Judith Weston is an expert in the care and feeding of the actorly temperament—and coaches directors on such. “She’s basically Yoda, except she’s not small and she’s not green,” says Taika Waititi.
Actors can be needy, fragile creatures—they crave the spotlight, but often it just amplifies their insecurities, like a magnifying glass burning ants. When Judith Weston began working with directors, she was startled to discover how many wereof their stars. “Directors come to me and say, ‘How do I keep control?’ ” says Weston, sitting in the idyllic back garden of her home near Venice Beach in LA. “If I tell them they don’t have to have control, it’s a relief to them.
updated last year for its 25th anniversary. Over the years, she has amassed a long list of clients, including Taika Waititi, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Ava DuVernay, Boots Riley, and Alma Har’el. Waititi says he considers Weston a creative, maternal figure in his life: “She’s basically Yoda, except she’s not small and she’s not green.
By her early 20s, Weston was in Manhattan toiling at clerical jobs designated for women at insurance companies and banks—the kind of places where, as she later wrote in a 1970s essay titled “The Secretarial Proletariat,” female employees were called “girls” and “had no rights, only duties.” In 1968, she found her way into an early women’s liberation meeting and became part of a group that merged consciousness-raising, activism, and guerrilla theater.
“I want directors to know how wildly frightening acting can be, how vulnerable you are when you’re out there on stage or in front of the camera.”
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