Lawrence O'Connor Actor Training

'This message is simple, but you still need to hear it and feel it and live it every single day: These constant distractions are not good for you. These alerts, these texts, these blasts of media, these portholes into terrors unfolding far away, this gutless slop, this digital chaos, these soul-destroying AI summaries, these tiny hearts, these angry comments, these measurements, this indifferent, undiscerning, aggressively unfair madness.

These forces erode your sense of yourself and disrupt your understanding of reality. They sever your connection to the people around you and annihilate your ability to see the beauty of who you already are, what you already have. They obscure who can see you clearly, who is here, who loves you, who wants you to thrive. They destroy your memory and your confidence and your hope. They shred your connection to the natural world. They cloud your sight and block your view of your purpose under heaven. They prevent you from noticing the brilliant light of the vast, shifting sky above you and the brilliant light inside your vast, radiant heart.

When you wake up in the morning and scold yourself, when you allow your most neurotic and negative thoughts to take hold, when you fall prey to endless hassles and distractions, when you never look out the window at the sky, when you walk to the train without smelling the moisture in the air, when you forget to honor the natural world, which presses on your skin and asks gently that you feel what’s here, you refuse to honor your humanity, you reject yourself, you reduce your life to a series of trivial and arbitrary struggles that add up to nothing.

Honoring humanity sometimes involves disrespecting the structures and mazes and subhuman voices and technologies that pull and claw at your attention as you navigate your day. Respecting your own humanity sometimes includes blocking out the people and places and things that are out of alignment with your values, principles, and purpose under the luminous sky. Welcoming the humanity of those around you with an open heart and inviting the divine love that’s etched into their faces into your senses and allowing the pure intentions pulsing through their blood to ignite your spirit sometimes demands pushing away the bad habits and invasive digital blasts and clumsy interruptions that trick you into believing that everything outside of your skin belongs in the same junk heap.

Honoring humanity starts with honoring the natural world: how nature rustles up to you inside the faintest sounds and smells, how it alerts you to what matters and what doesn’t matter at all, how it lifts you out of despair even when you forgot that it had that power, how it pulls at your desires even when you thought they were dead and gone, how it plants you in this moment and keeps you grounded firmly here and whispers in your ear:

YOU ARE STILL ALIVE.

You’re still alive.

Honoring humanity naturally includes dishonoring the forces against humanity, against nature, against love, against pure hearts aligned with each other in spite of everything. Respecting humanity necessarily includes surrendering to the radiant light of the sublime around you, allowing that divine light into your senses, humbling yourself in the face of that brilliance.

Talent is the ability to let the divine into your pores, to yield your ego’s demands to the sublime majesty around you, to allow the radiance of this world to touch your weary soul, to give your body to your most sublime intuition and create light from the scrap heap of your broken, wayward, insecure, perfect life.

Confidence is the ability to let go of total control, to allow this chaotic world to float through you without trying to dominate it, to give your love to the people who have nothing but hate for you, to forgive and spread love and honor humanity, which means respecting nature — your nature and the natural world.

When you block your own senses with tiny screens and constant chaotic disruptions, you block your own glory. When you make yourself into an obstacle to the truth, when you deny the reality of your divinity, when you ignore the beauty of this crazy fish tank where you live, when you stray from the path of love, when you turn your face away from the love that offers itself to you without hesitation, you dishonor the natural world and disrespect your own humanity.

Put down your phone. Live your life in the open air. Honor humanity and leave these tiny windows onto the suffering of perfect control behind. Humanity is imperfect, nature is imperfect, you are imperfect, your truest loves are imperfect. Yield to the reality of the sublime around you, and leave these fantastical trivialities and obsessive illusions behind.'
HEATHER HAVRILESKY
JUL 29, 2026

Put Your Phone Away. Are you honoring your humanity?

Vanya
Andrew Scott's mesmerising and deeply moving performance is a masterclass in honesty on stage, living truthfully in the given imaginary circumstances, acting without acting and suiting the performance to the optics of the medium. Diligently prepared and with meticulously crafted specificity, every fibre of his being employed at the service of the piece.

This recording alone worth infinitely more than the £9.99 to subscribe to National Theatre at Home to watch it.

Vanya - National Theatre at Home | Watch Theatre Online Andrew Scott (Fleabag) brings multiple characters to life in Simon Stephens’ (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) radical new version of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Filmed live during its sold-out run in London’s West End. What is Vanya about? Hopes, dreams, and regr...

It was wonderful to spend time a few years ago with Lindsay for his interview and q&a at Guildford School of Acting after such a long time
He was incredibly kind and generous and a gracious interviewee.
The Lindsay Kemp Company
O'Connor@@

Posted • I believe that all great art holds the power to dissolve things: time, distance, difference, injustice, alienation, despair. I believe that all great art holds the power to mend things: join, comfort, inspire hope in fellowship, reconcile us to our selves. Art is good for my soul precisely because it reminds me that we have souls in the first place. We stand before a work of art and our spirit is lifted by it: amazing that someone is like us! We stand before a work of art and our spirit resists: amazing that someone is different!
—Tilda Swinton

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Proud to have been approved to become a member of International Acting Coaches Together - iACT.
Those of us that train and coach actors who put their trust in us to be of service to their work and to hold a safe space in which they can explore freely, need to be accountable and our work subject to peer oversight. I am happy to be held accountable to iACT's standards of conduct and ethics.
IAct

iact.fr

very cool press portrait pics, as well as production photography - check out Sian's site here:

PRESS/PORTRAITS — SIÂN O'CONNOR - PHOTOGRAPHY