Fear: Fuck Everything and Run, or Feel Everything and Relax?
Fear never fully leaves, so good actors learn to work with it. Ashlie Walker on curiosity, feeling, and relaxing in the face of fear.
Acting coach · Meisner-based training
Get out of your head and into the scene.
Coaching for actors at every stage: craft, confidence and career. It's rooted in Meisner Technique, more than 20 years in the industry and a real understanding of what fear does to a performance.
Who it's for
Wherever you are in your career
New to acting?
Getting ready for drama school auditions, choosing monologues, or working out how the industry works and where to begin. Ashlie helps you build a strategy and the confidence to go for it.
New actors & auditionsStuck in a rut?
Been working for a while but not getting the breaks? Nerves getting in the way at castings? Get honest feedback and support in a safe space, and look properly at what's blocking you.
Coaching for working actorsReady to go deeper?
For professionals preparing for a role or a new agent, or who want to sharpen their technique and work on weak spots. Feel confident in what you can do and ready to be seen.
Meisner-based technique
The approach
Truthful acting starts with paying attention to someone else
Ashlie has trained, worked and taught extensively in Meisner Technique. That includes teaching at The Actors Temple in London and running workshops with Actors Academy Finland. The work goes straight to many of the most common problems actors face: self-consciousness, wanting to be "good", habits that stop you being truthful, and thoughts that stop you really listening.
Alongside the craft, Ashlie brings her first-class psychology degree and training as a cognitive behavioural hypnotherapist. That's useful for the parts of acting no one teaches you: nerves, performance anxiety, rejection, and the mental load of preparing alone. So if you've been looking for a life coach for actors as much as an acting coach, this is where the two meet.
Sessions are honest. You'll be supported, and you won't be flattered. As one actor put it, Ashlie has a way of "cutting through the bullshit" while "holding a space where you feel safe to be vulnerable".
What sessions can cover
Craft, confidence and career
Craft
Meisner-based exercises, listening and responding, emotional truth, scene and text work, and preparing for a specific role.
Confidence
Nerves, stage fright, freezing at castings, perfectionism, and learning to work with fear instead of being run by it.
Career
Drama school and audition preparation, castings, agent opportunities, and a realistic plan from where you are to where you want to be.
Coaching can take place in person, online or on set. Tell Ashlie what you're working on and she'll suggest the format that fits.
Acting can be a lonely business
You're often preparing alone, trying to build contacts, figuring out your casting type and how to market yourself. Technique can drop right down the list, and that's before the stress of making money. It's no wonder actors get stuck.
Coaching gives you somewhere to bring all of it, so you can build momentum with your craft, your confidence and your career.
From actors
What actors say
Ashlie is an incredible director. She has a natural way of being on it, cutting through the bullshit and helping you find a way out of your comfort zone whilst holding a space where you feel safe to be vulnerable.
In the short time we have worked together, I feel like a new actress, less afraid of being perfect, staying in “the moment” with Ashlie’s gentle guidance. She has a way of saying the right thing when needed and staying out of the way when needed.
Ashlie’s uniqueness above others is in her highly sensitive intuitive awareness and emotional accuracy and understanding. Her way to direct is gentle, yet never lets you off the hook to underachieve your best potential at hand.
As an actor, working with Ashlie Walker is one of the best things that ever happened to me. Her knowledge and internalisation of Meisner Technique is truly remarkable… And most important, she never gives up on you, as long as you don’t give up on yourself.
Ashlie holds a space for her students to really learn about themselves (and their craft)… She does this with the lightest of touch, guiding each individual forward with care, kindness and generosity.
But this sensitivity to nurture is not to suggest she is not precise and rigorous, or that she won’t push you to your limit if she sees that some tough love is what you need.
Ashlie’s teaching ignited my passion for the craft of acting. She approaches teaching with an inspiring level of dedication, patience and compassion which she then, inevitably, instils in her students.
Directing
The Lucid Artists
Ashlie founded The Lucid Artists, a female-founded collective making new theatre that elevates women's stories and helps actors move from actor to creator.
About The Lucid ArtistsReading
On acting, fear and Meisner
Meisner heads for Helsinki!
Actors Temple co-founder Ellie Zeegen asks Ashlie Walker about taking Meisner-based actor training to a community of actors in Helsinki.
Let's talk about Meisner
Ashlie Walker on why Meisner-based exercises help actors stop self-monitoring, listen properly and work truthfully from moment to moment.
Let's work on what's getting in the way of your best work.
Online, in person or on set, by arrangement. Tell Ashlie where you are in your career and what you're working towards.