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Moni Yakim Knows How To Move You
The movement coach has taught at Juilliard for 50 years. Stars of stage and screen credit him with helping them create physically demanding roles by manipulating their bodies.
Moni Yakim has taught movement at the Juilliard School for more than half a century. His students include Oscar Isaac, Jessica Chastain, Adam Driver, Anthony Mackie and Kevin Klein. In the documentary Creating a Character, all of those actors describe Yakim as one of their formative influences.
"Everyone who takes his class is forever changed by it," says Isaac, who still consults with Yakim when he takes on seminal roles. He credits, which ran at the Public Theater in New York City in 2017, and the titular role in the Coen Brothers' . When he was cast in that breakout part, he spent an afternoon with Yakim considering how to embody a destitute folk singer from the early 1960s.
