My identity is f..ed up to say the least. Born in a country that doesn’t exist anymore and the ideology that lost the battle for global domination.
I grew up feeling distinctly different from the Russian majority. Before kimchi became the hot new thing, I remember being mocked for being a stinky breath, kimchi-eating, slanted eyed Korean. Yet now I describe myself as predominantly Russian culturally.
By now I’ve spent a significant chunk of my adult life in anglosaxon countries and am pretty fluent in English. I’ve found it easy to integrate thanks to my knack for languages. My English accent is not pronouncedly Russian, yet it’s not American, nor British, nor Australian.
As I started acting, I’ve realised how difficult it is to act and emote genuinely in English even though my command of it is pretty good.
It was soo odd to then discover some inexplicable primal feeling that might be attributed to some genetic memory that may have passed through the generations when I decided to do this scene from HBO’s “Succession” series in Korean.
My plan was to work on the scene in English first, which I’m way more fluent in, and then to try it in Korean. To my surprise, I felt very connected to the scene in Korean the very first time I did it in the inexplicable way I didn’t feel when doing it in English.
My genetic memory hypothesis may well be wrong as there are so many other variables, but somehow I reckon there’s some truth to it.
In any case, I’m super thankful for all the people that have contributed directly and indirectly to my journey and development in this limitless exploration of what makes us human.
Huge thanks to @loisohis for delivering an amazing and emotionally charged reading!
And immeasurable thanks to all the teachers and fellow students from who I’ve been slowly learning this craft of acting