An Essential Lesson

If there is one thing that I must impart, it is about lines. In my career to date, there is one issue that I come up against time and time again: lines.

Look, you are an actor, your lines are vital to your performance. Learn them all dead cold, with no intonation and do it before rehearsals/filming begins. The freedom you will feel for doing this is elating.

It is not acceptable to sort of know them, to paraphrase, to wait until the last minute. Sit down and learn them, and learn them verbatim.

And verbatim means verbatim. Not kinda or sorta, verbatim. If you want to make up lines, go be a writer! And then see how you feel when actors fuck with your lines, paraphrasing and hacking up your precious words.

“But I don’t know how, I don’t know the best ways.” Well, here is a tip, it is not magic, just sit down and memorize them until you learn them. Cover and speak, use a dictaphone, get an iPhone app, write them out or use memory hooks like pictures.

You cannot know your lines well enough. You cannot over-learn them, that’s a bullshit myth. If you want your lines to be truthful and fresh, learn.

I hear lots of excuses, I believe none of them. If you sit down long enough, you remember them. If you don’t, you wont. They will not ‘go in during rehearsals’, that’s not the purpose of rehearsal. The purpose of rehearsal is for the actors to practice the actions of the character. If this is held up by your paraphrasing, stuttering unlearned excuse making, stumbling, then you are holding everyone else back.

I can barely believe that I have to write a blog about this, isn’t this a given? From my experience, it is not. How sad.

As Spencer Tracey once said about acting ‘learn your lines and don’t bump into the furniture’.