Making the audience laugh – a difficult job
Asked what was easier – to make the audience cry or laugh, Neringa said that it once seemed to her that making the audience laugh was very difficult. She watched actress Kristina Kazlauskaitė with great admiration, from whom the entire audience could burst into laughter with just one phrase. Neringa did not ask for K. Kazlauskaitė’s advice, but eventually noticed that she herself was capable of making people laugh.
„Perhaps in life, I am such a person that sometimes, when I act naturally, it makes others laugh. And when I feel that people are having fun, I unconsciously play along a bit more. There might be something like that in my nature. A desire for others to have fun,” says the actress.
Neringa Varnelytė, known to television viewers from “Dviračio žinios” (Bicycle News), recalls that she ended up on the blue screens thanks to the late Vytautas Kernagis, who invited her to his show.
Neringa laughs that she had to work on something she completely didn’t believe in.
„Once upon a time, it seemed to me that the lowest job for an actor was to voice cartoons. Well, my first job was to voice cartoons, and I got stuck there for a long time, I still do it now, and it brings me great pleasure,” admits N. Varnelytė.
“We need to ask the ministry why they don’t value artists”
Asked if there was a perception among actors that television was not what they studied for, Neringa Varnelytė was open.
„We know how we, actors, live, what those salaries are in the theater. If you only worked in the theater, when your salary is, say, 1,100 euros, I don’t even know… We need to ask the Ministry of Culture why this is, why artists are so undervalued. Simply undervalued. It’s a pity. I believe it will change. I believe this is some kind of stage,” hopes the actress.
Neringa Varnelytė remembers that when she first started working in the theater, the remuneration was not that important.
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„I remember when I came to the theater, when they accepted me, I was so happy and gave myself a word that I would never ask for a raise. Now I think, why did I tell myself that? After all, you give yourself, you give your time, your energy…” says N. Varnelytė.
Neringa decided to become an actress already in elementary school.
„When I was in fourth grade, our class was brought to the Youth Theater. The curtain hadn’t even opened before the performance. I sat there mesmerized and thought: ‘Oh God, how good it is here, how good it is here. It’s so good here! I want to be here. I want to be here.’ Well, I watched that performance, and then the question arose for me, what can one be here? I decided to be an actress,” recalls Neringa, who fulfilled her childhood dream.
“I carry the cross of my life on stage too”
„I think that every person has a very strong experience and we all have our cross, not just of the stage, but of life. I drag the cross of life onto the stage, it helps,” says Neringa Varnelytė.
Asked by the head of “Rekūrai” how much that cross of life weighs, the famous actress doesn’t even hesitate: “I can carry it. My family, loved ones, all people open to you, even movies, or someone you will never meet, help me carry it. That’s how we help each other.”
The famous actress, who is raising two daughters and a son, says that at home her role is not a director or a partner, but a supervisor. Neringa’s husband is also an actor, Algirdas Dainavičius.
„Where we really support each other, I think, is in work matters. Of course, also in life, in all important things. However, we are both people with strong characters, we don’t really adapt to each other. An Italian family,” smiles N. Varnelytė.
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Watch the full interview here:
