13/12/2025
DON’T ACT LIKE YOU’RE ACTING
This weekend my acting students will be presenting their scenes one final time. So I offer this to them and to any actor who strives for great acting. It's the kind of acting that captivates, surprises and moves your audience. Above all, it looks authentic. How do we do that? How do we not be fake, phony, hammy - all those things which make us insecure, with our gut telling us that we’re not good enough?
Paul Newman gives the answer. When we embrace that strange, misunderstood technique called Method Acting, when we reject the controversial idea that it means we must keep up the accent during the whole run making everyone else’s lives unbearable, when we have the courage to “live truthfully under imaginary circumstances” the price we pay is that we must live, think and do the things we that do in real life - EXACTLY THE WAY WE DO IT in real life, and we must totally give up control over how the audience is going to perceive it. Hammy actors can’t do this - they’re either ignorant of this process, or they’re too afraid or they’re too lazy to contemplate this wonderful, life-affirming way of working.
So, when you’re character is “playing an action” (a transitive verb going from me to you), then genuinely, honestly, 100% full out, play the action. Don’t act like you’re playing the action, don’t fake it, don’t pretend, don’t show us, don’t check it off your list of actions in your mind — actually, honestly do it. If your scene calls you to CHARM, or to PROBE, or to OBLITERATE, do it. All of this is happening to your character in real time (indeed there’s no such thing as a character anyway). You’ve never been in this situation before, you’ve never thought these thoughts before, you’ve never chosen this course of action with your scene partner, and you have no idea what you’re about to say.
Do that and you’ll pull your audience in, hypnotize them, and if it’s a comedy they’ll laugh more boisterously, and if it’s a dramatic moment, you will deeply move them. And that’s what we actors want to do anyway, right? The only way we become good actors, is to stop trying to be good actors in the eyes of our audience. Only then will they say, “they’re good”. They won’t know why, but you will.
