“Trust the Process”: A look into Carlysle Garland’s Journey as an Atlanta actress
Photo by Paolo Chiabrando on Unsplash
Artist Info
Instagram: @carlyslegarland
Tiktok: @carlyslegarland and @auntiecharlette
Resumes.actorsaccess.com/carlyslegarland
Trust the process. Whatever process you have for acting, trust it. Whatever process you have for your art, trust it. It’s so much easier said than done. But when you start to really tell yourself “no I’m just gonna trust it and I’m gonna do this thing now, to get my mind off of it, because this thing brings me joy, and there’s nothing else I can do right now for that thing. I trust that the process is happening, I’m gonna go do this thing and everything’s gonna be okay”, it’s freeing.Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Hailing from Minnesota, Carlysle has found her way to Atlanta, where she has managed to kick off an up-and-coming acting career. I had the chance to chat with her about how she got her start and what her experiences have been like so far. When not acting, she can be found nannying for families in the Atlanta area. It is in this way that she is also able to engage with a passion of working with children, which she loves just as much as acting.
Can you tell us a bit about yourself, what you do, and what’s brought you to this point (what inspired you to get into your field)?
I’m Carlysle and I am an actor in Atlanta. my day job is nannying. I got into the field through the Missoula Children’s Theater, which I still sometimes work for. They actually came to my elementary school in fourth and fifth grade and I participated in their productions in my elementary school. I’d say that the way they taught me things during those week long programs sparked my interest in the world of theater and acting, and from fifth grade on, I just kept doing everything I could regarding acting. Now I’m in Atlanta doing film and TV. I’ve done a couple of projects. I’m looking forward to doing some more and to just keep networking with people and learning things and trying different things and expanding my knowledge and my abilities and network and community. Also because I’m a nanny, I get to work with a lot of children which is super fun and I get to learn and apply things that I learn from them into my acting.
Can you walk us through your creative process? How do you typically approach a new project or piece of art?
So when I get some material, usually what I like to do is memorize it first, which some people will say is not a wise move, and I totally understand all the reasons for that. It’s just something I like to do because I’m pretty good at memorizing. I try to memorize it in a monotone kind of way, without any inflictions, so that I can avoid having any kind of preconceived ways of saying the lines. I just try to get the words in my body and then I do research on everything surrounding the production and the people working on it. If the show or movie is already out or based on a true story or real people, then I will research that. If it’s on a platform like actors access and there are other sides for different characters that are in the show or movie, even if my character isn’t interacting with them, I will still read those as well just so i can gauge whats happening in other parts of the story.
Once I’ve done as much research as I can, I’ll create a backstory for my character. I’ll start with the pieces of information I know from the script or from the side that I was given. Anything that’s in there, I’ll write that down as apart of that character’s life, and then I will create other information that isn’t given to me to help me walk around in the character’s shoes for a bit. I’ll create circumstances surrounding who I’m in the scene with, where I am in the scene, what happened right before the scene, and where I was going beforehand. I also go more in depth with what I did earlier that day or earlier that evening or what I had planned to do after the scene that is about to happen. Then, I’ll go even further and think about what my character does 24 hours a day. What I do once I wake up, like go to work or whatever it is and then what I do that night. I also think about this person’s life in a more general sense. What does this persons life typically look like outside of this scene?
If there’s anything specific in the scene such as a heightened emotion, I have another focus that I do with that called factual preparation. I’ll dig into how I’m feeling in each moment in the scene as I motion through it. I’ll do that a few times before practicing it with a scene partner or just someone in general to check my dialogue. Then from there I guess it just depends on what’s happening after that, like whether it’s an audition tape or an in person audition or filming on set.
What or who inspires your work? Are there any particular themes or ideas that consistently appear in your art? So in your case (as an actress) are there any particular types of work that you find yourself gravitating more towards.
Theater-wise, I love anything Shakespeare, and if Shakespeare wants to be on film and tv, I’m down for that too. I love Shakespeare in general. I love performing Shakespeare. I enjoy reading it. i enjoy watching it. I understand it and it’s super fun for me. I also like comedy. I want to be in a sitcom. I will be in a sitcom one day. So I do try and practice my comedic parts of me, and I try to keep up with those cause I want to keep those fresh and I want to make sure I’m still learning and applying different things with comedy to make sure that it’s coming across. I’m making sure that I’m fitting different moods of certain shows that may have comedy that I wanna do. I love drama too, so anything drama related is great for keeping those chops moving and working those out as well.
As far as being inspired…comedy inspires me alot. I like watching shows that have drama. Older shows that’ve ended like Private Practice. Shonda Rhimes is just freaking amazing and so I like pretty much all of her stuff. Scandal…oh my gosh. Amazing show. With shows like that and like Private Practice I like connecting to the characters and finding different scenes and monologues that I’m interested in doing. I like shows that make you feel something, like This Is Us. Oh my god that show…I cried every time I watched it. It was no other show. Everything about it was so raw and real and realistic. I felt like I was watching someone’s life, actually someone that could be my neighbor.
I have an acting class that I attend virtually because it’s based in St. Louis, where I’m originally from, but that school also inspires me. The coaches, Elizabeth and Kelsey, they’ve inspired me in alot of ways. Kelsey is an actor, Elizabeth has acted and is also a filmmaker, director, and producer amongst other things, so they’re quite a team and a pair. They inspired me in a lot of ways because they have so much to offer with the way they teach acting. I’ve utilized what they say and what they preach in their classes since I’ve started with them and I’ve only seen my craft grow and expand and evolve and adapt and mold and it’s so fun. So I love listening to them and working with them and I find them so inspiring in being filmmakers. They created a pilot that I got to be apart of two years ago, which is super cool. So they’re just doing cool things.
Overall, I like looking at other people and what they’re doing and trying to be a student in some kind of a way. I enjoy trying to learn something from other people who are also creating things in ways I’m not.
Can you discuss any specific techniques, mediums, or tools that are integral to your artistic practice?
Well, it’s funny ‘cause I started talking about my coaches cause I meant to mention them when I was talking about how I approach my work because I approach it in so many ways that I learned from them. I take bits and pieces from a lot of different techniques as far as acting goes and character portrayal, but alot of what I do stems from the creative actors studio approach. There are similar elements in other acting approaches that different studios will talk about in their own words, but with the way my studio that I work with approaches it, it just hasn’t felt like all of the other studios. Often times, when I’m working with other friends who are actors, I often wanna bring up some of the techniques and different ways that they can try something, but because they’re not familiar with them, we tend to end up not doing it. It would end up with me trying to teach them that, and they’re open to it, but it’s such a very specific kind of thing. I feel very lucky to know about it, and I wish that more people would take their classes and learn about it, because i think that it could help alot of actors. I think it’s a powerful technique, and it’s based from our natural human instincts, and as long as actors are willing to go to certain places, then they can have even richer performances in my opinion.
How do you navigate the balance between artistic expression and commercial viability?
I’m new to the film and TV part of the acting industry, and it’s been quite different from my theater career. I haven’t had experiences with professional theater companies yet other than mizzoulous children theater and that’s, well, children’s theater, so it’s a little different than a theater house in Atlanta, like the Aliance theater. So I haven’t really worked in the professional theater world outside the children’s theater and now I have been able to experience being on set of a show and different movie sets.
What’s actually interesting with the money…’cause I’m not overly concerned about money when it comes to my acting right now. I have turned down projects that have payed well. I have turned down projects that don’t pay well for reasons not actually related to the pay at all. So the pay has not been a big concern for me right now. I’m still new in this industry, so I’m not expecting like 300,000 per episode. Thats not why I’m acting right now. Yes, I would like to be able to make money to live off of from my acting eventually, yes, but right now I’m not hyper-focused on that. I just want to do cool projects and experience different sets and different directors and different actors. And yes I want to get paid. That sounds great, yes, but I also want to tell stories. I’m a storyteller.
With that said, I had one experience with a pretty big production company which I won’t name. I got a contract on which I thought the compensation read as something different than apparently it was supposed to read as. I eventually talked to someone with sag, and they were like “Yeah, no, that’s not right.” I’m like, oh well that’s weird ‘cause everybody I talked to, including my agent and my coaches have said that is wrong, but okay, if SAG said that what they had was right and I’m not getting paid what I thought I would be getting paid, then there’s nothing really I can do about that. It’s unfortunate because it read differently to pretty much everyone I showed that specific phrasing they used. Everyone I showed that to, they read the same thing I did, but sadly the production company did not, so it was just a little bit of a bummer. It would be nice if they could change the phrasing then, because it doesn’t read that way, and I feel like they just cheated me out of money that they said I was gonna get and then I didn’t get it. Again, its not about the money, but I don’t like that feeling and that kinda sucks, and I feel like there are other actors that have to deal with that and some actors that don’t even get paid. So I just want more clarity. I want more specifics on the business side and to not leave anything grey because I feel like I’m not alone in that there are a lot of actors who get contracts that are so vague and we’re not lawyers. So do we have to go find an entertainment lawyer to read every single contract we get just to make sure we don’t get screwed out of money for our time? I mean, yeah we want to do this show and we wanna tell this story and you’re telling me that I’m gonna get paid, so yeah, I wanna get paid. I am taking off my day job to do this job as well. So while it’s not about the money, it is about the principle.
How do you see your art impacting or connecting with your audience or the wider world?
Carlysle: I think I see my art connecting with people because I’m coming from a place of reality and truth. Even if it’s my truth inserted into this character’s truth, it can be relatable to somebody’s truth. I connected myself to one of the more recent characters I played. I was able to connect myself to this person’s story almost instantly. It was very relatable to something that happened in my life, and I know because it connected to me, that it’s going to connect to somebody else too, and I feel confident that with my research and how I approach a character and what I decide to do with that character, somebody else out there will also feel that, because I felt very confident about how I was helping tell her story.
What kinds of projects are you interested in working on later on down the role?
I would love to work on period projects. More specifically projects centered around the 1700s-1800s. I would also love to see more stories being told about more black experiences, but not just black experiences as far as racism and slavery. There are so many stories with white faces that could easily could be Black, Indian, Asian faces. They could be so many other faces, but we just see them with white faces and I’m a little exhausted of just seeing white faces in these storylines for different films. Like, I love BET because obviously it’s BET, so they’ve got all kinds of different faces in those shows and in those movies which is great, but if you don’t have BET and you don’t watch BET, you’re not seeing that. So I’d love to see those movies on other networks as well. I just want to see more stories that have more diversity, and I don’t mean two black people amongst eight white people. I’m not talking about that kind of diversity. I want truly diverse characters and diverse stories because they do exist. So I want to see more of those stories being told.
And I have at least one idea in my head that im not telling alot of people because i don’t want somehow, the universe to hear it, and then somebody runs with with and then somebody else creates it. so this is me going back to like “i’m not a filmmaker”. one day i will create this short and it will be great. i just havent decided when and im trying to keep it under wraps until i decide i have enough info to do it and all that stuff.
I want to see more mixed and biracial people in stories, whether that’s related to their biracialness or not. I would love to perform a character that’s biracial and the storyline has that information in there, like it’s pertinent to the story to know that character is biracial and just to shed more light on what it feels like to be a biracial person, but I wanna be a resemblance of a biracial person that most people would not expect to be biracial. If you put me next to Zendaya, people are gonna say that im white. They’re not gonna say that I’m mixed. They’re gonna say that she might be mixed if they don’t already know that she is, but they’re not gonna see that on me cause I’m so light and I don’t see enough people like me on the screen that are so light that I can be white. It’s probably more subjective and in my head than I’m realizing.
I also don’t feel like I see a lot of actors on tv or in films that we know or who is mentioned in the story as being mixed. I wanna see something where a character being mixed is somewhere in the dialogue. Because I know there are other people out there like me that don’t feel represented. I also know that some of my black friends whose shade is much darker than mine also don’t feel represented in enough things because they don’t a lot of super dark black people in certain things. And I don’t mean super dark in any kind of derogatory way, I hope that is not reading that way. I mean some people that feel that they are very dark. They don’t feel like they’re represented on the screen. And so thats so interesting to me as well because it’s like dang, that means theres all these shades all these hues all these different levels of tan and dark and black colors that are also still feeling not represented. and its kind of a bummer…actually it’s a big bummer because I feel like theres this small hand full of actors who are black, biracial, and mixed ethnicity that we see all the time and that’s great and they’re representing somebody else out there for sure, but there are so many actors, and there are so many good actors, that can also represent other shades as well. Why can’t we get some of them out there too? Emphasis on the “too”.
I would also love to see more historical stories with the race of the characters flopped. Like Hamilton. I loved what Lin Manuel Miranda decided to do with that and that…there’s very few white people. Or people who are perceivably white. I’m not not trying to assume that those white people are just white. But I appreciated that there were these different ethinicities that were playing these originally white people. So I want to see more.
Okay, I’m gonna tell you a little idea i have. its not specifically the idea I’m thinking of writing, but it’s something else I had in mind. Maybe it has not really been done (or maybe it has and I don’t know about it) because it’s not for most audiences. We have lots of movies on slavery. And really heart-wrenching hard stuff to watch. very realistic. Lots of research. I want to see shit like that, but with it flipped. I want to see the slaves that are being tortured like they were during that time, but I want to see them as white people. I want to see what that looks like. I’m very interested to see what that would look like. If the roles had been reversed in our history, what would that have looked like? Because we know what it looked like for how it happened, we have ideas for how that looked…we have no idea how it would’ve looked if those were all white people and the black people were the ones in power.
What advice would you have for someone just starting out in this field?
I hope for other people…if i were gonna tell this to somebody else, I would tell them to find a way to focus on yourself and practice self care. Really learn what that means for you. Do the work when you get the opportunities, like getting into an acting class. Keep those acting muscles going. Find scenes. Practice them with your roommates. Film something. Put something on tape every once in awhile for fun. Keep your physical being in tune. Self care. Find what that means to you. Do it. Do self care. Keep that as a focus point every day in this career. And go to therapy if you need to. Find a good therapist that you can talk to so that you’re not just talking off your friends’ ears or your family’s ears or whatever. Your neighbors ears. And then when you do get the audition, have fun with it. Do your homework do what you know to do from your classes that you’re taking and have fun with the audition. And submit the audition and then forget about it. Go back to your self care and whatever it is that brings you joy day to day and if you’re not feeling joy, find it. find it in some capacity. Remind yourself that your career is a lifelong journey. It’s not going to happen overnight. The sooner you can accept that and just focus on your joy, the more fun you’ll have with auditions, and the more grateful you’ll become when you do book those roles that are right for you and when you become really busy with all the bookings that you’ll get.
I wish I would have really been able to hone in on that whenever I got here to Atlanta, that this is such a marathon and not a race. I’ve heard it. I heard it when I moved here, but I didn’t really hear it, and so I don’t know if that had to do with my age at the time, or if I just wasn’t in a mental or emotional state to actually really hear that, and I don’t know why I am now, but I feel like I am now in a mental state where I can understand that and that maybe because i also lost a lot of people in my life so I’m also like I want to be able to take advantage of being able to see the people that are in my life and have fun with them and not stress out about things that I cannot control. Like once I submit my audition, there’s nothing else I can do. That audition’s done. I can’t do anything else to persuade them, and that wouldn’t be appropriate anyway. Some people beat themselves up about it and I just wish that for those people that even when they don’t get auditions, they understand that it’s okay. It’s going to be okay. If you have an agent and your agent is working for you and you’re in contact and communication with them and you feel good about your partnership, then just trust the process, just like with acting. Trust the process. Whatever process you have for acting, trust it. Whatever process you have for your art, trust it. It’s so much easier said than done. But when you start to really tell yourself “no I’m just gonna trust it and I’m gonna do this thing now, to get my mind off of it, because this thing brings me joy, and there’s nothing else I can do right now for that thing. I trust that the process is happening, I’m gonna go do this thing and everything’s gonna be okay”, it’s freeing. Because hyper-focusing on something that’s so out of our control is not good for anyone. It’s not good for us. It’s not good for anyone around us and I’m so glad that I have been able to move past that.
I haven’t had an audition since November, and if that were me when I first moved here, I would’ve been stressed out. I would’ve been emailing my agent already, at least five times, at least twice a month, like “what’s going on there are no auditions.” I would’ve been self submitting like crazy. Which I can still do that. I can still self submit if I wanted, but I don’t want to. Right now, I know what it feels like to have six auditions in a week, and it’s stressful as fuck and I’m okay right now not having any. I mean, yeah it means that I’m not being seen, but that’s okay. I have to believe and I’m trusting the process that the auditions will come when they’re meant to come for me and if I really want to practice my auditions and see if there are projects that I really would love to be apart of, I can self submit. I just don’t have the burning desire or feel the need to do that. I don’t want to feel a need to have to over exert myself to put myself in a stressful situation where I have to do an audition cause I self submitted for it , and i also have eighteen other things going on. I’m not doing that anymore. I have an agent and she works so hard for me and her clients. I’m gonna trust that she is putting me out for lots of auditions and the ones that I’m meant to get will come and the bookings that I’m meant to get will come and in the meantime, I’m just gonna enjoy my life because we are not guaranteed tomorrow and if I were to die tomorrow and I stressed my self this whole week doing all these auditions, I would not be very pleased with my life. And thats just me. I cannot speak for anyone else. That is purely just me. I wouldn’t like that. But I could die tomorrow and be like “I had a great fucking week last week. I did a lot of cool things that I didn’t expect to do or that I really was working hard towards and I achieved them. I’m good. I can die tomorrow.”