Playing a High Stakes Scene

You are playing a CIA agent in a television drama, we’ll call her Carrie. In the scene you have to persuade your mentor (a senior CIA agent) to do something risky for you in order to prevent the next major terrorist attack. You only have one piece of evidence and it’s tenuous.  It’s a high stakes, there’s a lot to lose if you don’t convince him, whether your character is right or wrong, she believes that an attack on the United States is imminent and must be stopped. But she doesn’t have proof, so he has to go out on a limb for her – on a hunch.

How do you find the stakes for that? How do you act that level of urgency? Most actors will simply emote the urgency, it will be messy, and result in ‘acting’ – the presence of obvious pretending. Your audience don’t want to see that, they want to believe you are the character.

Carrie is asking her mentor to put his faith in her.

To play this scene, you need to connect to that task and not an emotion for that scene. Acting is psychologically motived action, not emoting.

You need to look to your own life and consider what it would be like, daydream about getting a mentor to put his/her faith in you if there was a lot at stake. What if someone’s life was at stake. What if someone’s safety was at stake? How would you behave?

How would you behave – if you HAD to get it there and then. What if it was a private conversation in a public space? How would that affect your behaviour?

What’s the problem? In the scene, there’s no enough evidence to convince the mentor, so behave like there isn’t enough evidence to convince them, behave like you would if you had to convince someone in a private conversation in a public space that they needed to put their faith in you but they weren’t convinced. What would you do?

Persuade, Bribe, Warn, Threaten, Concern, Implore, Entreat… 

Do these things in the scene with the restrictions of relationship type, environment, stakes, what the task implies, and against the implied obstacle in the scene. 

And you will look like Carrie in that urgent situation.  You do not know how to behave like Carrie in that situation, but you can match those things that affect your behaviour enough to appear like Carrie, and if you connect enough with your imaginary scenario, you will produce the right behaviour, which will engender the right feelings that will make you appear to a willing and complicit audience like Carrie desperately trying to get her mentor to put his faith in her.

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How to Act a Monologue Part 1

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Acting: What do I do with my hands?