As an actor, you are always training regardless of whether you are seasoned or just beginning a career in acting. You want to say, “I have a craft.”
You are always in the pursuit of sharpening your tools as you develop strong acting abilites.
You are looking to keep your instrument alive, responding, open to stimuli.
Actors depend on having an instrument that works. You need to exercise it. Here are five basic essential things you have to work on constantly to sustain your acting career.
Script Analysis
Pick up plays and screenplays and break them down, even if your’e not a stage actor.
Understand the script analysis of it from A to Z. Make a list of events—relationships, wants, conflicts and obstacles—and look for what is not obvious. That’s good script analysis. Look for the deeper meaning of things. Go out on a limb in your analysis. What could be the extra layers of complexities that exist?
Those discoveries will lead you to make choices that are off-kilter and grow ad an individual actor. Again, the more you train yourself to do this exercise, the more you’ll develop your acting skills and the easier it becomes to do this intricate work.
Creating Characters
You should constantly be thinking about creating different characters.
Keep writing backstories for different characters. Create profiles, composites and explore their physicality. That is always the way into discovering who they are. What are the most controversial events that could have happened to them?
Read lots of biographies. It will inspire you to find twists and turns. Interview folks, ask them about their lives and uncover their secrets. It will give you ideas as you grow your professional experience!
Improvising
Yes, you have to be able to improvise and think fast on your feet. To be able to put it in your own words makes you able to own the material you are working on on a deeper level as you traverse the roads of becoming a successful actor.
Also, knowing you can improve the scene makes you fearless—a feeling that you could handle anything. You can have a lot of fun getting out of your head in that way and completely forgetting what the next moment is. You really have to trust your impulses and channel them in the most creative way. If you’re stuck in a rut during your rehearsal process, improv can do wonders to break the cycle. Plus, it can help boost your acting auditions.
Knowing the Words
Regardless of your experience level or acting technique of choice, work on committing lines to memory as it’s a must-have acting skill. If someone comes to see you perform in a play, remember that cliché question they ask you backstage, “How did you learn all those lines?”
All joking aside, for some professional actors, memorizing can be a challenge. The breaking down of the script, knowing who the character is, and improvising the dialogue before committing to the words that are written can very much help you with this tool.
Again, it’s a muscle that you have to train. Memorize a poem, a song, a monologue, or a scene every week. Once you understand the intent of the line, say it and make it yours over and over again. Your body has muscle memory; it remembers.
Although improvisation is wonderful, if Aaron Sorkin or David Mamet wrote that script, you will need to get it perfect word for word.
Know How to Work in Front of the Camera
Yes, practice makes perfect, but the moment a camera is filming you, everything is different, regardless of which acting technique you employ. Learn to watch yourself and learn from it to help develop your professional experience. It’s important to understand if the choices you are making are reading.
Look at what your body is doing; look at what your face is doing; see how you take direction and implement the adjustments quickly. As you try out different choices, find out which one is the strongest and which one plays the best.
Every tool mentioned above is a muscle that needs to be worked on consistently in order to bolster your craft, improve your acting auditions and deliver strong acting performances. Once you have that foundation, repetition will deepen your work as an actor, so roll up your sleeves and get to work!
Michelle Danner is a renowned acting coach who works with A-List Actors privately as well as on set. Michelle trained with Stella Adler and Uta Hagen and was voted favorite acting coach by Backstage readers and featured coaching Andy Richter on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien. Michelle has two books, The Daily Ritual and The Golden Box. Please find more about Michelle and her acting classes at michelledanner.com.
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