Post-Dramatic Stress: Ex-Students Decry Nightmare Acting Coach

The students thunderously applaud — an ovation of rapture, beaming smiles on eager faces. At last their acting teacher has arrived. For years, Gloria Gifford, 75, has been relied on to keep the faithful waiting at her conservatory. How long? Maybe 30 minutes. Perhaps an hour, even two.

Pre-pandemic, she choreographed each day’s grand entrance to the rented venue. Over the years, Gifford has cycled through theaters in Hollywood, West Hollywood and North Hollywood. An entourage of a half-dozen male students escorted her from her car to her throne-like chair, ornately carved in dark wood, cushioned in red velvet and positioned near the front row. Her chauffeur, too, has been a student. Driving Gifford has been one of many tasks assumed by members of The Gloria Gifford Conservatory for the Performing Arts, from grocery shopping and picking up dry cleaning to moving her household furniture.

Once seated, Gifford monologues at length: gossipy stream-of-consciousness critiques on everything from marquee performances (Meryl Streep can certainly do wrong) to the scene work and outfit choices and even dating decisions of those in the room. Her kaleidoscopic patter, a forceful blend of life and career advice dispensed with a brassy New York inflection, is by turns funny, savvy and nasty.

Now more than 20 of Gifford’s former students, some of whom were with her for well over a decade and left the conservatory within the past year, contend that while she offers useful tutelage in the craft and business of acting, her instruction is fraught. They say she preys on susceptible Hollywood hopefuls, lording over the group with mental and occasional physical intimidation, as well as public humiliation by disclosing student secrets and retaliating against those who leave.

Several conservatory veterans compare Gifford to Ursula, the charismatic, tempting antagonist in The Little Mermaid. “Her energy reminds me of her: gluttonous, extravagant,” says Samiyah Swann, who spent 15 years studying under Gifford before leaving in 2021. Adds Tejah Signori, who left in 2017 after a nearly half-decade tenure: “She’s alluring and she uses humor. There’s something to her like nobody else. You want to know more about her because of the stories she tells about herself.”

In Gifford’s telling, she’s a pioneer and a legend, a woman of color discovered by Bill Cosby, whose big break was the star-studded 1978 comedy California Suite, in which she played Richard Pryor’s wife. She went on to land plum, if non-headlining, roles in 48 Hrs., Halloween II and This Is Spinal Tap before the 1990s took her to supporting work on TV, from Life Goes On to Hangin’ With Mr. Cooper. While she still books the occasional gig (this year on Abbott Elementary and How I Met Your Father), she primarily has spent the past several decades instructing. Gifford boasts that her alumni list includes Jenna Elfman, Bianca Lawson and Efren Ramirez. “I teach you how to be an actor, but I also teach you how to be a person, because you’re stuck with the character and the character is stuck with you,” she says in an undated promotional video for the conservatory.

Nearly all the former students who spoke for this piece agree that Gifford is an expert reader of people, skilled at homing in on their soft spots, understanding the motivations and tensions that make them tick — and what can inspire a compelling performance.

“If she was a bad acting teacher this would be easier — that’s the most frustrating thing; I can’t lie and say I didn’t learn anything,” says former student Antonio Roccucci, who left Gifford’s group in 2018. “But there’s all this extra stuff on top of it. It’s just not right.” He adds: “I was in it for four years, and it was eat, sleep, breathe Gloria. You just craved that validation from her. It was bizarre.”

Students contend it’s difficult to exit the conservatory without incurring Gifford’s anger, because there’s no path to graduate and she believes in ongoing mentorship. (The group’s size typically hovers around 40 to 50 people.) They claim she often speaks to the remaining classmates about those who’ve left in bitter terms, as disloyal or uncommitted, and at times seeks to reframe views about them by publicizing compromising secrets they’ve shared with her.

“I say, ‘When I escaped from the class,’ ” explains Joe Filippone, whose three years with Gifford ended in 2019. “People think, ‘How do you escape from an acting class?’ It’s very hard to leave her.”

Gifford’s defectors describe time squandered, relationships ruptured, confidence shattered. “There was an oppressive weight of control over our lives that was unbearable, and it was progressive,” says Lauren Plaxco, who spent a decade at the conservatory until 2018. “Slowly but surely you just gave away pieces of your life to her, and it was what you thought was in your own best interest.” Plaxco still dreams about Gifford. “They are anxious dreams,” she says. “I feel haunted.”

***

Gifford denies or disputes her critics’ claims. In an interview with THR, she portrays these former conservatory members as a tiny number of stalled actors, led by “white privileged entitled girls,” waging a spiteful attack on “a school run by a Black senior citizen and all the Black and Latino students who are carving out their paths.” (Half of the individuals who spoke to THR about concerns are people of color.)

Gifford says her biggest worry is not her own reputation but that the accusations by these former students will taint the work of every student who has studied at the conservatory. Explaining that she’s weakened from a recent bout of COVID-19, Gifford says, “My blood pressure’s going to go through the roof with these people, and I hope that I’m not going to be dead and they’re going to be laughing because they got [THR] to help them kill me.” She adds, “All actors are dramatic. So naturally, you’re going to get all the drama.”

Gifford name-checks some of her most successful alumni (“I was the same teacher to them”), including Max Greenfield and Homeland executive producer Gideon Raff, suggesting solicitation of testimonials. THR didn’t hear back from any of them, except director Patty Jenkins, another former student, from Gifford’s early stint at the American Film Institute, who responded: “I took one mandated class with Gloria Gifford during my time at AFI. She was not significant in my education in any way. I did witness very questionable behavior within her community that put me off from any further engagement.”

Gifford asserts that the “emotional vampires” opposing her have, like psychiatric patients, transferred negative feelings about others onto her. “In some of these cases, these people have done everything to get their parents’ attention or approval,” she explains. “They can’t get it.”

Gifford, who is divorced after a marriage earlier in her career and has an adult son, rejects the notion that, wittingly or not, she’s running a high-control group, calling it a “good hook” and reasoning that “you go home every night. People who are in cults, they live there.” She asks, “And how about the people that come [to the conservatory] for three or six months and just leave?”

A current student and fervent supporter, Danny Siegel, who has been with the conservatory for seven years, assigns full responsibility to the unhappy actors. “If I didn’t like what I was hearing, I could leave any time,” he says, explaining that Gifford “holds a mirror up” to her students. “There are two choices: If the student doesn’t like what they see in that mirror, they either change or run from it.”

Another loyalist, Chad Doreck, who’s been a conservatory student for 20 years, compares the former members now aligned against Gifford to the mob in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible: “It was an allegory then, it is an allegory now.”

As is frequently the case at other local acting schools, Gifford’s students have often been new to town or fresh to the industry, pursuing professional dreams following troubled childhoods and more recent personal anguish. “Many are damaged or struggling with some secret or looking for stability,” explains George Benedict, who spent four years at the conservatory beginning in 2014.

Gifford, who studied criminology and was employed as a social worker before pursuing acting, paints a dark picture of her clientele. “In the 35 years that I’ve been teaching, I have seen things you cannot even imagine,” she explains. “I have been afraid and I have had to say, ‘I don’t want this person even near me.’ “

Other veteran L.A. acting teachers THR consulted for this piece, who did not speak about Gifford specifically, were open about the ever-present ethical challenge in performance instruction. “The teacher is in a very precarious position,” says Howard Fine, who has coached Brad Pitt, Michelle Williams and Salma Hayek. “There are a lot of damaged people who wander into acting classes, and people who want to indulge in emotional pain and are looking for the studio to be the dysfunctional family that they came from. You must responsibly guide people. Not everyone is ready for this work.”

Adds teacher John Ruskin, who was once apprentice to the legendary practitioner Sanford Meisner: “There is a level of trust earned by the teacher, and if the teacher is authentic they will never use that trust to manipulate or abuse the student like a Svengali. Great actors allow themselves to experience a deep vulnerability in front of their audience. As a teacher of acting, it is such an honor to be a witness to that, and to abuse that privilege is unethical. The work a teacher with integrity does should be healing and expanding of the actor, never traumatizing.”

Nakta Pahlevan, a four-year veteran who departed Gifford’s group in 2018, invokes her Iranian heritage when speaking of the conservatory. “I grew up in a dictatorship,” she explains. “If you give power to one person, it will be violated or abused. No one’s holding Gloria accountable. She has an absolute power over actors. We are vulnerable, sensitive dreamers. To be a good actor, it’s important to let yourself go. But after you’re with her for a while, you can lose something of yourself.”

Gifford is unmoved. “People do a lot of things to please authority figures,” she says, “and that’s their thing.”

***

Naté Jones was at a crossroads in her life when, in 2017, she entered the Gloria Gifford Conservatory. She’d been bouncing between work in New York and family in Michigan and Ohio. “I’d been looking for an acting home,” she says. “I was just very excited to plant some seeds in L.A.”

Gifford’s free introductory class, known as an open session — in which veteran conservatory members perform scenes while she holds court — won Jones over. “I immediately signed up that day, to lock a price,” she says. “I didn’t even have the money. I was going on a whim. I was still technically a nomad at the time,” she recalls, adding: “I was the perfect person to be in Gloria’s class because my self-esteem was so low. I felt like I needed it.”

Jones recalls that Gifford’s deal-closing was key. “She leads with this warmth,” she says. “She sits you down and asks about your life: your relationships, your career desires, your fears that she can help you work through. It’s only later that you realize it’s transactional. Once you’re in the class, it’s not about you at all.” Explains Justin Truesdale, who departed in 2018 after six years: “A lot of the people had parental issues and saw her as a surrogate mother. You’re brainwashed. It’s a very psychological, sensitive thing. She gets you to divulge all this personal information about yourself. It’s power.”

Some of Gifford’s former students say they saw a pattern of love-bombing before withholding. “She butters you up at the beginning and then later treats you badly,” observes Kristine Sabella, who spent more than six years at the conservatory, leaving in 2012. “You’re left trying to get that hit again.”

Gifford, who solicits astrological birth chart information in the hope of better understanding her students, mothers them with treats she brings to class (the bakery Porto’s is a favorite) and is known for extensive gift-giving — more lavish for those with the longest tenures: full luggage sets, kitchen cookware and pricey collectible books.

Kelly Musslewhite, who left in 2021 after eight years, does not dispute Gifford’s gift-giving. “The more you give of yourself, the more you’re rewarded,” she says. “It’s a nice feeling in this town.”

Benito Paje, a current student who has studied with Gifford for 12 years and considers her a mentor, said in a statement: “Gloria helped me financially during my mother’s later years, and when she passed. She paid for several flights to Washington, D.C., just so I could see her and spend time with her and take care of her.”

But members of the conservatory, which Gifford has compared to both Juilliard and a teaching hospital, soon must acclimate to what they say is a demanding reality: a commitment rising to more than 50 hours a week of classes and rehearsals, at the expense of not just day jobs, auditions and booked gigs but also missed graduations, weddings and even funerals. (Gifford dismisses this, noting she double-casts so students may attend to other obligations.) Students also say there’s a culture of isolation from loved ones, which weakens and ruptures important ties. “You’re heavily discouraged from having relationships with anybody outside the class, including family members, so she has complete control of you,” explains George Steeves, who embarked on a five-year tenure in 2009.

Tiffany Hines, who spent nine months at the conservatory beginning in late 2017, notes that Gifford “would say, ‘Do you want to study with your family or with me? Are they actors? Are they doing what you’re attempting to do?’ ” She continues: “My father was a Jehovah’s Witness, and it reminded me of the [imperative] to stay inside the circles of the religion. Outside associations were discouraged. Keep it in-house, with one another.”

***

Many of those who leave the fold say they have been treated as traitors, with Gifford later criticizing them in front of the group and former colleagues cutting off contact. (Students say they have mostly notified the conservatory of their departure by email, because doing so in person has resulted in attempted interventions behind closed doors.) “When I left class, no one in class ever spoke to me again,” says Truesdale. “You have to be made an example of.” Gifford denies that there is any such retribution.

Classes cost $250 to $500 per month — on par with other L.A. acting seminars — although members foot additional bills for private coaching and to put on the group’s regular showcases; multiple individuals tell THR they’ve paid Gifford more than $100,000 over their tenures. Conservatory members vie to assume menial tasks in the hope of winning her favor. “I became the ‘ice guy’ for two years — it was my thing to make sure her Perrier was how she wanted it,” explains Roccucci. “If you got those tasks, then you were higher up in the class system.” Gifford says she has fairly compensated her students for their work with advice, food, gas, gift cards, class discounts and cash.

When frustrated, which is often, Gifford screams, hurling insults. “She would say that she used to get so rageful that she’d black out,” explains Steeves. “She’s like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. One side is very giving, loving, caring. But when you make a mistake [in class], she becomes a whole other person, a monster.” Notes Filippone: “She excuses her rages as passion or being blunt because she’s a New Yorker.” Even when she’s relaxed, Gifford’s caustic commentary keeps the class on alert; she’ll preface pronouncements she suspects are incendiary with, “This will clear the room” and, “I’m going to tear someone a new asshole.” Mariangelica Cuervo, who spent two years at the conservatory beginning in 2012, says she related to the 2014 film Whiplash, which centered on J.K. Simmons’ frightening jazz instructor: “I thought, ‘That’s like Gloria,’ but the guy in the movie is like 10 percent of Gloria. She was way worse.”

Leana Chavez, who started with Gifford at age 13 in 1995, observes that she and others left after the conservatory moved online during the pandemic. “On Zoom her control broke down,” she observes. “Her being late was more pronounced. Her yelling was more ridiculous.” Gifford insists the opposite: “For the last two and a half years, I don’t think I’ve ever had to lose my temper once, and that’s really interesting to me because it means that I’m not being provoked.”

On rare occasions, Gifford has struck students or pinched them in anger. Asked about this, she responds: “Every single thing I’ve ever done was to teach a lesson, and it is what it is.”

More common, students allege, is for her to sanction various forms of onstage physical assault (hair-pulling, open-palm slapping) and degradation (crawling on the floor, smashing cake into a face) without securing permission in advance. Gifford is unapologetic. “Some things, people may be shocked,” she says. “My results have been pretty extraordinary. I’ve been fortunate to have people get very far in this business with my teaching methods. Some people don’t like it? Then leave.”

Those who finally did leave dispute her approach. “She says she doesn’t have a method, that it’s to do whatever it takes to get that performance,” says Lucy Walsh, who ended a decade-long stint with Gifford in 2020. “Me getting slapped in the face by five girls — which she had done when I wasn’t reacting the way she wanted [in a scene] — gives her free rein to be as abusive as she wants to be.”

***

Like Jones, who booked a breakthrough arc on Snowfall after she left the conservatory, Hines, also Black, was drawn to Gifford because “I wanted to learn from someone who had this experience of being a Black actress in Hollywood. It’s a unique path. There’s a lot to gain.”

She says she persisted despite red flags, including the initial financial outlay (“To start you have to pay first and last month, like an apartment”), the verbal aggression (“It’s jarring to see her light into someone; even talking about it now, I’m a little shaky”) and the normalized drudgery (“Those who’d bend backward to do things for her, she’d treat them the worst”).

But for Hines, who was more established in her career than most conservatory members when she arrived — her credits already included arcs on Bones, 24: Legacy and Magnum P.I. — it was witnessing Gifford’s misuse of intimate details of her students’ personal lives that she says most chilled her. Class veterans say confidences Gifford had earlier gleaned from them in private one-on-one conversations would later be divulged without consent in front of the group. The information was often traumatic in nature. While instruction was the declared goal, domination and humiliation were the outcome.

“That someone was molested, or that someone was raped, or that they’d been incontinent or couldn’t get hard: It didn’t matter what the thing was, she told it,” Hines explains. “It was a vengeance thing.”

Gifford denies she leverages private information. “Every single student I have ever taught has told me secrets,” she says. “I could write 12 books on the things that people have told me. I don’t. I have heard everything — weird things. I hear them all the time, and I don’t discuss them in public.” She adds, “You could give me the names of five of these [critics] and I could say, ‘They did this and this,’ and your hair would turn another color. But I’m never going to do it. Never, never, never.“

Former students say they felt compromised and trapped. “Our weaknesses were used against us,” says Musslewhite. “It was scary because you’d see that anything you told Gloria, she’d bring up publicly in class. A huge fear I had in leaving was that she’d take everything I’d said and tell it to this group of 50 people who are supposed to be your friends.”

Conservatory veterans say Gifford has offered unsolicited critiques about students’ bodies, and how they do or don’t comport with Hollywood’s prevailing beauty standards. Gifford counters that she’s volunteered only germane comments to assist in building careers. She does, however, readily acknowledge another point of contention: offering sex tips. “It’s part of how I teach,” she explains.

At one point, Gifford conducted an exercise, ostensibly to promote vulnerability and openness, in which men were seated onstage opposite women and prodded to answer intrusive questions: if they’d engaged in anal sex, the size of their penises, their history with sexually transmitted infections. “It was treated like a game, in good fun,” says Filippone. “It cemented in me: ‘I’m getting out of here.’ ” Gifford places blame on her students for the exercise getting “out of control,” noting that she didn’t use it again “because I didn’t trust what people were going to do.”

***

Gifford’s mentors included the late New York legends Walt Witcover, who trained the likes of Jerry Stiller and Ernest Borgnine, as well as casting director Michael Shurtleff, author of the popular guide Audition. One of her key influences was Strasberg disciple Milton Katselas, an esteemed instructor who spent three decades running the Beverly Hills Playhouse — where, according to Gifford, she was a student beginning in 1979 and then, in the ’90s, taught for a half-decade. Katselas, who died in 2008, boasted an A-list alumni roster (Clooney, Pfeiffer, Hackman, etc.) but drew controversy for fostering an environment in which performers allegedly felt compelled to join the Church of Scientology, of which Katselas was a member.

Gifford, who has also studied Scientology, isn’t a proselytizer. However, some members of the conservatory’s innermost circle, an echelon of designated administrative “officers” who enforce rules on the rest of the group, have become involved in Scientology during their prolonged relationships with her. They contend her organization is influenced by the church.

While Gifford doesn’t explicitly cite Scientology — instead making oblique reference to “what I study” — and new students may go months without recognizing its imprint, several say that the church’s ethos and style are clear. Veterans point to the conservatory’s cultural inwardness and intolerance of defectors as well as the leveraging of secrets, but also to Gifford’s frequent invocation of Scientology teachings. She cites L. Ron Hubbard’s Emotional Tone Scale and its positions (covert hostility, unexpressed resentment, etc.) when critiquing performance. Then there’s the lingo: to be in “present time,” that “outflow equals inflow,” a call to “grant beingness,” the notion of “blowing” (aka leaving) the conservatory.

“You’re getting the tech [a teaching methodology developed by Hubbard],” explains Walsh, who studied Scientology while a member of Gifford’s group. Notes Abigail Kochunas, a former officer who spent 14 years at the conservatory: “Any time someone caused a problem for her, she’d say, ‘You’re being suppressed,’ or, ‘You’re being suppressive.’ ” Kochunas took her first Scientology course two months after starting with Gifford in 2007 and disconnected from the church after parting ways with the conservatory.

Rising to the status of captain, a level below officer, Walsh left the conservatory in 2020 after 10 years. “[Gifford] creates a place for you to tell her your story, then she creates a place of need,” she explains. “I respond to validation. I have intimacy issues, abandonment issues. My dad” — Eagles singer-songwriter Joe Walsh — “left when I was young. She becomes that validation.”

Walsh, who steadily secured credits on TV (Curb Your Enthusiasm) and in film (Mother’s Day) during her time with Gifford, describes a low point in 2018, when during a play rehearsal, her mentor subjected her to “a big handling” — a church term for correcting improper behavior or action, “where you get yelled at in front of everybody and told you’re a piece of shit and need to make amends for what you’ve done.”

As she headed down the 101 through Hollywood afterward, Walsh contemplated suicide. “I thought about driving my car off the freeway,” she says. “I got very close. It was very scary. It felt like a ride and you want to stop and get off but you don’t know how.”

***

Several actors who have left the conservatory tell THR that the experience has quashed their passion to perform. Hines notes that her boyfriend, who spent four years with Gifford and “was on her good side,” hasn’t acted since he left. “Even when I need him to read for a self-tape, I can tell he doesn’t try,” she explains.

Truesdale understands the feeling: “It definitely extinguished my fire.” It’s for this reason that these actors say they’ve chosen to speak out. “This is to save the people who are coming off the bus, wide-eyed and bushy-tailed,” he says. “They don’t know the story.”

Gifford has her own view of her anguished diaspora. “When I first started teaching, I thought I can help anybody, and maybe I did help some of them a little bit, but some people I can’t help,” she explains. “That has been the hardest thing for me to deal with. So I take responsibility for their pain or their problems or their anger, or I’ll even take responsibility for their transference, but I can’t fix everybody, and I can’t please everybody. I have to just work with the people that I do please.”

This story first appeared in the May 25 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.