The Actor's Personal Connection

In coaching an actor this week, I was struck again by what feels obvious—and yet is so often missed: the actor must find a personal connection to the circumstances, or the character’s conflict never becomes a lived experience.

Revisiting the concept of talking out as a way to help actors own everything they think about a character and a play.

Building the character's attitude towards their partner is not only essential in playing a scene, it saves you. There's a danger, however, in building the attitude all on one level.

Sometimes I think we've just had too many classes - and too many teachers telling you what you have to do in order to play a part. An actor needs to develop the ability to figure out what is necessary for each part.

The ability to visualize and live off images that are in the actor's imagination is a great skill to develop. It keeps you from acting in a vacuum,– to say nothing of solving the problem of a bad partner.

Actor work is not an intellectual exercise. And it’s not about “good writing.”It’s about experiencing.The audience doesn’t come to the theater for the words on the page. They come for the experience of what the character is going through — in the world of the play.In this episode, I return to one of my core tools: Talking Out. Through études — structured improvisations in which you speak aloud everything happening with your character — you begin to move off analyzing and philosophizing about the character and move into the experience of the character.

Actors have a tendency to abandon their technique as soon as they get an audition – and leap to a performance. Just taking a little time to really think about the text makes an enormous difference.

There are many roads in to building a character and, unfortunately, there is no paint-by-number approach. It's great as an actor to play with several different techniques.

When an actor does not connect, you catch them "acting". It doesn't matter if it's a television series or a play. Specificity helps us connect.

We have a tendency to leap to clichés because the dialogue seems to lead us there. There's a way to fight this.