Still, for all this, one gets the sense that movies are not where Ms. Pill’s big passion lies. They are certainly “fun.” They definitely help pay the bills. And they allow an actor to “focus more specifically, which is nice,” she said. But it’s the stage that makes Ms. Pill misty, that turned her from a wisecracking everykid into a dewy thespian as she spoke to The Observer, her eyebrows knitted so tight they quivered.
“I mean, the writing in plays is typically just much better than most other writing, or at least more fun to play, and you get to play with language instead of just, Duh,” she said, unlocking her brows and cocking her head like a latter-day Tara Reid. “But if it’s natural dialogue, there’s a poetry and a rhythm that you yourself are finding. And there’s something really interesting about that.”
If Ms. Pill had not become an actress, she said, she probably would have liked to try her hand at academia. What kind? “Physics. Quantum mechanics. Ya know,” she said with a cool swagger, before dissolving into laughs. And then, more seriously: “I would have liked to have tried to get more into politics, I think. I’d also sort of dreamed of a degree in English too.”
Ah, well. English and politics would have been nice. But the truth is, Ms. Pill has been an acting junkie since almost, well, the beginning.
As Ms. Pill described it, she first got bit by the performing bug when she was 10 or 11. It all began innocently enough, after a “guy who worked at CBC Radio” in Toronto heard her narrate a show for her children’s choir (she also did ballet at the National Ballet School, and retains that telltale posture and willowy figure) and asked her to read for some books on tape he was producing. “I was like, O.K., sure, I can read,” she said, mocking her clueless child self. But soon she was pestering her mother for head shots, an agent, auditions. When she finally landed a job as an extra in Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, she was a “goner,” she said.
“I had the best time,” she recalled. “I fell so hard in love with everything about it.”
Ms. Pill made her first exploratory foray into New York’s theater world toward the end of her senior year in high school. By that point, she had already racked up a sizable list of TV-movie credits as well as Pieces of April (which was set, perhaps not incidentally, in the East Village). Live theater, however, was something completely new.
“I had no idea what I was doing,” she said bluntly of her first audition for a role in the New Georges theater company’s off-off-Broadway production of None of the Above. “I sort of might have said that I had done theater in Toronto, when in fact it was in a church basement, and it was like a camp thing. But I was like, ‘Oh, I am such a pro, you have no idea,’” she said, affecting the dripping accent of a 40-year-old diva.
The ruse seemed to work, or maybe she just had a really good audition, because Ms. Pill got the part, after which came other auditions and other parts. Sometimes the roles fell into place easily. Other times she had to beg—or simply dress up as a boy, take pictures of herself and send them to the director—as she did after auditioning for the Lars von Trier-Thomas Vinterberg collaboration Dear Wendy.
“I wrote an insane letter, and I just begged him to be part of the movie,” she confessed.
Then there were the times when, despite a sizzling audition, she simply didn’t land the part.
“We first saw Alison Pill when she came into audition for Doubt for the role of the Sister James, and she blew us away,” said Mandy Greenfield, associate artistic director of production for the Manhattan Theatre Club, which produced Doubt and Blackbird and is now producing Mauritius. “We were all left with the sensation that we’d just seen someone incredibly special.”
For all that—the sensations, the tingles—Ms. Pill was not cast in Doubt. (Alas, the cruelty of casting directors!) But over the next few years she would work fairly consistently, doing fine if not swell, until she hit the lovely, lucky streak she’s been riding for the past 18 or so months.
