The Sid Theory of Script-Reading "Everyone the whole way, for this whole thing, has been telling me, you're never going to get something that cool again," Nick Krause said of his first major feature film role, in Alexander Payne's "The Descendants," opposite George Clooney shooting in Hawaii. Mr. Krause plays Sid, the scene-stealing teenage friend who tags along with Mr. Clooney's on-screen family as they travel around the islands. He already had Sid's shaggy haircut, but he did lose some weight before the shoot. "I heard I might have to take my shirt of, and I was like, "Oh, hell no,"" he confided. In his audition video, shot on his phone, his sister stood in for Mr. Clooney in the scene in which his character has a heart-to-heart with Sid. Though it might have seemed technically dashed off, Mr. Krause and his sister, Kate, also an actress, have a lot of theories about how to read a script ("sides" in actor-speak). "We'll be like, O.K., now read these sides like you're Arnold Schwarzenegger and I'm a floating pie," Mr. Krause explained, laughing. Really weird stuff just to challenge us. And then we do it as Mercutio vs Romeo or old Shakespeare characters vs "Secret Life" characters, just seeing whether we could juxtapose them all and still have the sides read as coherent. And that's how we would memorize them. He was referring, by the way, to "The Secret Life of the American Teenager," the show with his "Descendants" co-star Shailene Woodley. It may sound crazy, but these are the kind of techniques that performers pay a lot of money to learn in acting school. Nick and Kate Krause are the children of Liz Atherton, a Southern talent agent (Ms. Krause appeared on "Friday Night Lights") and they grew up performing. "A lot of acting is just being able to have as many connections as you can to the world outside of you related to whatever you're talking about," Mr. Krause said. "Like "read this heart-wrenching scene and think about a war in Somalia" - a lot of actors will do that. But me and Kate would do, "You're Arnold Schwarzenegger and you're so sad that your burger is late! Read these terrifying lines like that. And the difference isn't a huge one, but it would make it much more solid in our memories because we had that many more internal connectors to it. Even if he never got a part as cool as Sid in "The Descendants" again, Mr. Krause added, he wouldn't mind: "It's O.K. with me because I love the work," he said. I love being an actor and diving into sides and all of that. It doesn't matter if I'm working in Hawaii or the fjords. He paused to consider this. The fjords do sound pretty cool. Mr. Krause is just 19 but living on his own in Los Angeles now, trying to make it as an actor. He's advanced far beyond his stoner character. "I was a lot more like Sid," he said, "when I was 17."