An actor unprepared
Mohamed El-Assyouti recounts his small contribution to this year's Ramadan soap operas that have us glued to the screens, whether we like them or not
I return home past midnight to find a note in my mom's handwriting: "Rida phoned and said that you should remember to bring your watch and black shoes, brown suit and pink tie, together with yourself, tomorrow 12.00 noon at Duwwar Al-Zummur." Rida, the production assistant, is just relaying instructions from Siham, the continuity assistant director. On the screen, costumes and props are sometimes more important than people, especially, as in this case, when they are a "racor" -- objects used or worn by a character in a scene that had been shot previously.
I had just received an "order" -- now I was the pizza to be delivered, all wrapped up in suit and tie. And there can be no wriggling out of this, simply because my part in this Ramadan soap opera is that of a lieutenant detective -- à la FBI, as the director once suggested. The suit, the tie and even my Ray Ban sunglasses would come in handy.
The directions were as follows: to appear to be speaking into a walkie-talkie and on my cell phone, as well as investigating corpses and examining machine guns, all of which were fortunately provided by the production. The plot follows arms dealers' connections to both the Russian Mafia and blood feuds in Upper Egypt, and although my character's post is in Qena, I never ventured outside Greater Cairo.
In the early morning I wake up and discover that I need to shave, another routine actor's activity that I hate, before showing up in my ensemble at Duwwar Al-Zummur.
This country-side house, available for rent whenever a TV production needs one, lies only half an hour drive from Studio Misr and Studio Al-Ahram. But for this Heliopolis resident getting there meant several bus and microbus transfers and a bit of a walk -- with the total trip clocking in at around three hours.
Once on location I try to discover what happens in the scene I am to act in, but the production staff are too busy smoking shisha. It seems my part is too small for them to bother making me a photocopy of the scene. They are content that I am there on time -- I was once late for an "order", so just to even the score this time I get to location a couple of hours earlier than necessary.
Shoot days go well when I manage to know my lines by heart, strike the correct poses and deliver them with the right pauses. I discover that TV acting is for the most part not about preparing a character before the camera starts rolling -- it is about memorising my lines. Of the thousands of pages which make the script of over 30 episodes of this LE5.5 million production, almost 90 per cent is dialogue. This is TV, and each character has to repeatedly explain its motives and goals ad tedium so that viewers who are not regular, or those who watch through distractions or interruptions, all manage to follow the series.
Weeks later I was still going through the same procedure, but this time the shooting was at Kimo Land, at the beginning of the Cairo-Fayoum Desert Road. Upon my arrival I learned that I had to memorise lines that not only sound funny within context, but ones that were inconsistent with the action scene already shot, because the props master could not produce a variety of necessary machine guns. After an eight-hour wait, my scene comes up, but by now I am exhausted, famished, very sleepy and anything but ready to stand before the camera.
With the lights on and camera rolling I fear my mind will blank. Only then did I understand why some actors insist on changing their lines -- the lines simply do not suit the character. Only then did the compromise acting for TV involves become clear.
Now as I flash back to that night, almost six months ago, when I paid the production office a visit during the casting process, I realise I never really intended to make a habit out of projecting my face into people's living rooms, especially in Ramadan when food and hosting guests paralyses them on their couches.
After four months of expecting an "order" any day to shoot the eight scenes my character appears in, which took seven days dispersed through the summer, I am relieved when the production is over, surprised by the frequency with which I receive comments from people everywhere I go, and not much thrilled by the result of my attempt at acting. In short, this extremely brief stint as a TV actor brought me some ephemeral popularity, but nothing by way of artistic achievement.
