Action is Acting for Actors

Acting is action. It’s all in the name. It’s not thought, it’s not feeling, it’s not emotion: no one knows the thoughts, feelings and emotions of fictional people. They don’t exist. When you give an actor a clear ‘something to do’, they come alive, they take action, they act. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t think, feel and emote, just that the over-concentration on these things is unnecessary and so let us focus on the actions of the actor as the mainstay of any technique of acting, if such a technique is necessary.

But for the actor to take action, they must first have a clearly established goal. Something to head towards, a target to give their action some direction. All the very best actors are doing is taking action under the imaginary circumstances of the scene. You do not need to believe you are someone else, you need to take actions on the character’s behalf. What’s more, it is not that you need to become the character, but that by taking the actions of the character, the character becomes you.

When you perform the psychological actions of the character, you become engaged on all levels, you are emotional, mentally and physically connected to what you are doing. Of course, it’s not that simple, but I suppose what I’m saying is that if you are given the actions to perform, quite a lot of the rest takes care of itself.

One of the most difficult lessons to teach someone is to stop them pretending and to let them leap out and just take action. It requires courage, it requires bravery and it’s not easy, but if you can work off the other actor, if you can understand a script, your last step is to take action. So, take action.