5 Mistakes That Actors Make
Since actor training and coaching is so inconsistent, it is easy for actors to make a lot of mistakes. The profession itself even encourages some of them. But the best actors learn to avoid these mistakes:
1) SHOWING instead of DOING – the performance is written all over their face, they are acting it all out for the audience’s benefit. You do not need to become the thing you are meant to be doing. You must do what a person would do in that situation, and they wouldn’t spend a single second presenting that to an audience.
Act as if no one is watching, with this proviso:
You have two obligations to the audience. BE SEEN and BE HEARD.
2) PRESENTING EMOTION – actors seem convinced that acting is about the portrayal of emotion. It’s certain that their job involves that, but the focus on creating that emotion is misplaced.
Emotion is the by-product of action, so if you want to bring the right emotion to a scene, you need to discover what causes that emotion, and not the emotion itself. Presenting the emotion is one of the actor’s biggest mistakes.
3) LEARNING THE LINES with INTONATIONS - If you decide how you are going to say the lines in advance, you will not play in the moment. If you decide how to say the lines in rehearsal, you will not play in the moment. Learn the lines cold. Then let them mean what they need to mean in the moment of performance.
4) BEING UNDERPREPARED - I’d like to defend actors with this one, fear of failure does crazy things to people and often leads them to under prepare BUT it is your responsibility as a professional actor to be prepared. Over prepare in every way, except the precise minutiae of your performance.
5) ACCEPTING MEDIOCRITY - The number of actors that confess to me that they are not doing their best work is shocking. Do not accept mediocrity, become obsessed with being exceptional. Set your sights high, demand excellence, from your self and others. Never settle for less than you know that you can do, and if you turn in a mediocre performance today, do something about it tomorrow. Working is one thing, being exceptional is something else.