Steven Spielberg revealed Tuesday his tried-and-true method for helping actors who might be stressed meeting the legendary director for the first time: time in the kitchen.
While on Amy Poehler’s “Good Hang” podcast ahead of the host’s interview with “Disclosure Day” star Colman Domingo, the filmmaker was asked how he deals with actors who arrive to audition and are visibly nervous to meet him.
While Spielberg said some actors show up fine and unbothered, he realizes his reputation can rattle others so he often gets them cooking and baking together in the kitchen to bring some walls down.
“I’ve always seen myself early in my career being successful but also feeling a little bit like a fake Western street on a Hollywood backlot, where you walk around behind the facade, and there’s just a bunch of 2x4s holding up the facade,” Spielberg said. “And if people only knew how nervous I am and how stressed I get, they wouldn’t be so nervous in front of me.”
He continued: “I just came up with a method, which I used for a couple of pictures starting with ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark.’ I decided that all the actors that I auditioned, and in person, I’m going to meet them in a kitchen and we’re going to cook. We’re going to actually cook. And so, for a couple of movies starting with ‘Raiders,’ everybody that came in met me in a kitchen and we were cooking stuff. And that was how everybody relaxed around good food.”
Poehler liked the idea partially because it was just an activity for a stress-addled actor to focus on with their hands while meeting the famed director. Spielberg agreed with the addition that everyone seemed a bit more themselves when they let their guard down and got a little messy.
“Everybody becomes so real when they’re covered in flour, and you’re trying to break an egg, and the egg spills out on the counter,” he added. “I mean, everybody becomes the best version of themselves.”
Spielberg’s kitchen strategy first came to light in 2020 when “L.A. Law” star Harry Hamlin recalled flubbing his “Raiders of the Lost Ark” audition as Indiana Jones after Spielberg asked him to bake a chocolate cake for George Luca with his potential co-star. To hear him tell it, Spielberg left the room and left the two actors to it — but then derailed when he began gossiping about how Spielberg once pursued his friend.
“During that time, because Amy Irving had been a good friend of mine, I was talking about how Amy was calling her friend group in L.A. and saying that this guy, this director guy, was stalking her in New York and how she was kind of getting annoyed because this guy, Steven Spielberg, was showing up at the stage door every night with flowers,” Hamlin recalled.
“I’d been riffing on how annoying Steven Spielberg was to my friend Amy, so hey, guess what? I didn’t get the part, OK, and I’ve never worked with Steven Spielberg,” Hamlin continued. “And I grant you that I never will work with Steven Spielberg and I never learned how to make a cake.”
“Disclosure Day” – Spielberg’s return to the aliens and sci-fi genre after helming classics like “E.T.,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” and “War of the Worlds” – releases on June 12.
