Actors talking about the actual work.
Back To One keeps the focus tightly on acting as a lived practice. Its conversations linger on scripts, sets, directors, anxiety, surprise, trust, and the strange emotional machinery behind a performance.
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Back To One is an actor-centered interview show about the work beneath the work. It is not especially interested in breezy career recap. The recurring question is practical: how does a performer begin, survive, adjust, and stay available when a role asks for something difficult? From there, the conversations become loose but exacting. Asa Butterfield describes the pull of familiar casting after a major series and the need for a set where discovery can happen in real time. Jordan Hall pushes against the idea that a strict preparation system guarantees a result. That uncertainty becomes part of the point. Matthew Shear talks through the overlap between acting, writing, directing, personal anxiety, and building a character from lived material. Samantha Smart frames performance and writing as ways of serving story, especially when dialogue, silence, and reaction all have to carry weight. Robert Longstreet’s episode turns fear into a method, with preparation imagined almost as coaching a friend through the role. David Krumholtz brings a sharper, more argumentative energy, treating acting less as a neat discipline than as a basic human need. Stellan Skarsgård’s conversation widens the frame to directors, over-explanation, silence, faces, pauses, and the parts of performance that happen outside the text. The show’s strength is its patience. It lets actors contradict themselves. It lets process sound unfinished. It also respects the practical realities of the job: auditions, speed on independent sets, waiting on studio sets, collaboration, insecurity, and the odd relief of not knowing. For listeners drawn to performance as craft rather than celebrity, Back To One offers unusually textured conversations with people thinking aloud about what acting asks of them.
Made for: For actors, filmmakers, acting students, and serious film listeners who want process, preparation, and set dynamics discussed without promotional gloss.
What sets it apart: Back To One stays close to the actor’s craft and lets the conversation breathe. Its edge comes from patient follow-up, not celebrity access or industry chatter.
The no nonsense, in-depth, actors-on-acting podcast hosted by Peter Rinaldi. One working actor every episode doing a deep dive into their approach to the craft. No small talk, no celebrity stories, no inane banter—just the work.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Peter Rinaldi makes acting craft legible by tracing the choices, uncertainties, and collaborations behind screen performances.
Back To One begins with a deceptively simple craft question: how does an actor start preparing a character? Peter Rinaldi follows each answer into the practical decisions behind a performance, from reading a script and auditioning to responding to another actor once the cameras…
Peter Rinaldi asks about character prep; suddenly you're debating whether to read the entire script.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Asa Butterfield makes a thoughtful case for preparation that still leaves room for surprise.
Asa Butterfield is most engaging on the point where preparation ends and acting begins. He builds a character through the script, talks with the director, and ideas about images, history, family, and physicality.
An actor's candid case for letting uncertainty shape the work.
Jordan Hall's conversation with Peter Rinaldi treats acting preparation as a question of how much certainty art can hold. Hall remembers auditioning for a play with only the sides, then realizing at the table read that she did not connect with the full piece.
Matthew Shear reflects on how reading, lived experience, and directing ambitions shape his acting process.
Matthew Shear's Back To One conversation follows his process from a first full read of a screenplay to the more private material that can find its way into a role.
Skarsgard makes a dry, persuasive case for instinctive acting and directors who know when to stop explaining.
Stellan Skarsgard treats acting as something closer to animal instinct than intellectual exercise. He prefers directors who stop explaining, watch an actor's face and notice what happens beyond the written lines.
Griffin Dunne links acting craft to the collaborative choices that shape a life in film.
Griffin Dunne's conversation keeps one foot in the craft and the other in the strange drift of a film life. He talks through the plain work of taking in a script, learning lines, and letting a role come into focus, then opens that out into producing, directing, and the…
Crispin Glover connects perfectionism to the slow, collaborative labor of making films.
Part two of Crispin Glover's Back to One conversation frames perfectionism as both fuel and friction. Glover traces a childhood label into the exacting care behind his films, then separates emotional meaning from easy autobiography, describing images that are meant to work…
Actor Caveh Zahedi discusses the goal of acting as yourself, focusing on non-acting and revealing shared humanity.
Crispin Glover explains how a childhood perfectionism diagnosis shapes his painstaking, decade-long filmmaking approach.
Griffin Dunne reveals how writing his memoir changed his view of a career he once regretted.
Cooper Raiff returns to the Back to One podcast to discuss how he landed Mark to play his dad in his film, with advice from his agent Shani.
Marianne Jean-Baptiste discusses her career, working with Mike Leigh, and her latest film Hard Truths.
Margo Martindale discusses her approach to acting preparation, emphasizing the importance of character origin and accent work.
William Jackson Harper contrasts preparing for theater, where he stays neutral through weeks of tablework, with TV and film, where he makes strong choices up front because there is no rehearsal.
Back To One with Peter Rinaldi features Asa Butterfield on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he talks through leaving Sex Education behind and taking on Our Hero Balthazar.
Back To One with Peter Rinaldi centers on Jordan Hull's acting process, from script aversion to career curation around The Plan.
Matthew Shear tells Peter Rinaldi on Back To One that he prepares by reading a screenplay as a whole, then marking scenes for the inciting incident and climax.
Actor Robert Longstreet discusses his fear-driven, self-coaching approach to character preparation and the emotional authenticity of crying on set.
Actor David Krumholtz discusses the nature of acting as a human necessity and shares candid thoughts about actors and agents in an interview on the podcast Back to One.
Peter Rinaldi talks with Stellan Skarsgård on the Upper West Side of Manhattan about preparation, repetition, and director-led filmmaking.
Samantha Smart says Charlie Bird needed a character who could feel "special" without a famous name attached.
Actor Theodore Bouloukos returns to the Back to One podcast to discuss turning 60 and the liberation of self-acceptance.