The next day I sat on the floor squished between two actors. One actor after another performed this painful scene, and each time it fell to the level of the writing. The teacher pointed to me and another actor, and we got up and performed the scene. I stayed true to my emotional throughline. We were the only ones who got laughs. The material wasn’t funny. The character’s perspective is what’s funny, and the character’s perspective is why everyone was laughing. Adding the appropriate beats may work for certain well-crafted comedies with traditional setups and payoffs. But the jokes in traditional comedies have to be funny for these rules to work. If the writing isn’t funny, rules about how to treat the writing may support the tone of the genre but they won’t beget humor. I suddenly understood why comedy is largely considered something you’re either born with or you’re not. If you are a natural at comedy, your inborn comedic rhythm may serve to heighten well-written comedies and save poorly written ones. But if you are not a natural at comedy, scripted comedic training generally offers an understanding of the comedic form, but is less geared toward imbuing actors with comedic instincts. Yet all you need is to commit to a great character throughline. The choice is so distinctive you can be funny even if the material is not, while staying within or breaking form, and you can do all this without getting in your head. Comedy can always be found in the character.
The teacher, tone deaf to laughter, ripped my performance apart, dismissing it, then turned to the class and insisted it takes months of training at this school, breaking down beats and rules of comedy, to get the scene right. The lecture ended on a note chastising all the women in the class for playing the character with the assumption that she wasn’t very bright.
That evening I mulled over the idea of how the role could have been played intelligently, if there is no indication of it in the script. Is it poise? Confidence? An alertness or curiosity? An air of snobbery? Articulation or a rapid speech pattern? Indeed, these are traits actors can use to support intelligent dialogue and intelligent choices inscribed in the text. I got in front of the camera again and tried various ways to play the role intelligently, but paired with text that lacked any suggestion of an above-average IQ, intelligent this character was not.
No attitude you put on can inform others of your IQ; emotional intelligence maybe, but not cognitive intelligence. Any definitive indication of cognitive intelligence to which your audience is privy is determined by the writer through the dialogue and choices in the script. The actor breathes emotional, physical, sensory life into the character. And this is the collaboration. I started noticing the collaboration breakdown in character descriptions for auditions:
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ARLENE: 25–30, stylish, independent thinker, passionate, unusual beauty. She owns and operates the most popular restaurant on the promenade. She has her mother’s brilliance and her father’s shrewd business sense, but her passions lead her down many dangerous paths.
* * *
The actress is responsible for Arlene’s physicality, her voice, and her emotional life, her passion, perhaps her lust, or curiosity, ambition or determination. The writer is responsible for character traits like independent thinker, brilliant mind, shrewd business sense, as these traits must be expressed in words and actions determined by the dialogue and plot.
***
Dr. Ekman: “There are a number of other aspects to personality where emotion doesn’t play a defining role.”
Author: “I’ve been trying to narrow down exactly what aspects of a character’s personality an actor is responsible for. It seems actor responsibilities are three-pronged: the character’s physical appearance, voice, and emotional life. It strikes me that no one but the writer could possibly be responsible for the cognitive life of the character. Intellect can’t be revealed without words/symbols [semiotics] and intelligent action in the form of dialogue and stage direction. We’ve seen proof of this historically. Until neuroimaging, patients who were unable to move and communicate beyond their primary physical needs were wrongly thought to be cognitively vegetative. Of course, the medical community now calls this horrifying state ‘locked-in syndrome,’ where someone may be alert and aware and their brain fully functioning, but they are trapped inside a paralyzed body, unable to communicate. I’m starting to think about how actor and writer collaborate to make up the fully functioning being, and I’m wondering whether you think this view in any way relates to how different mechanisms in the brain make up personality?”
Dr. Ekman: “Emotion plays an important role, but so does cognition, so does the way in which we have learned the habits of thinking that we have, our values, our conceptions. Even the language that we use only partially represents experience, and we often tend to only experience that part which is represented in language and miss other things. So emotion is certainly a very strong and important part of our personality and being, and of course especially so for the actor. But so is the way in which we appraise a situation, evaluate it, the beliefs that we bring to bear and the values that guide us, and none of that is emotional. That’s all cognitive.”
The universality of emotion
Dr. Ekman is perhaps most widely recognized for his work with micro expressions. However, another finding of Dr. Ekman’s related to micro expressions is perhaps the most relevant to acting. Darwin theorized that many emotions are inborn and universal, and evidence supports his theory. Nevertheless, until Dr. Ekman’s work in the early 1970s, the conventionally held view championed by Margaret Mead was that emotional expression was learned, and culturally dependent. Dr. Ekman’s studies of preliterate tribes in Papua New Guinea finally proved that both feeling and expressing certain emotions are universal and unlearned characteristics of being human. He also discovered that recognizing emotions in the facial expressions of others is something we have evolved to do as naturally as breathing. Emotional recognition crosses race, gender, class, education, and geographic location. In other words feeling, expressing, and identifying primary emotions are not skills actors have to acquire. They are inborn. Although we aren’t born with instincts for what translates on-camera we are born with instincts about feeling, expressing, and recognizing emotion.
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“My job is usually to express emotion as freely as possible.”
Meryl Streep1
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Emotional blocks
Many actors have convinced themselves that emoting on cue is problematic. So much so that volumes of exercises have been developed to coax emotions and relaxation. Yet such exercises reinforce the false assumption that feeling and expressing emotion are emulous skills. They make something we would do readily, something to achieve. Emotions become finicky the more we overthink or intellectualize emotional experience. In their natural state, emotions are spontaneous reactions. Treating them as a goal, a target, instead of a reflex objectifies them and delivers them to the domain of the analytic, a domain ill-equipped to deal with them.
One basic requirement is that actors are able to conjure an emotion on the spot. Any emotion. On the spot. My method for getting actors to do this is simply asking them to do this. The key is not letting actors think this is such a big request. I ask for it like I ask someone for a pen. And we move right along without the actor having a chance to think about it. You’d be floored how often this works.
Serious conditions such as traumatic brain injury, autism, psychopathy, or acute psychological trauma may inhibit a person’s natural ability to feel, express or recognize emotion—and this is precisely why these are such serious conditions. Humans who do not live with these conditions have the full spectrum of emotions readily available to them. It’s a huge, weird misconception that emotions cannot be easily called forth and effectively communicated between typical humans. In fact, the psychological sciences reject this premise yet the acting world still considers emotions these temperamental unicorns that live inside us and can only be indirectly lured. Coaxing a feeling (an emotion) does not mean faking an emotion. By its very d
efinition, a feeling cannot be faked. Only the physical expression of a feeling can be faked, and that is rarely faked well.
I find the majority of emotional blocks are like a five-pound Pomeranian blocking a doorway. The earsplitting yapping may overwhelm your ears, but you don’t need your ears to step over the Pomeranian. Your working memory can get completely overwhelmed trying to overcome an emotional block. But you don’t need your working memory. In fact, you need to stop thinking about it. Rage is a classic example of an emotional block often seen in actresses, and it can be easily overcome. Socially, rage isn’t ladylike or attractive. However, if an actress having difficulty expressing rage is asked to tense all her muscles, furrow her brow, purse her lips, make a fist, and growl, rage comes. This is usually followed by a reaction of morbid self-consciousness. Sometimes an actress will jut out her chin and her voice will become shrill when vocalizing anger. When this happens I work with her on rooting rage lower in the chest cavity. This takes it out of the head and gives it more weight and resonance. It also serves to lower chin and jaw, frequently giving way to a more impactful delivery. I want to be careful to avoid saying this is a “prettier” expression of rage. It is only an expression more moving on-camera. Sometimes I simply ask the actress to mimic me. I lower my voice and growl, “Do it,” and she does it. I smile, she smiles, we’re all friends, and it’s done. Although she may have reserved her doubts, once she sees the power and beauty of expressing herself honestly on-camera, the self-consciousness dissipates on its own. I never ask actors for a figurative trust fall. All any actor need do is try it on-camera, and the truth is always revealed during playback. Although art is subjective, honest expression of emotion is universally compelling. The truth the camera sees is beautiful, even if it means the actor’s face momentarily contorts in painful ways. Profound beauty is something almost everyone can grasp yet nevertheless evades a satisfying explanation. This is where the science stops, and the art of screen acting speaks for itself. If you are doing anything distractingly unappealing, experimentation and repetition allow you to finesse certain behaviors into those that maintain their reflexive honesty but are less off-putting.
Chapter Endnotes
1 Streep, Meryl, and Graham Fuller, "Streep's Ahead." Interview Magazine, December 1, 1998. www.simplystreep.com/content/magazines/199812interview.html, accessed August 6, 2014.
Reverse Engineering Emotion
Reverse engineering an emotion means to work backward, breaking down or manipulating the physical elements of emotional expression in order to recreate expression and stimulate the emotion. For actors who are truly having difficulty experiencing and expressing certain emotions, Dr. Ekman has a method of reverse engineering emotions that can help get the actor out of their head and back in their body by making the movement so the emotion follows. However, Dr. Ekman’s method is second in importance only to his observation that the emergence, expression, and recognition of primary (universal) emotions happen for human beings without effort. In fact, the repression of these emotions takes such effort that Dr. Ekman has a training program designed to detect when someone is trying to conceal how they really feel.
Dr. Ekman: “I developed the facial action coding system, the acronym for which is FACS. It’s the first tool we’ve had for precisely describing different facial movements. And so I’ve given actors who are interested, a vocabulary. It’s like musical notation for the face. You can hear music but if you want to be able to reproduce it again and again and recognize that same tune when it’s played on a tuba or a violin, you want to look at the musical notation. My facial descriptive system provides you with that, and some actors find that very interesting. I’ve also worked with actors in terms of showing them how, instead of using a sense memory, they can follow Stanislavski’s other instruction which is make the movement and the feeling will follow. And there are certain facial movements, if you make them voluntarily, it generates the entire physiology of emotion. And so I’ve taught them to use that as a skill to bring on an emotion when you want to have it as part of your performance.”
Author: “In which of your books can actors learn about reverse engineering an emotion?”
Ekman: “Actors can look at the second edition of the book What the Face Reveals, edited by myself and Erika Rosenberg. It gives a very good description of exactly what FACS is.”
Author: “Would you say then it’s psychologically healthier for the actor to reverse engineer a distressful emotion rather than conjuring an upsetting memory from their past, via sense memory?”
Ekman: “I wouldn’t say it’s any healthier, but it’s more precise. If we each remembered the saddest moment in our life, it would probably have a common characteristic of somebody dying, but who that person was and how old we were, and any guilt we felt about it, or any anger, it would be different one person from another. That brings in a whole texture of feelings, and the question of course is, how many of these [feelings] are relevant to the particular part you are playing. If you make the muscle movements of the face, that brings in the emotion free of all the associated memories, and anticipations and thoughts, and you can then choose what you want to add to it. It gives you the pure essence of the emotion itself.”
Author: “Do you believe that if you experience an emotion, it has to be expressed somehow?”
Dr. Ekman: “The norm is, if you have an emotion, it produces involuntary changes in your face, in your vocal chords, in your skeletal musculature and posture. It’s fairly quick and fairly inescapable. However, some people can deliberately succeed in hiding most of those signs and a few can hide all of those changes.”
Author: “So if you weren’t deliberately trying to suppress them they would likely manifest themselves?”
Ekman: “Oh, they would always manifest themselves. They’re a crucial part of a package of changes that occur, and inform others [packages of changes] of which you are experiencing.”
***
A study recently showed how scientists were able to successfully place false memories in a mouse. Memory “can be self-servingly Photoshopped, nudged off the mark by suggestion, and corrupted by being dragged out and rehashed.”1 Perhaps one day actors will be able to have false memories of their characters delivered directly to their brain. Until then, Dr. Ekman’s facial action coding system for reverse engineering an emotion is a definitive remedy for actors who have, through trauma, social conditioning, or conscious mental effort, stilted their own reflexes. The codes for the action units (AU) give the muscular information needed to reverse engineer every conceivable facial expression; the physiology then triggers the emotion. Without explicit subversion, you cannot experience the physiology without the emotion, and vice versa. The order, for the purpose of acting, is irrelevant.
To determine if you are truly blocked, experiment with emotions in a nonpressured setting and allow them to come forward on their own, without mental effort. I recommend just sitting with the emotion, much like how you’d sit for a meditation. Notice where it begins to resonate in the body, how it feels physically. Practice allowing emotions to surface organically and know that you have Dr. Ekman’s AUs to reverse engineer emotion should you need them. For the rare, entrenched emotional block, Stanislavski’s final thoughts on acting championed reverse engineering emotion, or the psycho-physical approach. Dr. Ekman’s work is the musical notation for Stanislavski’s opus.
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“My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.”
John Lennon2
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Chapter Endnotes
1 Healy, Melissa, “Memories Can’t Always be Trusted, Neuroscience Experiment Shows,” Los Angeles Times, July 25, 2013, www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-implanted-memories-20130726,0,3603431.story, accessed March 9, 2014.
2 Lennon, John, "The Artwork of John Lennon." Exhibit - Fort Lauderdale, FL. Accesse
d August 6, 2014.
Emotional-Intensity Set Points
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“We all boil at different degrees.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson1
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Friends may describe you as someone who is enthusiastic and excitable. Or maybe those who know you are apt to characterize you as mellow and laid-back. Your emotional-intensity set point is where you are more likely to hover on the valence/arousal spectrum.2 Our bodies have a set point for weight, a number on the scale our metabolism strives up or down to maintain. Similarly, we all have an emotional-intensity set point that falls somewhere on the spectrum of high (excitable) intensity and low (docile) intensity, or high arousal and low arousal of your nervous system.3 An important note: your set point (physiological comfort zone) by no means prohibits you from experiencing the full spectrum of emotions and intensities. Our bodies simply tend to tip the scale in favor of one side or the other.
The Science of On-Camera Acting Page 9