BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Actor Terry O’Quinn is in an elite circle. Not just because millions of people tune in each week to see him on the hit ABC television series LOST, but because he can call himself that rare honor – a working actor.
“Work. Work when you can, any way you can,” said O’Quinn, sharing his insights on the acting profession to a room full of theatre students at Illinois Wesleyan University on Tuesday. The actor addressed three classes and an open forum Monday and Tuesday before returning to Hawaii to resume filming of the television show.
O’Quinn is the older brother of Illinois Wesleyan’s Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts Thomas Quinn, and offered to speak to his brother’s theatre classes during a visit. “His wife’s family lives on the East Coast, so he’s flying back and forth all the time,” said Quinn. “The trick was just getting him to land.”
Sitting in a circle with nearly two dozen students in the E. Melba Johnson Kirkpatrick Laboratory Theatre, O’Quinn fielded questions and gave honest answers about everything from entering the acting profession, to working for television verses theatre, and being recognized.
“You know you are getting more famous when people say your name or even your character, ‘Are you Terry O’Quinn?’ or ‘Are you John Locke?’” said O’Quinn, who had to change his name because another actor already has his name, Terrance Quinn, registered with Actors Equity. “I used to get people coming up to me and saying, ‘You look familiar. Do you shop at Wal Mart?’” For O’Quinn, the recognition is not the reward of acting. “Really, I think of fame as distracting, it’s something you have to get around,” he said.
Every actor looks at working on a hit show with a wary eye, said O’Quinn. “I’ve been acting for more than 30 years and this has never happened to me. And it will not happen again, I can almost guarantee it,” he said, though he joked he and fellow LOST actor Michael Emerson, who plays Ben Linus – the nemesis of O’Quinn’s character – could always spin off a show. “We could be detectives and solve really creepy crimes,” he said, alluding to the suggested supernatural elements of LOST.
A theatre actor for more than a decade before he started taking roles in television and film, O’Quinn said he loves the intimacy and immediacy of the stage. “Working in television can be fun, but theatre is so colorful and alive, with the audience reacting right there,” he said. “In theatre, you have one shot to get it right, that performance, that night.”
Stage actors can make great transitions to working in front of the camera because they understand that immediacy, said O’Quinn. “In television, hundreds of people set up a shot, you are pulled in and the director says go. Then, of course, you do the scene eight different times for camera angles. The benefit of stage training is that you are ready to go each time. There are a few actors who might think that film means you are more free to make mistakes, but mistakes just waste the time of hundreds of people.”
O’Quinn advised students to go into acting with full dedication. “Acting has to be your only alternative. You can’t go into it and have a fall-back profession waiting. If you only try halfway, you are going to fail,” he said, noting auditions have to be the same way. “If you are jumping from one building to the next, do not slow down before you jump. Jump. Jump hard.”