“Just feel like a messy puppy,” Julia Crockett instructs me, her eyes beaming with enthusiasm as if she’s already part-way to embodying one herself. “Just be a sloppy puppy,” she excitedly repeats. “Sloppy puppy, sloppy puppy.”
Now, Crockett isn’t literally requesting that I turn into the animal while we sip matcha lattes in a Lincoln Heights café. But that was the very real advice she bestowed upon Sarah Pidgeon (or “Pidge,” as she refers to the actor) when it came to tapping into the physicality of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, whom she portrayed — to much acclaim — in the recent Ryan Murphy-produced TV series, “Love Story.” “Her senses had to be alive,” says Crockett. “And I kept saying to Sarah, ‘Really use your eyes to see the world, touch the world, taste the world, breathe through your mouth. Notice every little thing.’”
Crockett’s sensorial awareness makes sense considering she’s a movement coach, which, in the simplest of terms, means she helps actors transform. In addition to teaching performers how to personify a broad array of animals (a deer in the woods is one of them, her longtime client-turned-friend Sarah Paulson says), she coaches them on how to do things like move as though they have greasy joints and slippery bones; walk with their nose first; and collapse their chests as if their heart has been broken. Sometimes it’s her job to identify physical habits. “In a session the other day, I was like, ‘Let your butt cheeks go,’” says Crockett. “And she went, ‘How’d you know?’” Usually it entails unlocking the underlying ethos of a character, which she compares to a “room inside of an actor we just have to find the door to.”
It’s always been apparent to Crockett that the body should be keenly considered when telling a story, and as of late, more actors are wanting in on the process; she’s worked across film, theater and TV with her ever-growing list of clients, which includes Emmy Rossum, Cristin Milioti, Austin Butler, Rachel Brosnahan, Luke Kirby, Rachel McAdams and Tommy Dorfman, to name a few. She wishes she could work with all of them more, though it’s difficult to be in one place long enough to — ahead of our interview, Crockett has just gotten back to her home base of Los Angeles after wrapping a not-yet-announced project in Montreal, and after, she’s heading to a Katana sword session where she’ll watch a musician-turned-actor who shall remain nameless practice before flying to Kyoto with them the following week.
Though Crockett typically prefers to keep the A-listers she’s worked with private (“It’s a very intimate experience,” she explains, one that feels “almost perverse” to post about), her clients are more than willing to sing her praises. “Our sessions together leading up to filming felt like being a kid again… They were exploratory and limitless and safe and free of embarrassment,” says Milioti, who worked with Crockett for her Emmy-winning portrayal of Sofia Falcone in HBO’s “The Penguin.” “Julia introduced a way of working to me that I had never known before,” says Paulson, who first met Crockett while preparing to play Linda Tripp in “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” for which she also earned an Emmy nomination. “That was almost six years ago, and I have never worked on anything without her.”
If this is the first you’re hearing of a movement coach, you’re not alone. While it may be niche, there are certainly others doing it; “I didn’t invent it,” Crockett maintains. In acting conservatories, she points out, a movement class of some sorts is typically required. “Even if it’s just a dance class, there’s an understanding that your body has to be doing the thing,” she says. “You need a dynamic, sensitive, alive body.”
What Crockett should be identified as is the inventor of her own specific method of movement training, a cocktail of conditioning and character coaching she’s developed over nearly 20 years of studying bodies. The NYU Tisch graduate was taught the discipline while training as an actor by Nathan Flower, the Terry Knickerbocker Studio’s head of movement training, who’d noticed she was particularly gifted at it. At the time, she wasn’t totally sold; “I was like, ‘Okay, cool,’” laughs Crockett. “‘I’m going to be a movie star, so I’ll do this in the meantime.’” But for the better part of the following decade, Crockett served as a movement instructor on the faculty of schools like her alma mater and conservatories like the Maggie Flanigan Studio.
Rossum was one of the first celebrities Crockett worked with as a coach; the “Shameless” star was preparing to step into the role of real-life blonde bombshell Angelyne for the 2022 Peacock series about the personality’s life, and Rossum’s acting coach called on Crockett to help with the process. That’s one example of a role Crockett’s services would come in handy for — one based on a figure that demands the actor embody someone distinctly different from themself.
Crockett and Rossum on set of “Angelyne”
As the name suggests, character coaching focuses on developing a character’s inner life. (Conditioning, another element of Crockett’s coaching, helps release the “instrument” of one’s body; it’s somatic-focused work actors typically do when they’re not on a project.) In Crockett’s case, that also means conceptualizing the physicality that can reveal this to an audience, or, as she puts it, “helping someone tell a story with their body.” From project to project — and actor to actor — it differs. “Some people really respond to energetic ideas or metaphors,” says Crockett (see: sloppy puppy). “Some people are very technical… think about your head being taller, you know.” In the case of helping Paulson metamorphose into Tripp, it called for a bit of both; “It was like, ‘Linda’s heart had her heart broken. So I want you to collapse your chest,’” explains Paulson. “It wasn’t just like, ‘You’re going to play a duck. Here’s how you walk like a duck.’ It was like, ‘Why does the duck walk like this? What is the physiology of the duck?’”
Apply that to a role like Bessette Kennedy; “She had these anecdotes about her as somebody who was very magnetic, very comfortable to be around. She touched everybody, and she made everybody feel like family,” says Crockett, who combed through research and the existing footage of the late publicist to aid in her conceptualization. “She just seemed like she had to be a very sensual person.” This shaped the mannerisms of Pidgeon’s Bessette Kennedy; “The eyes were a really big part of it,” notes Crockett, as was the mouth: “[It] was so important to me that she had it slack and open.” Pidgeon’s lip biting and hair tossing was also an intentional choice. “That became a kind of Sarah Pidgeon development on an idea,” says Crockett. “I also think it was something that when Sarah did it, she felt like her.” “This is what’s helpful about the physical work,” she continues, “because to actually arrive at that level of sensual confidence for some people — not necessarily for Sarah Pidgeon, but for some people — it might mean a lifetime of fucking therapy.”
Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn Bessette in “Love Story.” CR: FX
If there’s anyone suited to deal with an actor’s unease, though, it’s Crockett, who’s well adjusted to it at this point, and as Paulson describes, generally unperturbed by anything which might make the average person turn red. “There is no judgment,” says the actor. “She’s so comfortable doing anything that you feel immediately comfortable doing anything.” And, yes, even acclaimed actors get embarrassed, which is why is usually takes a few sessions (three being the minimum, Crockett says) to really get someone to open up: “The first couple times, he was like, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this,’” says Crockett on Chris Messina’s first-time nerves (another treasured client). “And then was just so much fun.”
Most clients like to have Crockett around as much as her schedule allows, whether that’s for rehearsals, on set, at a table read, or, as would be the case with Paulson, in their living room. In the case of “Love Story,” Crockett was around as much as she could be, both physically on set with Pidgeon and via FaceTime at night before shooting. Logistically, it looks different every time; “We have pictures of Julia on millions of sets, crouched in tiny corners, sometimes sitting in a trailer with my dog, sometimes in a big open space with the director,” says Paulson, who is more often than not accompanied by Crockett while filming. In an ideal on set operation, Crockett is able to follow along on an iPad connected to QTAKE, an on-set video assist software; depending on a director’s comfort level, she’ll give, or translate, notes on the performance. And when sets are less welcoming, explains Paulson, “she hides in my trailer and she’s on her own iPad, she’s on QTAKE, she has the headphones on and she will text — I’ll have my phone sometimes, and I will just put it in a couch or somewhere — and she’ll give me notes from there.”
For her clients, Crockett functions, both on set or off, as a sort of artistic ally in a process that typically transpires in solitude. “The rehearsal really happens then and there with the camera, and then you get adjustments from the director,” says Crockett. It’s something that can be tricky for an actor, especially on TV where directors come in and out, notes Paulson, as it becomes the actor’s job to “hold the totality of the thing.” Crockett can help with that.
“I would always leave our time together feeling galvanized, vibrating with excitement, during a moment when I was terrified of messing it all up,” says Milioti. “Sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of why one does this for a living, because there is an enormous amount of distraction, an enormous amount of noise. There is no noise in the room with Julia.”
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