How to Stop Acting Read online

  My memory of what happened differs slightly from Kevin’s. I think these young actors asked for my help because they recognized a freedom in my acting. While I was clearly serious about it, I wasn’t afraid to do outrageous things on stage. I was willing to accept bits and pieces of the many approaches to acting as long as they worked for me, but I trusted my instinct to guide me, whereas these younger actors felt hampered by what they thought they were supposed to do and were tied in knots by the struggle.

  I hadn’t planned on teaching, but I told Kevin and the group that if they shut up long enough for me to figure out what I was doing, I would be glad to start a small class. Shortly after I began the class, Kevin was given his first leading role in a main stage production at the university, and I began to work one-on-one with him, coaching him for the part.

  “You took me line by line through the scenes,” Kevin recalls. “I remember you reading with me and saying, ‘What does this line mean to you?’ I thought, Who cares what it means to me? What’s the right way to say it? Up until that point, I would look at a line and say, ‘How would Olivier or Brando deliver it?’ Just as I assumed a painter would say, ‘How would Velázquez paint this?’ or a musician would say, ‘How would Horowitz play this?’ But you said, ‘When you are on stage, if it’s going to be alive, as opposed to some idea you are showing us or indicating to us about this character, you have to take responsibility for that line. So tell me what that line means to you.’”

  As Kevin progressed through the script, he began to allow himself to stop interpreting the character intellectually and to simply respond to the words, phrases, and lines personally, so they meant something to him. “This huge gaping door opened to me,” Kevin says. “At the risk of sounding pretentious, I suddenly realized that this is what being an interpretive artist is. I actually bring something to bear on this material. Me!”

  We talked about what each line meant to Kevin, and also what the play as a whole meant to him personally. “It was thrilling,” he remembers. “Where I once would have written ‘ideas’ in the margin of a script, I now found myself writing over and over again, Trust yourself, trust yourself.”

  Kevin’s acting began to become totally instinctive in a personal way that would evolve into his signature style. He played his role in the university production with an individuality that made people take notice of him. He was unpredictable, and therefore fun to watch. Important roles started to come his way. With each role, he explored different aspects of himself. His range increased as he allowed himself to be genuinely stimulated by the different texts he tackled and the characters within them.

  This was the beginning of our exploration together, and it continues to the present—this process of immersion in the script, in the dialogue, so that the character is completely personal, believable, and unpredictable. From that fortuitous encounter with Kevin, I began to work with other actors, and coaching took on the shape of a vocation, along with my continued work as an actor, director, and teacher.

  I found I particularly liked coaching because I could tailor the teaching to the individual actor and help him deal with his specific problems in an immediate way. I could sit across from him and respond to what he was doing at that exact moment. I could watch and listen and make no judgments. I could abandon theory for a hands-on, personal approach, helping each actor to find his own way as I had found mine.

  When I decided to write a book, however, I wasn’t sure I could translate what actors do with me in the privacy of the studio onto the page. To find out, I enlisted the aid of a knowledgeable theater writer, David Finkle, and a number of my clients—in addition to Kevin, Glenn Close, James Gandolfini, Matt Dillon, Christopher Reeve, Peter Fonda, Bridget Fonda, Ally Sheedy, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tcheky Karyo, Chris Noth, and several others—with whom I could review our collaborative work. When they talked about what I’d done with them, I was surprised to see that it followed a distinct, graspable, and consistent pattern. Without trying to, it seemed I’d developed an “approach.”

  The actors’ take on what I do has been invaluable, and I have therefore incorporated it throughout this book, often in their own pertinent and persuasive words. I’ve included as well the solutions they’ve found to the real challenges of acting professionally on stage, in films, and on television. But above all, the book is about what I did and what I do to help actors feel free, creative, and truthful, to help the actor allow instinct, emotion, and the rawness of real life to emerge within him to become the character. And this is all so the actor does not have to Act the character.

  My hope for this book is that it will offer actors what the acting texts I studied offered me—a window into myself and a source of personal power and emotion. Do with it what you will. Use parts of it, or none of it, or all of it. If it gets you to think about acting from another point of view, my effort in writing it will have been well spent.

  1

  TAKING IT OFF THE PAGE

  “I’m basically a shy person, and I can get as shy in front of a character that I have been hired to inhabit as I can in front of an actual breathing human being. A lot of what we worked on when we first got together was getting through my shyness in relationship to the character whose words had to come out of my mouth.”

  —Glenn Close

  Actors come to me for all sorts of reasons, at every stage of their careers. Matt Dillon came to me for the first time with a stack of research he’d done for his role in Drugstore Cowboy. Christopher Reeve came at a low point, showing the courage to rediscover himself in his work. James Gandolfini continued to examine Tony Soprano with me in The Sopranos’ second and third seasons, after a hugely successful first year. Glenn Close came because of a problem with auditioning. Glenn says:

  You have to force yourself to get through that barrier of shyness—to force the words out, to speak them—so you can slowly start getting beyond that and into the character. That kind of training has stood me in great stead. You find yourself on a movie set doing a scene and you know you’re not there. At that moment, I have learned to say, “Don’t lose courage. Just keep leaping out there. Be able to make a fool of yourself.” And because you’ve not gotten frightened, and you haven’t retreated from the moment, if you persevere, you’ll find it. I think those early days of me sitting in your living room and forcing myself to say words that I had no idea how to say—getting them out, flinging them out, throwing them out—was like breaking some sort of sound barrier, giving me freedom on the other side.

  In the conventional view, the actor’s work on the character begins with his reading the script for himself and then talking about the character and text with the director. The problem with this approach is that from the beginning of the process it places the actor outside the script, and outside the character. And being outside the script and the character means that the actor is fundamentally outside himself—outside of the instinct, feelings, imagination, and fantasy life necessary to conceive the character creatively. He may arrive at an extremely sophisticated understanding of the character that nevertheless leaves him utterly confused about how to put his analysis into action.

  That is because reading the script is an intellectual process that inevitably leads the actor to approach both character and script as we have been taught in school—in an analytical way. Whether it’s Stanislavskian analysis or some sort of literary analysis, it leads the actor to think about the character rather than instinctively to try out different possibilities for the character. In fact, analysis tends to make the actor afraid of trusting his instinct. It leads to doubts about whether his mind is crisp enough to grasp quickly enough the character’s central needs in life or his desires in a particular scene, as Stanislavski instructs. Analysis weakens the actor.

  Glenn Close, one of the most intelligent actors I know, told me, “I don’t pride myself on being able to read a script really well. There are some people who can sit down and really analyze it and get its full value immediately, but it takes me a while.
” Analysis is not really what actors are good at, although most really good actors are quite smart. It should be left to literary scholars and critics. Actors are about feelings, imagination, and improvisation. They are good at becoming other people. Their instinct is their talent. The more they trust their instinct, the more inspired and inspiring their performances become. That is when they surprise us, even startle us. That is what the audience goes to see.

  It’s not that intellect is unimportant. It’s just not where the actor’s work starts. I believe that it’s not until the actor is actually verbalizing the words of the character that his real work in acting begins. No matter how experienced or inexperienced he is, the most important thing for him to do is to connect himself to the text—to the dialogue, to the words. At that moment, he has connected himself to the character in a real way—even a physical way, as the words come out of his mouth. If he is able truly to speak the character’s dialogue, rather than to read or recite it, he is in fact inside the character’s head. He will feel free with the dialogue and the choices it provokes. His fear of finding the character will diminish. If he can be in the moment, in the script, and in himself at the same time—floating with the line—his instincts and the script will take him where he needs to go. If the actor can connect in a personal and instinctive way to the words his character speaks, moment by moment, at the very outset of his work, then he will begin his exploration from within the character.

  The actor has to start from his visceral response to the material. This is why he must reject intellectual choices at the beginning of his work. He must allow himself to be in an exploratory state, unsure of what he is going to do; this forces him to trust his initial responses to the dialogue, regardless of how absurd or contrary they may seem. If he is analytical, his intellect will stifle these reactions.

  But the moment when the words must come out of the actor’s mouth is always the most fearful, as Glenn Close so vividly describes. It’s the ultimate showdown. And because it is so daunting, the actor does what he can to avoid or postpone it, even when he says the words aloud. Each time he picks up a new script and starts to read it out loud, he is tempted to “make it real.” By real, he inevitably means conversational or natural or casual. If the actor is a quick study and what is considered in the business a “good reader,” he will make the dialogue sound as if it’s real even while he has his nose buried in the text. That seems like the smart thing to do.

  The problem is, it’s a useless thing to do because the actor is approximating, no matter how deftly, a realistic line reading—that is, how the dialogue might go. And in the process, he is establishing rhythms and choices he doesn’t even know he wants. He’s imitating the way he thinks it should go, and before long he may find himself stuck in those line readings and those choices without being aware of it. At best, he’ll have to break the pattern in order to feel free and to find fresh responses, real responses.

  When an actor comes to work with me, I want real, fresh responses from the beginning. So whether he’s a seasoned actor taking on his umpteenth major role, or a young actor just starting out, we begin the same way. We go back to the barre, like a ballet dancer, starting from zero with a simple but effective exercise that allows the actor to discover or rediscover the foundation of acting through the text, with no preconceptions of how to play the role. I call this process taking it off the page.

  Here’s how it works: The actor looks down at the phrase and breathes in and out while he reads the words to himself, giving himself time to let the phrase into his head. Then he looks up from the page and says the line, no longer reading but speaking.

  Taking your time to breathe in and out while you look down at the page to read the phrase for yourself allows you to access whatever unconscious thoughts or images it evokes. It doesn’t matter what comes up—however trivial, simple, deep, or apparently unrelated it is—as long as it is your actual response at the time, and not what you think is appropriate.

  The point is to let the dialogue bounce around in your unconscious, a bit like in the Freudian concept of word association in which the psychoanalyst says a word and the patient responds with whatever word comes to mind, before he can censor it. The actor is accessing his unconscious self, surprising himself with his unconscious response, in much the same way.

  As soon as you exhale, say the phrase before you have a chance to censor whatever thought or feeling surfaces. Don’t deaden the line by trying to be sincere. Just say what you mean, no matter how startling, stupid, frightening, funny, touching, irreverent, or boring. Exhaling before you speak ensures that it is your own voice that you are using, not a phony, artificially projected actor’s voice. It is the way we all speak when we are not acting.

  Once the feeling has surfaced and been expressed, feel free to drop it so that the next line can take you to a new place. Actors often hold on to a feeling or thought that’s working, out of fear that they’ll have nothing else to replace it that will be as good. But the truth is, holding on to the thought or feeling evoked by one line limits the possible range of responses the next line can elicit; letting go leaves room for something new to arise. That’s what exploration is all about.

  Often actors are afraid they won’t have a feeling for the writer’s line. And sometimes the honest response to a line is, I don’t feel or think anything. If so, that’s what you must say—with the writer’s words. Surprisingly, that response is as good and useful as any other. That’s because it is a truthful response. In real life, we often don’t know what we feel or think, or whether we have a response at all. It takes courage to admit to yourself that you don’t really have any feelings about something. Even more courage is needed to avoid manufacturing a false feeling to please those around you.

  This admission is not only important, it’s essential! Nothing is powerful when admitted in front of an audience or a camera. Doing nothing puts the audience on notice that the person in front of us is real. I am not manufacturing feelings and thoughts because it’s expected of me, he is saying. His no-response makes him more dangerous, unsocialized, surprising. We don’t know what he may do next. This makes the actor interesting.

  One of the reasons people love James Gandolfini’s portrayal of Tony Soprano is that it’s filled with a lot of unusual responses and unexpected choices. People often assume this comes from a process of breaking down the script and selecting from among his responses in advance. But in fact, when I work with Jim, often the most important thing he does is to admit that he doesn’t know what he feels about a scene or a moment. By accepting this and allowing himself to do nothing, he is making himself available to the surprising and unpredictable responses that follow.

  The beginning actor will also discover that if he has no feeling one moment, he will find himself angry or frustrated or saddened or amused the next moment. And it will probably be a big feeling.

  An actor doing nothing is doing a great deal. Think of the end of The Grapes of Wrath. Ma Joad asks Tom, “But Tommy—how will I know where you are?” And Henry Fonda (as Tom) answers, “Wherever there are cops beating on fellas, I’ll be there, Ma …”

  Recalling this classic moment, Peter Fonda told me, “My father stayed with his Nebraska cadence. He hardly blinked and he just read the words as simple and flat and straight as it could be. Thinking back on it, had he put any dramatic spin on it, facial or verbal or tonal, those words would have been the corniest words in the world.”

  Doing this—doing nothing—allowed the truth of that moment to emerge powerfully.

  Don’t get too exacting about how much text to take off the page at a time. You may pick up a phrase or a whole line or even a couple of short lines at once. Do whatever your instinct tells you, or choose arbitrarily. In fact, breaking the normal rhythms of your speech can make you more open to characters with different, new, and unexpected rhythms. But what matters most is that you say what you mean, whatever that is.

  Most important of all, don’t be careful! These are you
r lines, your images, your thoughts. Don’t think of taking it off the page as a technique so much as a commonsense way to start your work. The exploration you are beginning is going to become the character. Because you are within the script, anything you do could be or could become the character. You are in a state of discovery triggered by the only thing we know for sure about the character—what the character says. This leaves you free to try anything that comes to you.

  Let me show you how taking it off the page works in practice. Suppose I am starting my work on Michael Weller’s play Loose Ends, in the role of Paul. The play opens with the monologue on the following page.

  The first line is, “It was great at the beginning.” I look down at the page and read the line to myself while taking a breath in and out. At another time, or for another actor, it might conjure up, say, the beginning of a relationship that has since broken up, but right now it evokes in me the memory of directing my first play as a graduate student, with Kevin Kline and the Vest Pocket Players. We were so young and everything was ahead of us. I look up from the page and say the line, relishing the memory.

  If I trust myself, I won’t have to do anything but say the line, and my response will be visible. I won’t have to add anything. No one will know the specifics of what I’m thinking, because I say only the line Weller wrote. But if I trust myself to just say it, the line will be full. Most actors don’t trust themselves to just say it, however. They don’t trust that what they are thinking or feeling is enough. They want to do something with the line. They want to show us their thought or feeling.