How to Stop Acting Read online

  When I find out what is not the character, everything else in me could be the character. So I’m free to do whatever I want until I find something else that is not the character. I am in a state of constant rehearsal, trying anything that comes to me. I’m not careful. In fact, the more arbitrary and outrageous I am, the better. If the choice doesn’t work, it will be spectacularly apparent. And if it works, it will be simply spectacular.

  When I go through a script with an actor, we take our time, stopping to talk about what each line means to the actor. I encourage, even push the actor to be inappropriate, to negate logic. I want him to go as far as possible. When Kevin Kline was exploring the role of Otto in A Fish Called Wanda with me, he had a line to Michael Palin the first time they meet: “That’s some stutter.”

  I asked Kevin to stutter for me. I wanted to feel this and to respond for myself. As he stuttered, I found myself staring intently at his mouth. I was amazed and revolted at what was going on with his mouth and the sounds coming out of it. I found myself mimicking his stutter as he did it, mouthing the stutter, trying to guess the word he was so desperately trying to say. It was so cruel and so inappropriate! But we both realized at that moment, “Yes, that’s Otto!”

  Kevin kept up the process of exploration, making strong, even extreme choices when they came to him. When he was shooting the sex scene with Jamie Lee Curtis, he suddenly pulled off her knee-high boots, threw them off-camera, and sniffed his underarms to turn himself on. John Cleese, the writer and co-star, was standing next to the camera. He picked up one of the boots and threw it back to Kevin as the camera was rolling. Kevin grabbed the boot, put it to his face, and sniffed as if he were hyperventilating. It was an outrageous series of choices that just popped out of him. I guess Otto was talking to him—a dangerous thing. But no matter how stupid or bizarre, it was right, so right that it ranks right up there with his outrageous torture of Michael Palin by stuffing French fries up Palin’s nose and eating his pet fish.

  Again, you don’t need to worry about consistency. Sometimes an impulse that seems to contradict the rest of the characterization gives a performance a whole new depth and complexity. If an idea comes to you at a particular moment, don’t reject it because it doesn’t seem in keeping with how you’ve responded at other moments. Try it, and see if it works. This is another form of working from the negative.

  In Dangerous Liaisons, Glenn Close plays the Marquise de Merteuil, a brilliant, powerful, dangerous aristocrat always in control, perfect and appropriate in appearance. Glenn’s portrayal was steely, fierce, witty, contriving, sensual, and unmerciful. In the final scene, the Marquise wipes the make-up from her face while looking in the mirror. The shot is a harsh close-up, and Glenn let the moment into her. She didn’t shy away from this terrifying shot, but instead revealed the pain of being battered by the lack of protection normally given to actresses—the soft lighting, perfect make-up, and loving camera angles that had made her so beautiful in The Natural. The depth of her vulnerability in this moment added a depth to the character we hadn’t known was there, exposing the nakedness of the Marquise without her social status. We were forced to rethink the whole performance in relation to this moment. In theory, it might have seemed out of character for this intimidating woman, but in practice it was not. It was a brilliant choice.

  Take the Script at Its Word

  When the actor and I are first exploring the script together, I urge him to take the lines literally. Most actors don’t believe the character is saying what he means. They immediately look for the subtext—what they think the character is really saying, below the surface of the line. I think that characters often mean exactly what they say, just as we do in life. And just as in life, the words may carry a subtext, which will resonate on its own if I mean exactly what I say. But if I try to play what I believe to be the subtext, I will spell out too much, giving the character away to the audience. Knowing too much, the audience will get bored. So will I. But playing what the character is literally saying can be very stimulating, allowing for lots of twists and turns moment by moment. Good dialogue partakes of the flux and irrationality of life, revealing ever-changing facets of the character.

  For example, imagine I’m playing Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. In the opening scene, I come into the kitchen late at night carrying two heavy suitcases. I put them down.

  “Willy!” my wife, Linda, calls from the bedroom.

  “It’s all right,” I say brightly. “I came back.” I take these lines literally—it’s no big deal.

  “Why, what happened?” Linda says. “Did something happen, Willy?”

  “No, nothing happened,” I reassure her.

  “You didn’t smash the car, did you?” she asks, obviously worried.

  “I said nothing happened.” I feel angry at her assumption. “Didn’t you hear me?” I bellow, thinking, Open your goddamn ears!

  “Don’t you feel well?” she says softly.

  “I’m tired to death,” I say quietly to myself, meaning it literally. I want to sleep forever and never wake up. I can’t go on. Death is the only cure for how tired of life I am, I think.

  I pause, realizing what I have just said. “I couldn’t make it. I just couldn’t make it, Linda,” I admit to her, feeling so vulnerable, old, like a total failure.

  “Where were you all day? You look terrible,” she says.

  She makes me laugh—her honesty, telling me how terrible I look.

  “I got as far as a little above Yonkers,” I answer lightly. “I stopped for a cup of coffee.” I’m thinking, that’s it. It must have been the coffee.

  “What?” she asks.

  “I suddenly couldn’t drive any more,” I explain. Of course, I had a bad reaction to the caffeine. It’s that simple. “The car kept going off on to the shoulder.” It was all because of the coffee!

  “Oh, maybe it was the steering again,” she says. “I don’t think Angelo knows the Studebaker.”

  “No, it’s me, it’s me,” I say, annoyed by her suggestion. I know it’s not the mechanic’s fault. “I realize I’m going sixty miles an hour and I don’t remember the last five minutes. I’m—I can’t seem to—keep my mind on it.” I’m so angry at myself I want to scream. What’s my damn problem?

  “Maybe it’s your glasses,” she says, offering an explanation. “You never went for your new glasses.”

  “No, I see everything,” I say, fed up with her patronizing. “I came back ten miles an hour. It took me nearly four hours,” I spit out. Then I feel terrible about my crude behavior to Linda. She’s just trying to make me feel better. Why am I getting angry at her?

  You can see the twists and turns the lines inspire when I take them at face value, one by one. They stimulate my emotions and my imagination to go in many different directions, giving depth and texture to the performance.

  Even a script that seems trivial may surprise us if we take it seriously. When I work with actors, I bring the same slow, patient exploration to an action movie as I would use with Shakespeare. The actor and I talk about what’s going on in each scene, piece by piece, trying it out in many different ways. We don’t set anything in the beginning, because we don’t yet know what to hold on to, but we go as deeply as possible even if the script doesn’t seem deep. The result can be a character with startling range and complexity, like Bridget Fonda’s portrayal of Maggie in Point of No Return, or Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in The Abyss, or Aaliyah in Romeo Must Die.

  The important thing is to take the time to explore as deeply and boldly as you can. Never skim. Leave no line of dialogue or moment unprobed. I don’t want the actor to analyze, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want him to think about the character and the text. On the contrary, I want the actor obsessing passionately over the character and text. But I want him thinking about them in a way that isn’t neat or tidy. I want him wandering around the character’s dialogue, thoughts, feelings, and experiences.

  Break the Rhythm
/>   When Peter Fonda came to me in 1993, he wanted to rethink his acting. Early in his career he had a great success with Easy Rider, which he wrote and produced as well as starred in. He had been at the Actor’s Studio and done many films but he thought it was time for some new input. For several years, we worked on lesser roles, in which he had been consistently doing very good work. Then one day he sent me a beautiful script, Ulee’s Gold, the story of a beekeeper who lives in Weewahatchee, Florida. He is a widower and has lost his son in Vietnam. His daughter returns home with her child in order to beat a drug habit, which brings a dangerous situation with it.

  Peter had been moved to tears when he read the script. “I remember looking up at the ceiling of my log cabin and saying, ‘I’d like to thank the members of the Academy … ’ And my wife told me, ‘Don’t you ever tell anybody you said that.’” He’d been particularly struck by a description that read, “Ulee leaves the room with a gentle sorrow.” Peter told me, “There is no book where I can go find what a gentle sorrow is. What does that mean? There’s no dictionary for this kind of stuff:” But the line had sparked something in him. He appeared in my living room, script in hand, and we went to work.

  We started by taking the lines off the page, trying to uncover the character of Ulee. As Peter says, “What the actor reads on the page is totally different from what one speaks out in a story.” He instinctively felt that it was a very special and quiet story that had to be played way down. “There were no dramatics thrown into it. Everything just flowed from the action,” Peter recalls. “I realized the most important line in the film happens at the end. And it’s not like the line from Easy Rider—‘We blew it’—which is a major power line. This is a very simple line. Ulee says to one of the young punks, ‘Meeting you, Eddie, has done me a world of good.’ And Eddie says, ‘How’s that?’ ‘It reminds me that there’s all kinds of weakness in the world, not all of it is evil. I forget that from time to time.’ That was the heaviest line of the whole story and it was so beautifully written you didn’t know it was the heaviest line. But for the character, it was.”

  Ulee’s rhythms were entirely different from Peter’s usual rhythms. Peter speaks quickly. His mind is running all the time, and he darts from one subject to another—“goes tangential,” as he puts it. But Ulee had a cadence all his own. He was slow, grounded, of the earth. “He is a purposeful man who’s led a very specific life in a very specific way,” Peter puts it. “And he’s forced to take a different course and become involved with others and make decisions that he thought he’d never have to make again.”

  Ulee began talking to Peter, and Peter listened to him while he took the lines off the page, keeping it slow, not needing to dramatize because “the words were very good,” just improvising and letting the words take him. As Peter’s rhythm of speaking changed, it affected him in profound ways. He found himself thinking differently, not only more slowly but more definitely, revealing a stolid, set character quite unlike his quicksilver, changeable, “tangential” self This Peter was hidden yet transparent, hard yet sensitive, raging yet quiet. And all of this came to him early in our work together. Slowing his rhythm gave him the space to go down into himself and let the character talk to him. It freed him to be someone else so that he didn’t have to Act. Instead, he showed up each day on the set and let himself go wherever the character took him, without losing confidence in himself. Once Ulee was talking to him, the rest was easy.

  And eventually he found the “gentle sorrow” that had so moved him on first reading, letting it occur where it came to him, not where it was indicated in the script. Instead it happened earlier, when Patricia Richardson, who plays a nurse who rents a place across the street, comes in to talk to Ulee. Ulee offers her tea, and she accepts.

  “She leaves the room and I’m there alone and I know what I have to do, we rehearsed it. I have to open a drawer, get a spoon, open a cupboard, get a cup and saucer. Get a paper napkin, put it down, take a teabag and put it in … Instead … well, I did that, but what happened is, I was liberated by this character, as an actor I was liberated. I opened the drawer and picked up the spoon; I looked at the spoon and if I paused at all it was a nanosecond of a pause but I thought, ‘This is the first time I’ve used the real silver since Penelope died.’ Penelope, my wife, was dead six years before the story starts. And then when I went up and reached out for a saucer and the cup—they weren’t rigged, it was just my own natural shaking—it made a little noise and I thought to myself, ‘This is the first time I’ve used the good china since Penelope died.’ It’s in that scene that there was a ‘gentle sorrow.’”

  Peter was just responding in the moment, allowing himself to react to what he was doing and saying. If he had forced the reaction, he “would have blown it totally.” But it wasn’t as if he was unaware of what was happening. “When I put the cup down, folded the napkin over, put the little silver teaspoon on the napkin, and then the teabag in the cup, I could hear all the women in the audience—‘Oh, look at that.’” And when they were shooting one of the beekeeping scenes, he could hear some of the beekeepers’ wives on the set whispering, “Oh, look, he’s still wearing his wedding ring.” “It meant something to them, and when I find those moments and feel them, I know that I hit it. It’s the drug that makes me never want to stop doing this in my life. It’s this wonderful feeling of—not escaping yourself but enlarging yourself, adding a character to yourself that’s not you.” Exploring the character with me, Peter found “the strength in Ulee’s tenderness, rather than the weakness. [He] could find the strength in his quietness, rather than just withdrawal. [He] could find the strength that he didn’t even know he had, until he was called upon to make very serious decisions.”

  It was a powerful performance unlike anything I had seen him do. The character of Ulee looked so natural that the audience could not see Peter acting and thought Peter Fonda must be just like Ulee. He isn’t, and yet, paradoxically, Ulee was all Peter. Many in the film community were startled. Peter received a Golden Globe for best actor in a dramatic film and an Academy Award nomination for best actor. He received another Golden Globe and an Emmy Award the following year for his performance in Ayn Rand, in which he transformed himself richly and memorably intro a man who is almost invisible.

  Actors always ask me how to get to characters who are different from themselves. Well, every character has to be us, or they won’t be believable. We will look like we are Acting. But getting to characters that seem different from us and yet believable and interesting is necessary for us to fulfill our potential as actors.

  In order to do this we have to throw ourselves into unfamiliar, even uncomfortable, rhythms that actually make us feel different. When I negate an actor’s normal rhythm and push him into new and unknown cadences, he finds aspects within himself that he didn’t realize were there. And yet these aspects turn out to be familiar—like opening yourself to another you living within you.

  The actor has to re-create himself every time out, with each role. He has to have the courage to start work on a new character as if he knows nothing about the character, nothing about himself—and nothing about acting. He has to accept the fact that he doesn’t know where he is going to go with a new script or how he is going to discover and play a new character. To discard old patterns of acting and tricks, he must break his usual rhythms of talking and physicalizing.

  If I’m working on a new script with an actor I know well, I try to help him discover a rhythm different from his natural rhythm and different from other roles he has played. I do this by consciously taking him away from what is comfortable. I distance him from what he knows too well. Once again, I work from the negative.

  Ally Sheedy is a very energetic person. She speaks fast and is passionate about things. She’s never laid back, and it’s impossible for her to hide her feelings.

  When she took on the part of Lucy in the film High Art, it was obvious that Ally’s usual rhythms wouldn’t work. In the film, a young edito
r new to photo publishing convinces Lucy to do a layout for her magazine. The two develop a sexual relationship in the process, which complicates both lives. Lucy is a photographer whose work is recording her own life as part of a counterculture of artists and drug addicts. She dropped out of the fast-moving art world after a book of her photography was a great success. She is secretive, mysterious. We can discern what she’s feeling only if we look hard. She’s always thinking, but we never know what. Lucy is totally hidden.

  I encouraged Ally to open herself to a rhythm completely different from her natural one. We started by taking the lines off the page, emphasizing the character’s quiet, her stillness. After all, we reasoned, a photographer is an observer. And since her subject is her own life, we figured she’d be quiet in order to observe, but not disturb, whatever she was photographing. Even the camera she uses, an old Leica, is quiet. And the heroin Lucy uses stills her and slows her body’s rhythms.

  This process of exploration carried over to the set. Ally recalls, “To be in a scene and do absolutely nothing, that took a lot of courage. You think, I should be interesting.” But she allowed herself “just to do nothing except think whatever I was thinking and not say the line until I was ready.”

  In the film there’s a moment when the young woman knocks on Lucy’s door. Lucy opens the door and leans against it, looking directly at the girl as if studying her face. She says nothing. It’s as if, even though she isn’t holding a camera, she’s composing a photograph of this chatty young woman. Ally’s stillness is so full that in a couple of seconds the girl is a wreck. She can’t do anything until Lucy finally invites her in.