We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Tenley Kellogg a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Tenley, so many exciting things to discuss, we can’t wait. Thanks for joining us and we appreciate you sharing your wisdom with our readers. So, maybe we can start by discussing optimism and where your optimism comes from?
In this industry, for every yes you will also get 1,000 no’s. That was told to me right at the beginning of my career. So I began to practice submitting and forgetting. After I submit an audition, I move on and go do something else and usually end up forgetting about it by the end of the week. If I’m not cast, and see it in theaters or on a streaming platform, I will always support the movie by watching it. At the end of the day, you really have to remember that timing is everything, and if you don’t get that one role, it just means that another one is coming your way.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
Learning how one character might do something compared to how I, personally, might do something has always fascinated me. I love getting to experience a new world through these characters. It’s like getting to walk around the block in someone else’s shoes. I try to find the similarities in our differences by creating a history of their experiences and relationships. This helps me in creating character choices, like a nervous tick, or a specific kind of laugh, etc.
Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake) is an independent anthology art film that has four coming-of-age vignettes. Each story has a different age group in it where each character is saying goodbye to something. For example: their childhood, they’re a single mom realizing they’re stuck in a dead end situation, they have health issues etc.
The main character of the movie is Green Lake because all of the stories center around the lake. The director wanted to transcend what lake life and small town living feels like. For example, the mundaneness, the feeling like you have no other options, everybody knowing everything about everyone, the small town turning a molehill into a huge mountain because it would be the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to them, different types of parenting…you get the picture. The director, Sierra Falconer, wanted to take all of those emotions and experiences, and transcend them from screen to seat. Just like art pieces, film is art and as long as it promotes emotion and conversation then the actors feel that they’ve done their job in telling a good story.
As for upcoming projects, I can’t really share anything at the moment, but I can say I’ve had some really awesome auditions so stay tuned.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Understanding the full script is really important, not just knowing your own lines, but the entire scene. Doing this helps to give a better understanding of the full scene and story. Continuity in the scene is also good to know. Remembering your blocking and tech work with each line, and being able to replicate this action every time you say that line is difficult, but totally worth it when the editors are working on the film and all the takes match up. Meryl Streep once said that “Acting is not about being someone different. It’s finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there”. Finding something in a character that connects you to them, even if on the surface it’s not there, is a great way to help become a character. If I had to give any piece of advice it would be to take workshops and get a coach. A lot of the time, we make mistakes that we won’t catch until someone points it out to us, and it’s better to make those mistakes in a learning environment, than on set.
What was the most impactful thing your parents did for you?
The most impactful thing my parents have done for me and my career would definitely be moving out to California. When I was twelve, my mom and I came to California for a visit and I fell in love. I had never felt like I belonged in a place more. This trip fueled my hunger to learn. I began to talk to my parents about my need for moving. I wanted to be a small fish in a huge sea. I wanted to feel the true industry challenge, and learn how to navigate through all the good & bad. Within a few months they agreed and we packed up our lives and moved to California! Leaving our home behind, moving to a new state, and not having many friends or family in Los Angeles has been one of our greatest family adventures, so I could not be more grateful that we moved.
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Brie Childers
