When Andrew Koji Isn’t Combating Onscreen, He’s Memorizing a Poem

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Pen and Paper

I would like this wherever I’m going. I journal for my very own sanity and use an analogous follow of the “Morning Pages” from “The Artist’s Way.” I write concepts, ideas, pictures, issues I need to develop. For each character I play, I create a pocket book with again tales, internal monologues, summary concepts, and add to it over time.

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Poetry From Memory

If I’m not on a job, I prefer to maintain my mind sharp by memorizing a speech, a poem or a passage that I join with. The final one was Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If.” Before that it was a passage from a Taoist e-book about how insignificant we’re within the vastness of the cosmos, but how we must always nonetheless attempt to be a greater a part of it.

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Exercise

Training has grow to be an enormous a part of my life once more after virtually 10 years of extra unhealthy and self-destructive habits throughout my early struggling performing years. It helps me keep away from or work by adverse states. Anything that may take me out of my head and into the physique — coaching with weights, the punching bag, Brazilian jiu-jitsu or yoga.

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Teachers

If we don’t continue learning all through our lives, I believe we stagnate. I’ll at all times look to check as a lot as I can between work, learning with a Japanese language tutor, meditation academics, martial-art academics or any topic that helps encourage me creatively and assume in a different way about one thing. I studied movie and theater in school, and I bear in mind my drama trainer on the time saying, “You ought to by no means grow to be an actor.” Then I discovered a category on the Actors’ Temple, and a terrific trainer known as Tom Radcliffe opened my eyes to possibly I might be doing this, that I had the potential to be an excellent actor.

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Nonfiction

“Man’s Search for Meaning,” Bruce Lee’s “Striking Thoughts,” “Hardcore Zen,” “The Road Less Traveled.” “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” is what I’m studying now. Older books that remind me why we do what we do on a deeper degree I discover useful on this more and more superficial trendy western world.

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Traveling in Japan

Kyoto is one in all my favourite locations — exploring temples, disconnecting from know-how, going off the crushed path. One of my favourite trails to date was the Kumano Kodo, an historical pilgrimage route.