Why Non-Actors Give Better Performances

WARNING: If you are a professional actor, this blog may offend. But hear me out. I’m on your side.

Why do casting calls keep asking for ‘real’ people and not actors? Reading some online forums, I noticed a trend for proper actors bemoaning the casting of real people in roles that might usually involve professional actors.

By why do you think it’s happening? Here’s a word from an Oscar winner you may have heard of:

“You can find non-professionals and direct them in one movie and it will be real, but then they can’t make a second and a third movie because they’ve given the thing they have. Kids and non-actors don’t know what they’re doing, but, boy, they’re so powerful on screen. It’s pretty humbling for an actor because they’re so straight. When they’re looking at you, they’re really looking at you. And when they’re not, they’re not.” – Meryl Streep

Non-professionals are better because they don’t act. They don’t protect their ability, and they aren’t confused by what acting should or should not be or look like, they just are. This makes them much more natural on screen than people ‘acting’.

Professional actors tend to ‘act’, and by act, I mean ‘consciously pretend’. Now they don’t know that they are, because they can’t see their own performance, but if you look, you can see them ‘acting’, you can see them doing it. You see, trying to be a character, is the most self conscious thing you can possibly do, because you are always aware that you are trying to be other than yourself, and you have to consciously be different, making you instantly unnatural.

You see, if you want to act for the screen, acting is the very last thing you need to do. The struggle is in representing the character and their journey, but non-professional actors don’t trouble themselves with all the hokey shenanigans that professionals believe help them perform. They simplify rather than complicate.

Theatre acting is often terrible because the actors play like they are doing everything for the audience’s benefit, nothing is real, it’s all ‘acted out’. Lucky for the grand old dames of the theatre, the audience are used to being patronised like this, so they just accept it as the status quo.

But in the world of film and television, we expect to treat what’s happening as absolutely real, so we crave total authenticity, and the camera is very unkind, it will punish you for faking it. This makes the job of the actor even harder, even the camera hates ‘acting’.

So when they cast real people, they don’t get that, they don’t get histrionics, they don’t get ‘my method and motivation’ actors, desperate to prove they are artists. Real people just get on with it, without pretend, without fuss, they just do it.

But Streep is right. That’s fine for perhaps one or two jobs, but after that, the roles that suit the nature of that person run out. Otherwise they become typecast and play the same roles over and over.

I know all professional actors WANT to give the best performance possible, the most truthful, but even with years of training, they seem unable to do it. (IT’S. NOT. YOUR. FAULT – the stupid things they taught you didn’t work anyway)

Luckily there’s a way of being real and being a professional actor, it’s what we do at my studio ACS, we teach actors how to be real, how to live truthfully as Meisner called it. We don’t ask them to pretend anything, but to engage in a truthful interaction with the script and their scene partner. This does take training but no character nonsense, no emotional journey, just the habit of viewing the other actors actions through a version of the character’s desire. Then you can ask ‘what is that I want them to do, and what are they currently doing’ – you can then take real – truthful steps towards achieving it.

It’s relatively simple. Doesn’t take three years to learn, and doesn’t cost a bomb.