Cayle Chernin's Blog

Cayle Chernin's Blog

My original intention with this blog was to create an ongoing Actor Diary, so here goes:

Easter Monday - waiting for fellow actor Bob Desrocier to come over to rehearse the scene we are doing for Chris Owen's Monday night class which I am new to, but which has been going on for years..it's a great group and now that our Green Room Group is on hiatus I am thrilled to have a place to work out..

I am working on a new reel with friend actor/film maker Pamela Matthews - my old reel is mostly blonde and two years old, so it's time..ah, an actors work is never done..and bears the name Lorraine Sinclair, a stage name I used for the past 5 years accumulating new credits after several years spent doing documentaries and only sporadic acting work. The idea was that Cayle Chernin was known from GOIN' DOWN THE ROAD (long time ago)and as a documentary film maker and that Lorraine would be all about acting - it sort of worked - well who'se to say what would have happened if I had simply stayed with Cayle. Eventually I added Cayle to the LS handle and used the unwieldy Cayle Lorraine Sinclair which was rather embarrassing, like I was trying to do some 3 name Hollywood thing - then when I started to be listed as Cayle Sinclair, it was the end of the name game...Cayle Chernin is back to stay.

On Friday I will be at Humber College courtesy of Martin Lager, another Eli Rill alumnus, to talk to the students about GDTR and was asked to also bring Anita Doren's NOT A FISH STORY, a short we did together that got into the Toronto Film Festival two years ago..a lot of years in between those two projects!

I ran into an actor from Cape Breton at an audition recently and he started to tell me about an amazing film called Goin' Down The Road. When I told him I was in it, he said: "wow, you look great" - I said "Well I was very young at the time, it was my first film". He said "Yeah, but do the math...you look great"!

The life of the actor: how do you keep those juices flowing when the work is few and far between? I have a short coming up in May for director Alan Powell, an Actra co-op which means no dough but a two day shoot when I get to play a great role of a 'grifter-type' Mother warring with her two sons..a lovely dark and dirty piece which I'm looking forward to.

Otherwise, I'll be teaching Pilates, doing wine tastings and bugging my agent Jack Frizelle to get me some auditions..

I have two scripts to work on:

ACROSS TIME a feature about a woman who slips through time and falls in love with the younger version of a dying old man - I've been working on it for years, first inspired by an association with Marcus Adeney, a cellist and writer who passed away in 1997 at the age of 97. I made a docu-portrait of him in 1991: THE MAN WHO COULDN'T LOSE that I sold to CBC Canadian Reflections and Vision TV. Marcus had played for the Silent Movies in the 20ies and that's the period my heroine time travels to in her psychic distress. I'm looking for a month somewhere that will allow me to reenter the script and do a final draft before trying to get it to an interested producer/director.

MOONSHADOW is a one act play, I originally wrote in the Fringe All Night Play Writing Contest two years ago. This year it won third prize in the Fringe New Play Contest - but we didn't win a venue in the Lottery so there are no immediate plans to mount it. Set on an Native Rez, a fishing guide catches a Mermaid and tries to get her to grant his wish - Money to send his nephew Jimi Henrdix Moonshadow to Toronto to play guitar. Two tourists, a Mother and Daughter come to the Island to have a spiritual experience a la Native AND CULTURES CLASH.

Please scroll down and check out the links in my initial entry - Michael Mortensen's mini website for me gives a filmography, a bio and acting credits and talks about our project THE CIRCLE ETERNAL, the script Michael is working on and that I hope to play Mrs. Harper in.

The links feature a lengthy 4 installment piece about the Actor take Action Seminar that I attended two summers ago in Rome at Michael Margotta's Actors Center Roma - which is set up to operate like The Actors Studio - well not the one on TV, but the one that Michael studied at with Lee Strasberg. The Method has gotten a very bad name over the years but Margotta's work with actors importantly utilizes the great explorations of Stanislavsky and Lee Strasberg and others who pioneered the authentic work of the actor.

The GOIN' DOWN THE ROAD link is a story I wrote for Canadian Actor Online about the maiking of the film in 1969 and was used to kick off an online chat that can be found at that site.

Just found out that one of my Pilates classes has been cut -- hum, now what...