What is it that distinguishes the average, employed actor from the truly memorable, astonishing actor? Great acting can seem mysterious. Training gives you tools for cultivating many of its ingredients. If you find one of the rare great acting classes, you can cultivate many of these qualities in yourself with profound results.
Here are a few vital characteristics of a great actor: a free flow of emotions and impulses expressed in the body and voice; an understanding of how to create life-and-death, moment-to-moment acting; a vivid imagination; and a body and voice capable of telling all kinds of stories.
Four ingredients. Each one trainable. Let’s take them one at a time.
The first ingredient: an open instrument
We live in a demanding world. People can be insensitive, self-absorbed and emotionally shut down. Interacting with people can hurt, often far more than we consciously realize. Life shuts most of us down. We tense up and build a protective psychological wall around ourselves. The temptation to avoid our feelings is irresistible for most people. Feelings can be no fun. We live in a culture filled with distractions and addictions that take us away from who we are on the deepest levels. We are forgetting who we are, and our deepest experience of life, over and over, because it seems easier.
So when it comes time to act and genuinely experience the reality of a character, we are blocked. Great actors understand the human tendency to shut down. They fight against it, daily, for their whole careers. There are many ways to slow down and open yourself up: yoga, massage, meditation, 12-step meetings, nature walks, long drives, proper nutrition, cutting down on caffeine, eliminating drugs and alcohol from your life. It is vital that you continually find ways to slow down and open yourself up emotionally as an actor. This is not a wellness aside. It is craft maintenance, the way a violinist humidifies the instrument.
Many approaches to acting ignore the emotional walls actors bring to the work, promoting the idea that pursuing objectives and playing actions will free you from all your emotional blocks. Learning to pursue objectives and play actions is a vital part of actor training, but it often does not free an actor who is blocked. It sure would be nice if it were that easy. There are hundreds of exercises that can liberate you from emotional blocks and inhibitions, but many acting teachers do not deal with blocks in their classes at all. The block gets diagnosed… “you’re holding back,” “raise the stakes”… and never solved. Diagnosis without a method is just criticism.
Are you sure you can move effortlessly into any emotional area required by dramatic material? Be honest with yourself about this, because everything else in your training depends on the answer. Often, it is the most sensitive and talented actors who wall up and shut down. It makes sense: the most sensitive and talented actors are the most tempted to escape their deeply felt experience of life. They have the most to escape from. It isn’t easy to stay open, relaxed and available. But it is a requirement if you want to be a great actor.
The second ingredient: knowing how to make war
Acting is a tough profession. Pursuing an acting career is a constant battle. And most of us really want to get along with our fellow actors. We want supportive acting classes and to support one another at auditions and on the job. We want to send the auditors the clear message that we would be very fun to work with in a rehearsal room eight hours a day for many weeks.
But many young actors are so busy pleasing one another that this wonderful trait spills over into their acting. Dramatic material often turns on people who cannot get what they want from one another. If you want your acting to astonish, you must learn to be a polite professional off-stage while simultaneously creating WAR that is titanic while you are acting.
Many aspiring actors do not know how to do this. And a lot of writing today, especially for the screen, does not supply the kind of built-in conflict that characterizes great drama. You just see lines on a page and the scenes don’t seem too meaningful. You must add the depth yourself if you want to be remembered. Stella Adler called it “agitating the circumstances.” Great actors learn how to do this by studying the great dramas for many years… and the great dramas are a technology for this, refined over centuries. Read them the way an engineer reads blueprints. Where exactly does Williams plant the bomb in the first ten pages of Streetcar? What does Kushner make Harper want that she cannot have? The answers are trainable instincts, and they come from volume: play after play after play.
You need a place where you can learn to do this where there is no penalty for failing… a real acting class. There is a penalty for failing in front of casting directors, in any setting, audition or paid workshop. They are judging you. Class is the one room where failure is the curriculum.
So in a real acting class, you learn how to raise the stakes, beyond simply being told you must. You learn why people fight. You learn relationship psychology. You learn about and experience your vulnerabilities, and how vulnerability can fuel human conflict. You learn about archetypes, relationship patterns and the human psyche. When you do, your imagination will grow leaps and bounds. So will your acting.
And war-making is inseparable from the second half of this ingredient: life-and-death, moment-to-moment acting. Moment-to-moment does not mean drifting along on whatever happens. It means every single beat of the scene is an event… something lands on you, changes you, and forces the next move, the way a point in a tennis match forces the next shot. Watch average acting and you can see the actor riding the scene like a passenger on a bus, waiting for their stops. Watch great acting and every moment is a fork in the road where something was genuinely at risk. The difference is not talent. It is training: learning to actually receive what the other actor gives you, at full cost, and let it change what you do next. That receiving is a skill, and like every skill in this article, it develops in a room where you are allowed to fail at it a hundred times.
One more thing about conflict, because actors misunderstand it constantly: making war in a scene has nothing to do with being difficult in life. The most ferocious scene partners I have known were the kindest colleagues in the building. The war belongs inside the story. Learning to hold that line… total commitment inside the imaginary circumstances, total professionalism outside them… is itself one of the marks of a trained actor, and casting people can smell it in a room within minutes.
The third ingredient: a living imagination
We live in a culture that saturates us with sensory input: lights, sounds, screens, movies, music, computers, city noise, on and on. We are stimulated all the time. We don’t have to use our own imaginations much, because so much of our culture does our imagination work for us now. This is a huge problem for young actors. Television and computers already supplied whole imaginary worlds… you never had to invent friends to play with in the sandbox. Now machines can generate the images, write the stories, and do the daydreaming on your behalf. The muscle you need most is the one the culture is most aggressively offering to flex for you.
Great acting comes from a highly developed imagination… your unconscious, infinitely vast dream world. As an actor in a technological world, you must work even harder than the generations before you to develop and connect to your imagination. I have seen actors’ imaginations grow tremendously with the right training. I have been amazed at the results of dream work and imagination games. I learned long ago not to hold auditions for my studio, because with the right tools and exercises, actors previously dismissed as untalented can produce startlingly interesting work. What I look for instead, when I interview actors, are the rare qualities of full commitment and artistic integrity. Talent is far more common than the industry believes. Commitment is far more rare.
The imagination is also where your dreams live, and your dreams are your imagination expressing itself every night, free of charge. Start writing them down. There is a whole article on this in the Reading Room, and the dream work we do in class is some of the most startling work I have witnessed in three decades around actors.
The fourth ingredient: a trained voice and body
Finally, great actors must have a flexible and expressive voice and body that connects to their highly developed imagination. It is astounding how few aspiring actors have good voice or body training.
All you have to tell stories is your body and voice, and the imagination that controls them. Your body and voice must be capable of painting all kinds of colors… of hitting all kinds of notes, physical or vocal. You must have a well-developed physical and vocal vocabulary, with tons of letters in your physical and vocal alphabet. Different stories require different physical and vocal languages. Acting, voice and movement classes give you sustained opportunities to develop and expand your voice and body.
But choose those classes carefully, because many voice and movement approaches are technical and devoid of the imaginative component. Voice training that stops at breathing and scales can disconnect actors and singers from their imaginations… very bad news. Movement training can pursue technical mastery of the body without any attention to storytelling and the imagination… very bad news also. Look for the rare voice and movement teachers who connect their work to acting, to your imagination. My own voice lineage, the Roy Hart tradition of extended range, treats the voice as the whole human being made audible, inseparable from imagination and feeling. That is the standard to look for, whatever the tradition. You must have a feeling of vocal and physical ease when you work. And this takes years of study for most actors.
On learning it “on the job”
You can learn a great deal on the job. But the job cannot carry the whole burden of developing your acting tools, voice and movement. An acting job is not the place to learn a process you should already have at the audition. Nothing is more annoying to directors and professional actors than someone experimenting in a professional rehearsal with a process they know little about. If you think you can be a successful, fulfilled actor with no training, or with training that ended in college years ago, you have an unfortunate opinion of what it takes.
There are many more qualities required to be a wonderful actor. These days, some actors delude themselves into thinking the great actors never studied. The great actors of the last generation knew better. They knew that the basic lessons must be practiced throughout an entire career, and that advanced lessons deserve sustained exploration in classes, rehearsals and performance. They knew there was an infinite amount to learn about acting… far more than most professions. They did not insult the study of acting. They had a deep respect for it. If you know these things, you are already way ahead of many aspiring actors.
Respect is not enough
But respect is not enough… you should take action. You can work on your acting process and your voice and body every day. A specific acting process and a highly trained body and voice give you more to offer at auditions and in rehearsal. Make your studies as high a priority as getting to auditions.
Here is what that looks like in a week, concretely. One class where you actually work on your feet. One hour of voice or body work daily, even twenty minutes counts when it is real. One play read closely. Your dreams written down each morning. One session of observation out in the world, among people unlike you. None of it requires permission, an agent, or luck. All of it compounds.
You can do it, starting right now, no matter how long you have neglected the vital work that great actors do. Take the next right action. You deserve it. The performing arts need you now more than ever.
Jason Bennett Actors Studio. Based in NYC and Jersey City, NJ. Online worldwide. Expanding to Florida.
Put these questions into rehearsal with How to Make War When You Act and Using Dreams for Your Acting.
