David Arquette has shared that his dyslexia causes him to struggle with learning his lines — often causing him serious stress.
“Being dyslexic and reading scripts and memorizing scripts, does that make it even harder?” Bachelorette alum Kaitlyn Bristowe asked Arquette, 52, on her podcast, Off the Vine.
“Yeah. I’m still, like, I can go over a script a thousand times on my own,” the Scream alum shared, adding he “can still not have it when I walk on the set until I hear the people say it and we run it a couple times.”
As the Mayo Clinic explains, “Dyslexia is a learning disorder that involves difficulty reading due to problems identifying speech sounds and learning how they relate to letters and words (decoding). Also called a reading disability, dyslexia is a result of individual differences in areas of the brain that process language.”
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For adults, symptoms can include “mispronouncing names or words, or problems retrieving words” and “spending an unusually long time completing tasks that involve reading or writing” — all of which are required for an acting career.
The actor shared that last-minute changes can also throw him for a loop.
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“I had this one scene where it was, like, cut it into three scenes. But when I got to the set, they were like, ‘We’ll put them all together.’ And just the sheer putting-them-all-together just scrambled my brain.”
The scene, he explained, was a monologue. ”I knew the pieces on their own,” he said, sharing that this happened during a recent film.
“It wasn’t that long ago, and I’ve been doing it for over 30 years,” said Arquette, who recently appeared in The Good Half with Nick Jonas and Brittany Snow.
“I was like, ‘God, to be, like, doing it and feeling this nervousness again.”
Arquette looked back on how his dyslexia impact his 2015 experience with live theater, when he played a certain famed detective, sharing that for plays it can be harder to “get it down.”
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“I did this play and I played Sherlock Holmes and I had a English accent and it was — oh, wow. Should never play that role. Just so not right for the bad kind of character,” he said, laughing.
But, he continued, “it was a comedic version, but still. But it was so hard and I wasn’t off book yet,” he said, referring to the industry term for when an actor knows all their lines.
He said he was still struggling with his lines right up to dress rehearsal, when “they invited, like, all of these schools. And the whole place is filled, and I’m not comfortable with the lines yet.”
“I was so nervous, and, oh, man. It was like I had nearly had a mental break at that point. It was so scary.”
