The sixth episode of the young actors' training program "The Character of The Actor" was broadcast last night, and after the screening of the first round of assessment, the remaining 48 newcomer actors entered the second stage of the training course. After the big assessment of this "film and television performance", the newcomer actors will be directly eliminated by half, leaving only 24 to enter the next round of selection. In order to be able to choose the right role, there is a fierce competition among the newcomer actors.
After the roles in the four scripts have been selected, 16 of the new actors face a situation where they have no role to play. Just when many newcomer actors were crying with depression and collapse after failing to audition many times, the program team once again staged a "big reversal" plot: a mysterious guest parachuted into the scene, he was the first Chinese on Broadway, the winner of the Fox Actor Award for Best Actor award, a professor at the Massachusetts College of arts in the United States, and Wang Luoyong, director of the Theater Musical Theater Center. Wang Luoyong's appearance in the program of cultivating actors is indeed very appropriate, and the editor is also very surprised by this invitation from the program group. The appearance of Wang Luoyong will bring a new opportunity and a new script to those children who are on the verge of elimination...
The reason why the program team invited Wang Luoyong to teach these newcomer actors a valuable lesson is precisely because Wang Luoyong has gone from an ordinary actor to the peak of the world stage drama performance art, and has also experienced countless times standing on the edge of almost no drama.
Few people know that Wang Luoyong's artistic enlightenment teacher was his uncle, and the first instrument he learned was the flute.
At the age of 11, Wang Luoyong participated in the activity of "going to the mountains and going to the countryside", that is, in this year, Wang Luoyong's life trajectory changed, he was admitted to an opera school in Shiyan, Hubei Province, so at a young age, he ran to Hubei alone with his bags on his back to learn Peking Opera. Wang Luoyong was a very curious child, because he was interested in the sound of the horn in the troupe, he asked the teacher to let him learn the horn, so he was arranged to go to the Hubei Song and Dance Troupe for five years. The study of the song and dance troupe obviously could not satisfy Wang Luoyong, and at the age of 17, he was admitted to the Wuhan Conservatory of Music to major in the horn, and also studied composition along the way, all of which also laid a solid foundation for his later career.
After graduating from the Wuhan Conservatory of Music, Wang Luoyong was admitted to the Shanghai Theater Academy in 1981, majoring in theater performance, and stayed on to teach for four years. Many people's lives will stagnate because of smooth sailing, but Wang Luoyong obviously does not belong to this category.
At that time, China was in the early stage of reform and opening up, an art delegation from the United States attracted the attention of Wang Luoyong, who knew through his understanding that a broadway play in the United States could often be performed as a repertoire for seven or eight years, or even decades, and his foolish heart could no longer be calmed, so Wang Luoyong resigned from the play and went to the United States, without dragging the mud at all.
He seems to have given most of his passion to the arts, and in order to be able to stay at the University of Louisiana School of Drama, he hid the fact that he did not speak English. To say that he is also really bold, the way of hiding is simple and rude, and when others ask him any questions, his answer is only yes or no. The imagination is beautiful, but the results are often not satisfactory. A few days later, Wang Luoyong was expelled from the school and withdrew a $6,000 scholarship.
The door that thought he had the opportunity was suddenly opened for himself, but he suddenly came to the point of exhaustion, and there were only two ways in front of Wang Luoyong, returning to China or continuing to stay in the United States.
With strong self-esteem and tenacity, Wang Luoyong gritted his teeth and persevered, while practicing English hard, he continued to run into walls everywhere, and finally he was admitted to the Theater Performance Department of Boston University.
In the spring of 1989, Wang Luoyong finally came to Broadway, and he watched a play called "Butterfly King", and he saw that he was full of tears and could not help himself. I remember very clearly, I rolled the program list into a stick, put it on the back of both hands, and then pointed to the theater with the index fingers of both hands and said, "Look, I'm going to come here one day." At that time, the classmates who accompanied him to the theater said: "If you want to come here, you also have to see if people want you or not." But in Wang Luoyong's heart, the dream of standing on the Broadway theater stage has grown beyond the scope of the inevitable.
He wants to play "Butterfly Jun", and if he wants to play the main role song Liling, this role is like the Qingyi in Peking Opera, which requires women to dress as men, which is quite difficult and quite shocking. Zun Long, the male protagonist of "The Last Emperor", starred in the movie "Butterfly Jun", which became a hit.
For the Chinese of that era, it was simply something that they did not dare to think about!
Wang Luoyong couldn't manage so much, and directly ran to the director of "Butterfly Jun", and Wang Luoyong himself later felt very funny. I don't know if it was Wang Luoyong's words that touched the director, he said: "I am an actor, I can learn", so he got the script.
Two months later, Wang Luoyong came on the spot in a line from a play in English on the phone, and he finally got the answer that had been waiting: come to new york tomorrow!
It wasn't easy to really start learning Butterfly King, and apart from the lines and simulating the posture of a woman, he began to assume that he was a woman in life.
In 1990, "Butterfly Jun" was successfully performed in Seattle, and Wang Luoyong also became a hit, and it is interesting that Wang Luoyong won the Best Actress Award with "Butterfly Jun".
The success of "Butterfly Jun" made the director realize that Wang Luoyong's future was full of possibilities, so he suggested that he go to Broadway to try "Miss Saigon". Wang Luoyong, who is not satisfied with the status quo, is eager to try again, but what is Broadway? Americans themselves have to go through a lot of screening, let alone a yellow-skinned Asian nobody. Wang Luoyong was fortunate to be on Broadway in 1995 as the first male protagonist of Miss Saigon.
This is the first Asian male protagonist since "Miss Saigon" was performed on Broadway in New York for 5 years, and it is also the first time ever that a Chinese actor has played a leading role on the Broadway stage! Wang Luoyong also won the Best Actor Award at the Fox Actor Awards in the United States for this.
Just to come back, is Wang Luoyong really just lucky? Not. He has stood in a "hopeless situation" countless times in his artistic career. When playing "Butterfly King", he found a good language teacher for himself, and in two months, he had to take down all the lines, and he couldn't hear the sound completely, which was an almost impossible task for a non-native English Chinese. So, he began to use the cork of the red wine bottle as a vocal tool, and later found that the cork was easy to have a saliva smell, and found a way to practice with small stones, with stones in his mouth to practice lines, which made his mouth full of blood, but he persevered and practiced an authentic English.
On Broadway in the United States, with money and status, and a virtuous wife and a lovely daughter, such a life has been almost perfect in the eyes of outsiders. But after too long of a stable life, Wang Luoyong began to be dissatisfied again. Eighteen years later, he returned to his homeland again. After returning to China, he also stood on the podium again and returned to the Shanghai Theater Academy to teach, and his first batch of students was Hu Ge's class.
In addition to teaching, Wang Luoyong has also played an important role in "Lin Hai Snow Field", "Visitor on the Iceberg", "Jiao Yulu" and "Tiger Howling Dragon Yin".
He has an English version of the "Table of The Master" recitation, and the ability of the lines can be seen.
In 2009, together with Yuan Quan, he starred in the drama "Jane Eyre", in which he played the male protagonist Mr. Rochester.
Since 2009, the heroine of "Jane Eyre" has changed twice, but the male protagonist has always been Wang Luoyong.
Xu Fan once commented on his performance in "Jane Eyre": If Rochester is not played by Wang Luoyong, who can replace him, I can't think.
In "The Character of an Actor", Wang Luoyong revealed that he has personally encountered too many cases of being rejected or failing to audition - although he now has so many golden resumes, he was once a humble job seeker like a newcomer actor on stage.
The pain and anxiety of actors after failing to audition and losing opportunities revealed in "The Character of Actors" is a normal state that is usually hidden under the bright entertainment circle, but this state is invisible and unknown to the general public, which is wrapped in more cruel, more severe, and more unfair entertainment industry rules than ordinary workplaces.
It is reported that Wang Luoyong brought the script "Mysterious Medicine" to all the newcomer actors who had no role to play.
At the same time, Wang Luoyong also appeared and told some young people who rushed into the show business circle to seize every opportunity to exercise their acting skills - the more they experienced pain, the more they experienced pain, the more they must remember this pain and frustration when there is no opportunity, which will become the nourishment when acting in the future.
Author: Chen Xihan
Editor: Chen Xihan