The Universal Action

When I work with acting students at my acting studio in Glasgow, I learn a great deal from them. One of the things about being around aspirational and inspirational people is the amount of drive to succeed that they have and when they arrive in our classes and we offer them a set of tools with which to take their innate abilities and strive, they often really do make giant leaps.

You see intent plus action is a powerful thing. When a desire meets the capacity for action and is shown a way to express itself, it’s amazing what happens.

The same thing happens with characters. All characters have a desire, they want something, they are compelled by it. As an actor, figuring this out is vital. Trying to work out the character’s emotional state is pointless, trying to represent it utterly fruitless.

Instead, when we are compelled, we engage in what you could call universal actions. These are certain things that cross cultures people do in pursuit of their goals, to get someone to let their hair down, to get someone to stand up for themselves, to get someone to rise to the challenge: these things are universal.

Once the actor has discovered what is driving their character, the next step is to find a universal action that the actor can do, which will represent what the character in the scene is doing. If the actor really does this universal action, they will create the illusion of character by combining the essence of the scene with their own actions and the writer’s words.

This is the simplicity of acting and what we teach at our Glasgow acting studio and the results are gob-smacking.