Our annual Drama Actor Emmy Roundtable had barely begun, and the six stars assembled were already swapping fears, horror stories and whatever morsels of wisdom they picked up along the way.
The group — Walton Goggins, Cooper Koch, Diego Luna, Eddie Redmayne, Adam Scott and Jeffrey Wright — would go well past the allotted hour, regaling each other with tales of their early years, navigating ugly comments (among them: “You’re not getting cast because you have a gay voice,” and, “You don’t have the looks, so you’d better work harder than everyone”) and desperately chasing other more successful careers. Or, in Scott’s case, trying to look and sound as much like Ethan Hawke as possible. “I was looking at pictures of [him] and just being like, ‘OK, this is what I need to do. My hair, my jacket …,’” said the Severance star. “I was trying to be this thing, and it took me years to realize that the only thing you have is you, and you’re the only one that can bring that to it.”
Monsters’ Koch, the newcomer at the table, admitted that he still finds himself doing a version of that. “I feel like I’m just constantly comparing myself to what other people are doing and I’m curious how you got past that,” he asked his peers. “Or maybe it just never ends.”
Later in the conversation, Koch revealed that he feels real pressure to say yes to projects while there’s heat on him. Scott had this advice to offer: “The thing that I came to eventually was that the things that ended up making any difference in my career were the choices I made for reasons other than career,” he said. “It was the choices I made because it was something that I wanted to do because I thought it would be fun or it was with my friends or I just loved the material, and I was never even thinking about career and how it could help me along. Whenever I make a decision for any reason other than that, it goes sideways.”
Meanwhile, White Lotus’ Walton Goggins, who would go directly from this to the airport, where he’d catch a flight to New York to host Saturday Night Live for his first time, was eager for any kind of advice — or simply a way to calm his nerves. One recounted a rumor that there would be a vomit bucket backstage at SNL (there isn’t); another suggested he just snag some in-flight puke bags from the plane. (Spoiler: He’d require neither.)
But Goggins didn’t try to downplay the moment he’s having. Instead, he said of the latter: “I’m just leaning into it with a childlike abandon. I suppose some people would take the opportunity to redefine how people see them and maybe become a little more aloof or a little more cool. I’m just leaning more into who I am as a person, and I’m not walking into it, I’m fucking running straight at it.”
At other points during the taping, Luna opened up about all of the years he was asked to lose his accent, move to L.A., etc, etc; Redmayne talked openly about accepting that sleepless nights are a part of his process; and Wright revealed that he, yes, loves going to ComicCon.
Watch the full Emmy roundtables on IFC on Fridays at 9 p.m. PT/12 a.m. ET or stream it on AMC+. In addition to catching broadcast episodes of Off Script With The Hollywood Reporter on Fridays, look for complete videos of each Roundtable on THR.com and YouTube on Sundays through June 22.