Andy Nyman is an actor, writer and magician. He has appeared in many films, including Severance, Death at a Funeral, The Commuter, Judy and Jungle Cruise. He won the coveted Best Actor Award at the 2006 Cherbourg Film Festival for his performance in indie movie favourite Shut Up and Shoot Me. On television he has played an incredibly diverse range of roles, including Winston Churchill in Peaky Blinders, Jonty de Wolfe in Channel 4's cult comedy Campus, and Patrick in Charlie Brooker's BAFTA-nominated series Dead Set. Andy has also appeared in many plays, including Martin McDonagh's Hangmen and Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party in London's West End, and Stephen Sondheim's Assassins and the lead role of Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, both at the Menier Chocolate Factory. Andy has co-created and co-written many of Derren Brown's television and stage shows alongside Derren. Together they created some of the most notorious and popular TV of the past years, including Russian Roulette, The System, The Heist and The Events, including predicting the National Lottery result. Andy has also co-written and directed most of Derren's stage shows, including Something Wicked This Way Comes, which won them the 2006 Olivier Award for Best Entertainment, and Secret, which won them a 2017 New York Drama Desk Award. Andy has also invented many very popular magic tricks which are performed by magicians the world over. His book of collected magic effects, Bulletproof, was published in 2010. In 2010, along with Jeremy Dyson, Andy wrote and directed the stage play Ghost Stories. It broke box-office records at theatres and led to two West End runs of thirteen months each, and productions all over the world. In 2018 Andy and Jeremy wrote and directed the feature film version of Ghost Stories, which starred Andy, Martin Freeman, Alex Lawther and Paul Whitehouse. It received incredible reviews worldwide and was 'Certified Fresh' on Rotten Tomatoes. His books The Golden Rules of Acting and More Golden Rules of Acting are published by Nick Hern Books.
-The book won't tell you how to act, but will tell you how to be an actor, how to stay sane and succeed in any creative position, if you have a dream and want to make it a reality it'll offer you properly useful advice. It's one of those books that helps you know yourself, ask the right questions, and reminds you to be happy. It is truthful, eye-opening and insightful, reading it feels like getting tips and advice from a friend down the pub; it is a goldmine of information. I'm no actor, but it's one of those books that I'll carry with me, return to time and time again because remembering this advice will help me become a better and happier person.- - Huffington Post -A little book but great fun... Presented in large print with jokey soundbites, occasional speech bubbles and stylised on-page annotation, The Golden Rules of Acting covers drama school, auditions, agents, directors, dealing with reviews and various other aspects of living an actor's life with wit. -Remember the best part about drama school is that you get to spend all day acting. Cherish that, you may have to wait a long time until it happens again, - opines Nyman wisely. I liked his well-made point that success in this business is a marathon not a sprint. Samuel L Jackson was 46 when he made Pulp Fiction and Morgan Freeman 52 when he starred in Driving Miss Daisy. Nyman's advice about having a decent website and keeping a record of everyone you meet with a note of when and where is sensible too. I think it's worth the cover price for the quotations alone. Threaded through the book are gems such as Michael Caine's -I'm a skilled professional actor. Whether I have any talent or not is beside the point- and Mark Twain's -The harder I work, the luckier I get.-...If you get only one useful nugget it will have paid for itself. -- The Stage -The cover of this book has a splash star on it reading 'Over one million copies sold.' Then an asterisk, and the asterisk note says Completely untrue... (and continues.) Well, this book should have sold over a million copies and I'm sure it will. It's unique. A mixture of streetwise good sense and hilarious sometimes laugh-out-loud wit. It contains some 200 (I'm guessing) bites of good advice or quotations; every single one of them worthwhile reading. But there's wit too in NHB's production of the volume. Just in the way an actor might annotate a script, Nyman annotates this book with highlights, handwritten comments, capital letters. And colour too. The whole effect is one of irrepressible joie-de-vivre... which, in a way, underpins Nyman's survival technique. It's what's enabled him to be a jobbing actor for more than 20 years - a somewhat successful jobbing actor judging by his website.Here's a taster: 'I deny that I said actors are cattle. What I said was actors should be treated like cattle.' (Alfred Hitchcock.) But my real favourite is the RSC director speaking to soldiers after a rehearsal of Henry V. He says: ...(No, I'm not giving that one away!) One of the most entertaining writers about psychology (inspiring yourself, self motivation, luck et al) is Professor Richard Wiseman (endorsing this book on the back cover)... and, moreover, his writing is academically and empirically based. Much of what Nyman is putting forward in his amusing way fits within Wiseman's framework. Without doubt, Nyman hits the nail home at every turn... This is an indispensable life saver and survival kit. Not a coffee table book. Keep it on the dinner table (where you can regularly dip into it).- - reviewsgate.com -Christians have the Bible, now actors have this book. At last, everyone is happy.- - Simon Pegg