Why most actors make lousy acting teachers

I know, I know, you just think I’m bring controversial or annoying, but from my experience and that of many of my peers that their favourite and most influential acting teachers were not actors but writers and directors.

Why and how could this be?

Firstly, actors are often far too close to the process of acting and cannot get the distance to examine what they are doing on an objective level. Many actors have reached the heights of their career without ever being consciously aware of precisely what makes them a great actor. They are unconsciously competent and that makes it very difficult to step back and codify the process of acting.

Not all. I don’t mean all actors, but in my experience of directing and teaching for almost twenty years now, most can talk about it, usually in ways that are not practicable, but they cannot actually teach others to do it. They convince themselves otherwise, because who could bear to live with the knowledge that one was a charlatan and our role little more than that of a flim-flam man.

I know this because I’ve spoken to actors that have become teachers and they couldn’t teach acting to save their lives and when questioned fail to move beyond the realms of the mysterious intangible bullshit that mires our beautiful craft in such nonsense.

Why can directors and writers do it better? Because they often have the ability to step back and consciously move to a more objective perspective. They see how the mechanics of the scene works and how the actor can best achieve the desired results. Of course, we have to be righteously defensive against results playing itself, but teaching is much more like directing than acting is. Those that think teaching is some kind of performance do not understand the process of education.

The acting teacher must be able to instruct the actor in how they work from scratch, unfortunately many focus on the wrong things.

There is one and only one thing the actor needs to know how to do, Play The Scene. Play the Scene. Everything else either serves this idea, adds to the actor’s capacity to play the scene for the audience or it’s a waste of your time.