Actors and high sensitivity
“I get emotional all the time,” Jennifer Beals [left] once said. “I get emotional every time I make a speech, or talk about other cast members,” she says. “Every now and again, my heart just explodes and expands.”
Laurel Holloman, her castmate on the Showtime series “The L Word,” has seen this firsthand: “If Jennifer is passionate about something, it comes to the surface within seconds. My theory on that is all the best actors have a couple of layers of skin peeled away. There’s a huge emotional life in Jennifer, and it’s kind of beautiful.” [from article The Real Beals, by Jancee Dunn, Lifetime lifetimetv.com, August 2004]
Nicole Kidman has noted, “You live with a lot of complicated emotions as an actor, and they whirl around you and create havoc at times. And yet, as an actor you’re consciously and unconsciously allowing that to happen… It’s my choice, and I would rather do it this way than live to be 100… Or rather than choosing not to exist within life’s extremities. I’m willing to fly close to the flame.” [Interview mag., Oct 2003]
Brittany Murphy thinks she is “a very oversensitive, vulnerable person. You have to be to do this for a living.” [Premiere, November 2000]
Scarlett Johansson has noted that sensitivity can have a dark side: “I think I was born with a great awareness of my surroundings and an awareness of other people. I know when I really connect with somebody… Sometimes that awareness is good, and sometimes I wish I wasn’t so sensitive. I’m so happy I’m not walking around life with a cloud over my head, not really knowing which way to look or which way to turn. But then, on the other hand, sometimes you don’t wanna see what’s behind people’s doors.” [Interview mag., July, 2001]
Winona Ryder has commented, “I’ve never been a suicidal person. But there have definitely been times when I’ve thought, I’m too sensitive for this world right now; I just don’t belong here - it’s too fast and I don’t understand it.”
Ellen Muth [in the Showtime series Dead Like Me] has noted her character George/Georgia does care about people, “but she puts on this front like she doesn’t really care about anything and I kind of like that. George’s sensitivity is very hidden, but when it slips out she very quickly makes it so nobody else sees it… George tries to hide her emotions and I tend to do that.”
She adds, “One of the great things about acting is that you are able to release all sorts of things through another character.”
