Our Team - Bow Street Academy Dublin

Principals

Gerry Grennell

Co-Founder

Gerry Grennell is one of the film industry’s most sought-after voice, Alexander Technique, and performance coaches. Trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, the Constructive Teaching Centre London (Alexander Technique), and the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hannover, he has spent more than three decades working with leading actors in film.

His collaborators include Johnny Depp, Meryl Streep, Natalie Portman, Tom Cruise, Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, and Oscar Isaac, with whom he has worked for more than a decade. Grennell also collaborated extensively with the late Heath Ledger across multiple projects, including The Dark Knight and Brokeback Mountain.

In 2014 he helped establish Bow Street Academy, Ireland’s National Screen Acting School, where his approach to screen performance helped shape the Academy’s training philosophy. He is also a co-founder of Bow Street Academy Dublin.

Shimmy Marcus

Co-Founder & Artistic Director

Shimmy Marcus is an award-winning filmmaker and Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Bow Street Academy, Ireland’s National Screen Acting School. His films include Soulboy, starring Felicity Jones, and Headrush, starring Steven Berkoff, for which he won the Miramax Scriptwriting Award. In 2010 he became a founding member of the Screen Directors Guild of Ireland.

Marcus joined The Factory filmmakers’ collective in 2011 and began coaching actors full time in 2012. In 2014 The Factory evolved into Bow Street Academy which he still runs today. While there he has created the Bow Street Meets interview series featuring actors including Oscar Isaac, Andrew Garfield, and Saoirse Ronan, and the Actor as Creator short film scheme in partnership with Screen Ireland. He is also a co-founder of Bow Street Academy Dublin, where he serves as Artistic Director.

Sarah Hone

Associate Artistic Director

Sarah Hone is an experienced actor, casting director and dramatherapist. She has a BA in Theatre and Performance and an MA in Dramatherapy, and has worked as a professional actress in Ireland, USA, Australia and Japan. In mid 2016 she returned to Ireland following a two year tour of Japan performing for Disney. Prior to that she worked as an extras casting assistant on the blockbuster “Mad Max: Fury Road” movie, in Sydney Australia. She has taught acting in universities such as The National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in Sydney and Temple University Japan. Whilst living in Australia for seven years she opened up a successful private Dramatherapy practice working in the homeless, refugee and disability sectors. A regular tutor at Bow Street she recently left Ali Coffey Casting after 5 years to join Bow Street full time.

Our
tutors

The curriculum at Bow Street is overseen by Gerry Grennell. Along with industry guests, our tutors have been personally selected by the artistic directors and specifically certified in the Gerry Grennell Method ™.

Rooted in our unique philosophy of “Ownership”— a discipline designed to liberate the actor from judgment, fear of failure, and performance anxiety.

Every tutor at Bow Street is personally selected by the artistic directors. They are not traditional teachers; they are experienced practitioners, each having completed hours of intensive, in-person training directly under Gerry Grennell.

Our tutors do not inhabit the role of the expert who “teaches” acting, or “directs” you how to act. Instead, they are trained to recognize the specific physiological and psychological blocks in each individual, providing the environment for a performance to be released rather than built. This approach allows the actor to become their own resource.

Our tutors provide the environment for radical self-enquiry, allowing the artist to identify and remove the barrier between the self and the lens. They do not offer tricks or techniques to be learned, instead they guide the actor through their own internal map, ensuring the screen remains the true objective teacher.