You’ve heard horror stories of moments on stage when an actor’s memory bank goes awol. Even though an actor has learned the material, they couldn’t remember the next line if their life depended on it.

Whether you’re a newbie or an acting veteran, if you have a human brain, you’re at risk of forgetting your lines at some point. 

Why Do Actors Forget Their Lines?

According to educator Elizabeth Cox, this forgetful phenomenon has a distinct evolutionary function: to protect you from danger.

Say you’re having a great time camping when a grizzly bear emerges and starts rushing towards you. It’s that forgetful function of your mind that allows for the fight-or-flight response to overrule the slower, more logical thought process that accesses stored information in your memory bank.

This important task in the brain has saved countless lives throughout the course of history.

Unfortunately, sometimes that fight-or-flight function overreacts. The anxiety associated with performing before audiences is stressful, but at least it’s not a grizzly bear.

However, it might feel like your entire career depends on the success of one performance. In these instances, performing can take on a threatening shape. The problem with fight-or-flight is that this function can also interrupt your flow when far less is at stake.

As nerve-wracking as it is to lose focus on stage, it is very common to experience this at some point when faced with an audience.

Fight-or-flight mode also causes singers to forget their next lines. This response stumps business people giving a big presentation to clients, interrupts professionals while speaking at seminars and freezes students’ minds during final exams.

Examples of A-List Actors Forgetting Their Lines

The Irishman actor Al Pacino knows what it feels like to forget his lines. In the clip below, he recounts the moment he forgot his lines on stage while performing Shakespeare.

“And I said, ‘My lords, so-and-so-and-so …’ and I realized that I went into another Shakespeare play. And I thought, ‘(*#@%)! I’m in ‘Hamlet.’ So I’m doing it, and then I thought, ‘Well, how do I get out of this?’ You’ll have to check out the video to find out.

The Good Nurse actor Eddie Redmayne recounted one of his worst memories as a performer on PeopleTV. He’d long feared the idea of finding himself on stage struggling to find his next line, but he never really thought it would happen to him.

One night while performing in London, it did. Redmayne describes his experience in the clip below.

Ways to Help Remember Your Lines

To reduce stress levels and make such episodes less likely, Cox encourages regular exercise, breathing exercises and practice their material in ways that match the kinds of stress they’ll experience when they forget their lines. For example, actors might consider practicing their lines before bright lights or in front of people they don’t know.

While uncomfortable, life and careers do go on after line-forgetting moments. Pacino didn’t let his Shakespearean snag stop him. He’s one of the few performers to have earned the Triple Crown of Acting. Nor did it affect Redmayne, who went on to win an Academy Award. Those memories have been reduced to war stories.

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