaking of Hangzhou, Japanese maple trees are grafted onto local maple trees, and the leaves turn red in autumn. "You can't go to a city to film, [but] has nothing to do with that city."
When not filming, he also goes to subway stations and train stations to watch the crowd, stroll to the vegetable market, and interact with all living beings. I also look at the paintings, watch the exhibition, and ponder the expressions and hearts of everyone in a certain painting.
"I wanted my performance to have the ability to shape and play time-honored classic characters that people talk about. But I'm telling myself that actors are too small, how complex people are, and have limited energy in life, if I can leave 10 classic characters by the day I die, I will admire myself as great. ”
▲TV series "Crazy"
20 years
In 2020, due to the epidemic, Zhang Songwen stayed at home almost in the first half of the year, surrounded by cultivated land and crops. He also likes crops, a good harvest means abundance, abundance brings security, he likes security. At that time, the theater was delayed, there was no news of the resumption of work, and sometimes standing in the field at dusk, he would think in frustration: Maybe this era does not need actors.
The last time there was such a concern was when "Gemini Killer" was released, he saw CG technology to create a rejuvenated Will Smith, appearing on the big screen with human actors, afraid that the actors would be eliminated under the impact of technology, "If people don't need it anymore, it means that the work I've been doing for more than twenty years will be transformed." I'm willing to accept all this, but I think it's a pity. It's sad that you can't do something you love anymore. ”
He missed the shooting atmosphere when he first entered the industry, every time after filming, everyone gathered behind the monitor to watch, at that time the monitor was only 10 inches, he could only watch from a crowd of three or four meters, the advantage is that if you don't understand the place, immediately grab the senior and ask, "If you dare to play with your mobile phone on the spot, or chat there, they will curse." This rule — watch more, learn more, indulge in your character creation, and do less extraneous things — is what we learned back then. ”
After the filming of "Hidden Corner", he suddenly found that it seemed to return to the original atmosphere, and the three actors of him, Qin Hao and Wang Jingchun and the other three young actors spontaneously formed a one-on-one guidance mode, "So I have never felt that I should not complain about the traffic and fresh meat, I only complain that someone told them that they don't know these things, and we lack peer communication now." He has always felt that as an actor, he is responsible for whether the craft of acting can be passed on to a younger generation of actors.
▲ "Hidden Corner"
The recorded part of the program on the day of the interview was to watch the trainees train and do some guidance. Zhang Songwen said that several targets had been found here, and said firmly and expectantly: "[Pull them] into our ranks." "No one from the team was allowed in the recording venue, so we said goodbye to him and watched him walk out of the dressing room.
Now Zhang Songwen's life has improved, there are more scripts to choose from, and he has some fame. The market near Shunyi's residence is still frequented, sometimes sitting on the stall owner's chair and chatting with everyone, sometimes helping to sell vegetables together. He likes to talk more with a vegetable stall owner because he is a soldier like his father. In the short documentary series "Me and Another Me," he goes there wearing an army-green cotton coat, saying, "Human life is like this, staggering to a position, may not be what you think it is at all." You imagine that when he was 18 years younger and became a soldier, he may have been imagining with others, what will I be like in the future, how will I be in the future... How did he know that he sold vegetables for 20 years. ”
Zhang Songwen has been acting for 20 years, he observes life and accepts all feelings, even if it is painful; Believe in the existence of characters and strive to be them, change your body shape, control your diet and sleep, and imagine a person's life. He experienced his own difficulties, compromises, maturity and parting, and with it he accumulated moderation, kindness, and generosity, and inherited his father's willingness as a soldier to do something for the collective.
Before leaving, he finally asked him what kind of personality he thought he was, in fact, the answer could be found by the listener from many previous narratives, but he still thought seriously, his brows furrowed, his eyes looked left and right, and he stretched out again: I easily listen to a song and hear myself burst into tears, and I know that I should be sensitive; It's also easy to see a picture in my daily life and think of a person when I hear a song, so I also know that I should miss the old; I like to use methods to solve problems in life, and like everyone else, I have many difficulties but have not avoided them, so I think I am a positive person. Simply put, it is a very ordinary person, very ordinary, without any particularity, ordinary to the point of being like a cousin, cousin, or even a father or a younger brother you know.
▲TV series "Crazy"