A Zen master once said, “We are exactly the opposite of what we appear to be.”
Are you authentically you? Many of us think we are at first glance. We may describe ourselves as straight-shooters, assertive, or not caring what others think. If we dig deeper, though, we may see that’s a facade.
When I was four years old, my best and only friend down the street was moving away, and I was having none of it. I held on to her, screaming and crying and wouldn’t let her go. My mother had a hard time peeling me off of her. Today, I look back at that moment as a treasure trove of pure feelings of love, abandonment and loss. My mother had a very different perspective: she was embarrassed and angry at me for expressing those raw feelings. I took that chastisement to heart, and became less authentic and more guarded as time went on.
Everyone has stories like this. I’m not blaming parents: the older we get, society does a veritable pile-on with rules of conduct. It’s no wonder that when we embark on an acting career many folks run for the hills when confronted with their own layers of defensiveness.
Thankfully, most folks never have to confront this stuff too deeply, and lead pretty well-adjusted lives. But for the actor, the life-lesson of never showing how you truly feel is the antithesis of what we are supposed to be doing! It creeps up and bites us at the most inopportune times, like at an audition or during any kind of performance!
How can we remedy this and bring ourselves fully in our acting, whether it’s in the studio, on set or on stage? How do we stay authentic as we are taking direction?
First let’s talk about authenticity. Coach Sanford Meisner called it, “Behaving truthfully in imaginary circumstances.”
Our task as actors is to continually work on peeling away the layers that keep us from authentically feeling what our character feels in a given circumstance.This is a life-long journey. If you don’t believe me, attend any acting class in L.A. You’ll see that the coach spends the majority of class trying to lead students to the emotional nitty gritty of each moment.
I had one acting coach who would periodically walk around, asking each one of us how we felt. She called it, “Taking our emotional temperature.” If we weren’t exact with our response, and said something like “fine” we were pushed until we gave a specific answer, like “frustrated”, “miffed”, or “elated”.
Usually when I ask a student how they feel after performing a script I’ll get an answer like, “I read it too fast,” or, “I didn’t punch the client’s name enough”. That is thinking rather than feeling. It shows a lack of connection to the words. I then have to drag their focus from their head back to their heart.
Another thing that can throw us is taking direction. Having a director ask us to deliver a line a different way can derail us if we don’t understand how this whole directing thing works.
The director is supposed to finesse our performance in different ways. It’s not a critique of your choices: they just see the story differently.
When we completely internalize this fact, we can begin to not just tolerate direction, but welcome it as a growing experience! It can be fun to look at things in different ways.
The only way we can truly grow as actors is to be constantly confronted with our emotional blocks and continually work to overcome them. This is why we are urged to get regular coaching, and take acting classes, and do improv. One of the greatest steps toward authenticity we can take is to live the moment of the script, instead of listening to ourselves as we go.
Let go of the fear of not being able to deliver when a director gives you an adjustment, and jump in with complete child-like abandon! There’s nothing like the euphoric feeling of realizing you were lost in the moment of a script. That’s when you are doing it right.Â
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