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Actresses Aunjanue Ellis and Regina King recently talked on the Variety show 'Actors on Actors,' presented by Amazon.

They had first come together on the sets of Ray, where Ellis tried to "sidle up" to King. However, Regina King was too focused that she did not converse with Ellis and was totally immersed in her method-acting role. Ellis revealed that she felt that Regina Kind did not like her and only later realized that the reason why Regina was not having her was that she was too focused. Ellis shared that this incident with Regina King helped her learn more about acting than she did in acting school. 

But it was not just Ellis who was scared of descending into that new experience. Regina King herself admitted that she felt scared too. For her, the fear came from learning music as she played her part in the story of Ray Charles. Apart from the music, King also had to learn about the specific time period of the musician. 

King then asked Ellis if she had some sort of fear when she was cast to play the part of a living figure who could later watch Ellis portray them on screen. For Ellis, this specific piece of work was Oracene. Yet Ellis turned out to be lucky, and though she had many things on her mind when she shot Oracene, fear was not one of them. 

"Honest to God, I felt like I had so much to do that I didn’t have time to be scared. All I wanted was to show up, have the words right and get through the day," elaborated the actress. "I’m thankful for that because if I had gone into that headspace. I would be playing the result of something, rather than the process. It would’ve brought me off focus and just made me worse."

King advised Ellis to focus on playing the process at such times when the end result is to differ from the regular circumstances. Because there is exactly no "worse" for an actor. Actors find it easier to play the end moment of their character on a show or a film rather than portray the specific point of time the character is subject to. 

"It’s easy to fall into playing the result, especially when you know the whole story," said King. "That’s part of being an actor and active in the performance, remaining present in the moment. Ms. Oracene doesn’t know what’s about to happen on Tuesday because right now is Saturday. “Play the process, not the result” — I have to write that down and put that on a sticker in the dressing room."

Ellis then complimented Regina King for her performance in "Jerry Maguire" and asked her about her technique in the film. She said, "What I saw in you in that performance was clarity and confidence in character. I see confident actors all the time, but I don’t necessarily see confidence in character. That scene when you were talking to Jerry like, “I know the value of a dollar,” is tattooed on my brain."

"The character that I was playing, Marcee Tidwell, was so clear on the page," said King. It was the character of the role she was playing that helped her get in those confident shoes, as she said, "I felt like, “I wish I had her confidence. I wish I had her assuredness.” You hear that saying: “The woman behind the man, the woman is the backbone.”

She continued that her technique for her role in Ray must have been about not conversing with others while she was in her character. "When you said that on “Ray,” during the day I was not engaging — I don’t even remember that. But that’s the technique I must have felt I needed to have to play that role then," she explained. "You don’t know what it’s going to be that you’re going to need to execute. It changes from role to role."

However, the actors did feel a considerable change in their acting techniques when they were confronted with the pandemic. For Ellis, she was not sure when the actors would finally come back to the sets. The actress shared, "When we stopped in March 2020, I just thought that was going to be the end of it. I didn’t think we were going to come back at all, so I had let it go. I really didn’t think about it."

"But I think because those couple months that we did shoot, and we’d had a really intense rehearsal period — Will uses the word “marinate,” and I think that’s a proper word for it — gave it time to really get in my bones and get in my cells," she said. 'When we did come back, I was probably a lot more relaxed than I was before."

The two actresses continued on talking, and King appreciated her Black heritage, "I’m so proud of being a Black American. I know that we call ourselves African American, but I’m a Black American, and I’m very, very clear about the history of being Black in the country that I live in. The thing that is so beautiful about it is how different we all are — and I don’t mean this to be funny — but we are so colorful. We are so rich in culture."