The Warmth in Performance
Earlier this fall, SCAD hosted its 21st annual film festival, a joyous eight-day Oscar Stop on the journey toward the next Academy Awards ceremony on February 24, 2019. The SCAD Savannah Film Festival is one of the world’s great film events, because we have something no other festival has: the joyous, electric presence of ten thousand SCAD students, who bring their boundless energy and enthusiasm for learning to every screening, panel, coffee talk, and masterclass.
The university hosts this major festival for two reasons: to show our students what professional excellence looks like, and to provide unparalleled networking opportunities as they launch their careers. Students experience exemplary screenings. They take master classes and attend panels from the biggest names in the industry. Their hearts are moved; their minds grow.
This year, students drew inspiration from stage and screen legend Hugh Jackman, among a dazzling array of other film professionals. On the second night of this year’s festival, I honored Hugh with the SCAD Savannah Film Festival Legend of Cinema award.
In the 21-year history of the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, no honoree has inspired students to study so many different professions as profoundly as Hugh Jackman: acting for the camera, dance, musical theater, filmmaking, dramatic writing, the whole gamut. And I know quite a few SCAD students chose sequential arts thanks to his masterful work as the Wolverine! How does he do it?
Picasso once said, “Every child is an artist — the challenge is to remain an artist once you grow up.” Hugh meets this challenge. For all his gravitas and star-power, what makes Hugh so very special is the sense of playful wonder that exudes from his every role, and in every facet of his life. In a business that can turn some inward and private, Hugh and his wife Deb have remained warm, self-effacing, and real. He’s still surprised by fame — as in, “Oh, you want a picture with me?” From circus showman to revolutionary Frenchman to would-be presidential candidate, his roles are larger-than-life because his heart is larger-than-life.
Hugh is exactly the kind of actor SCAD performers want to emulate in order to reach the next level — performers like Kayli Carter! Just three years ago, Kayli was a student sitting in the audience of the film festival. This year, on the climactic closing night, she was backstage in a red-carpet-worthy gown, waiting to receive the highest honor for SCAD alumni — that’s the magic of the SCAD Savannah Film Festival. I recognized Kayli for her superb work with the SCAD40 Prize, inaugurated this year to celebrate the university’s 40th anniversary, and awarded for demonstrating the purpose and preeminence of a SCAD education.
Kayli graduated with the SCAD Class of 2015. She has accomplished, in three wildly busy years, what takes most actors a lifetime: the red carpet, the Oscar buzz, the late-night talk-show invites, and praise from the most important critics of our day.
We’ve seen her on screen on Netflix and Amazon, on stage on Broadway and the West End. We’ve been amazed at her fresh realism in Private Life, and in 2019, we’ll see her as the notorious Manson family member Squeaky Fromme in Charlie Says. Like Hugh, Kayli shares a love for theater. She made her stage debut in 2016 as Flo in Nice Fish, created by Academy Award-winner Mark Rylance. The New York Times said her performance was “played with warmth and intelligence.”
Though separated by decades of experience (Hugh’s big break was X-Men in 2000, and Kayli’s was Godless in 2017), Hugh and Kayli are perfect complements to one another — both equally embody the empathetic warmth required to achieve verisimilitude on stage and on camera.
Audiences respond to intelligent, empathetic performances, performances that endear them to characters, and by extension, the actors who inhabit the roles. We see evidence of that warmth in every interaction with Kayli.
Kayli says the best film professionals support an openness of heart. “The people I’ve met in this industry have the kind of empathy and joy that fuel positive change in the world,” she says. “In theater as well as film and TV there is an inherent drive that we all have to tell stories, and inhabit the human experience in a truthful way.” Just released on Netflix, Private Life is the realest comedy you’ll see this year, and Kayli is at its moral center with an insouciant maturity that allows her to fill every frame with humanity and warmth. As a result, her name has already been mentioned in the conversation for Best Supporting Actress, next to Emma Stone, Nicole Kidman, and Natalie Portman.
As one critic said of Kayli’s meteoric rise, “Where has she been hiding?”
Well, she wasn’t hiding, exactly. She was a student at SCAD! She was in the classroom, in the studio, in the SCAD Casting Office, every day, every quarter. She is a paragon of the preparedness all performing arts students learn at SCAD. It’s the preparation that allows them to move seamlessly from stage to soundstage, from binge screen to big screen.
What was Kayli like as a student? Well that’s an easy one. According to SCAD records, a few words kept coming up in professor comments: Helpful. Gifted. Prepared. Professional. And I found this prescient note from her first SCAD acting class: “Kayli did the work and enjoyed the process. There is great artistic potential here!”
I advise students to be like Kayli and enjoy the process. I tell them to do the work. Make full use of SCAD resources — every course, every audition, every opportunity. Do all the things. I tell students to look to actors like Hugh. I tell them: Be generous — to yourself and to your work. Your audience knows empathy when they see it. They feel the sincerity that blossoms from your heart.
What a joy, what a privilege it is for me, personally, to honor industry icons and rising stars alike at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival each year. It thrills me to say that, after the festival, it was announced that Kayli will join Hugh in the upcoming comedy Bad Education. Kismet!
Perhaps both Hugh and Kayli will return to the festival next year for a screening of Bad Education. If their individual flair and enthusiasm for acting is any indication, can you imagine what cinema magic these two will create when working side-by-side? I, for one, can’t wait.
