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January 2022

card reads "how to make your acting look real"

How to make acting look real without pushing

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If you’ve ever had a dream where a friend or a partner did something hurtful, and then you woke up and you really felt mad at them (even though they did nothing wrong!) then you’ve experienced the incredible superpower of your brain to turn imagination into something that feels like a memory.

What would happen if you harnessed that superpower in your acting?

In this clip, we chat about building memories for the roles you play. Doing so can produce real emotions and help you with powerful physical embodiment – which ultimately makes it a heck of a lot easier not to push in your work, and to make acting look real.

Check out the clip below and shoot me an email to let me know what you think.

CLASS CLIP TRANSCRIPTION

Sarah: Yeah, so sometimes as you describe the relationships, as you build the relationships with the people you have in the scene with you, finding juicy language, right. Like, my lover, love of my life, now right, the love of my life…he’s…you find him sexy, but he’s also a fucking asshole. You know, like to find those…because you know, our relationships are also complicated, always. Finding some of those opposing descriptors are very helpful.

Student: Mmhmm.

Sarah: Maybe you can just build one or two memories. Memories that are so vivid. A couple is all you need. I was just reading a science article about how the parts in our brain, in the hippocampus, which is the center in charge of memory, they’re learning that our imagination and our memory are very closely linked and use the same parts of the brain. Right, isn’t that fascinating, Zach? Yeah, what were you gonna say?

Student: I read about this, and parts of your brain that…when you go through an imaginary scenario, your brain stores it like memories of things that actually happened to you.

Sarah: Right!

Student: That’s crazy.

Sarah: How useful is that as an actor. To know that if you build something with your imagination in a powerful way, just in the way that we all know how powerful our brains are when we let them. Right, like when we have a dream that’s vivid and we wake up sweating. So if you build these memories so that they’re real for you, using your imagination, they become your own.

card title "are you affecting your scene partner?"

Are you REALLY affecting your scene partner?

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Have you ever held a really good burrito in your hand, just the perfect amount of all your favorite ingredients?  You can smell the yumminess inside…it’s still warm and you can’t wait to take a bite but just as you lift it off your plate, the tortilla falls apart and the contents go everywhere? *6^(*&^$*^%#!!

If acting is like a burrito (bear with me here), then affecting your scene partner is the tortilla that delivers the goods to its destination. You can have all the perfect ingredients—you’ve got the lines down, you understand the circumstances deeply, you’ve built specific juicy relationships to the POPE, you know exactly what you want and it puts a fire in your belly, you’re present —but if you aren’t actively working to affect your scene partner throughout the scene, the whole thing falls apart. 

Check out the clip below to see a student working through the difference of playing an action with the other character and doing something to them – and discovering the power of really landing that action on their scene parter.

CLASS CLIP TRANSCRIPTION

Sarah:   Reasoning with…is different. It’s something that you do…it’s something that you do with someone, you work with them, right. Working with them is different than changing them somehow. You’re doing something to them to affect them and change them.

Student: And that’s working with them.

Sarah: It’s more direct, to the other person, to get a result. Does that make sense?

Student: Working with them, you mean.

Sarah: No, I’m saying—when you have that “with,” like “work with,” “reason with,” it’s a different thing that when you’re doing something to them to change them to get something.

Student: Oh yes, totally, yes, yes, I get that. Yeah, yeah I get that.

Sarah: And it was so direct, what you were doing. It was so, you know, it felt so, there was a clear, a clear action being played as you replayed that. So that’s what that playback can really help you discover, you can keep doing it. What does it feel like? What am I doing? What am I doing? What am I doing?

Student: Right. Right. It’s so funny you said that because in the scene, in the last page in the scene, as I was really, cause there’s a lot that he’s doing there, and as we covered last week, with his ultimate objective, I was like, what is he doing? What is he doing? What is he doing to this guy? What is he doing to Casey? It’s funny that you said it because I just remember a couple days ago, I was just working on it, and I was like, no, I’m not getting it. I’m just not getting it. And I was just like, I really sat down and literally did exactly what you were doing. And I was like, yo what am I doing? I looked at my verb sheet, I was like, what am I doing? I went down through all three columns, I was like, no, no. And I just started using, I was like boom, boom. But I know I can get way better at that because you just showed me like three different words that I could’ve applied instead of what I used with my boy, reason with. And it’s’ like no. I’m not reasoning with him at all. This is a serious issue, he’s dealing with family and dealing with family outside of, especially, you know, in this time, you don’t, it’s not reason with. It’s not with, it’s like to. I’m trying to affect you.

Sarah: Yeah!

Student: I still need help with that, but I like where I’m going with it.

Sarah: I feel like I could tell that there was a little lightbulb that went off just there as you saw that. As you were replaying that moment.

Student: Right.

Sarah: I could see it. And what you were playing was a clear action that didn’t look like a “reason with.”

card reads "no more boring acting!"

How to never be boring

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I often encourage actors to “leave it alone” in moments.  Especially when you’re working on camera – if you push, we’ll know.  But on the flip side, it can feel scary not to push when you are not yet accustomed to the feeling of letting go.  Aren’t I doing too little? Isn’t this boring?

The key is all the work you do beforehand. Yes, it’s true that if you don’t prep and then leave yourself completely alone the performance might feel flat.  There won’t be anything going on underneath.  So how do you make sure you’re cooking with gas under the surface even as you surrender and let go?  Check out this class clip to hear a few ideas. (And if you’re needing more, check out this previous post about not being boring!)

CLASS CLIP TRANSCRIPTION

Sarah: Some actors get confused like you’re trying to then substitute the person, your real life person, for the person in the scene, and I don’t think that’s helpful. I think it’s good to prepare with your understanding of it, so you can get that essence of like, okay that stuff is stirring, I remember what that felt like, you know.

Student: Yeah.

Sarah: There was, like, certain songs that I used to use when I had to do scenes like that, songs that were really good for me. I had like, I literally had, this is very like share-y, but I had an old cologne bottle of my ex-boyfriend’s cologne that he had left when we broke up, and I saved it. It had like four sprays left, but I could just smell the cap of it and it was so like…it was all I needed sometimes, just to be like, got it. You know? Those little things that you kind of collect. Songs, images, memories, photographs, smells. You know, those things that just, boom, we’re right there. And it’s not even like a picture, it’s just a gut feeling.

And then you go into the scene and you can put all your attention, and then you can let go. If you leave yourself alone but there’s nothing underneath it, it looks flat. And that’s the thing that actors don’t get is that, like sometimes they’re afraid of being boring, being boring and uninteresting and like no choices, like they’re making no choices. But really, the work is releasing so that the stuff you built can actually come through. When you tense it, you’re literally shutting off, you’re shutting yourself off from being the channel of communicating all that stuff.

Right, again, it’s like the fireside Timothée Chalamet, you know, it always comes back to that. The three takes of Timothée Chalament in front of the fire. There’s no pushed-ness there, but there’s so much happening, there’s so much life inside, because it’s so specific to him.