Actor Growth

One thing that I was thinking about this week was after that workshop it made me think on my experience to date with the acting coach. The advices I got thus far feels like it has more to do with a directional choice in how I portray a role as oppose to methods and techniques to better help my ability to play/land different roles.

A really good example is the comment he made about wanting me to play things more seriously. That one scene I did appeared that it specifically revolved around high school like characters. Now what he did afterwards was that he tried to motivate me indirectly to take things more seriously and started to imply that I need to generally start to treat things with an older perspective.

He loved it when I did the scene where it was so serious and how it showed compassion and really didn’t like it when I started to show a more “uncertain” character side afterwards like an unconfident teenager. He clarified it by saying that I should treat things like this as a mid 20’s character.

Now this was very interesting I thought. In general his advice was very broad in a sense where it was implying that my choice in how I played the character would be fixed by changing my acting range to be more serious and “mature” like. When really, for many of the scenes it came down to my directional choice based on my initial interpretation of the story and setting.

Think of it like this. Imagine it’s like sex education where grown adults in love in a particular country think that kissing or simple skin contact can cause aids or something (Yes there are places like that). Therefore, when you play this character in a particular scene involving casual intimacy you approach it in a way where you are very nervous and fearful.

Afterwards, a person comes up to you and tells you to stop acting like a kid and be more like an adult who is deeply in love with the person. However, because you still have that notion about the character’s ignorance about sex you still play it in a cautious way. Similarly, then the person comes up to you again and of course you as the performer is confused too.

Like with that, simply reviewing his/her interpretation of the setting will change everything. In that example, instead of saying “act older” just changing the actor’s mind that these characters aren’t ignorant about sex will automatically make them play the character to what you are looking for.

I think that is useful too for a director or even actor to keep in mind. If you want to change the way that someone performs a role then the key thing first is to make sure they have the correct interpretation of the setting and circumstances that they are currently bind to I’d say.