How to Stop Acting

by Harold Guskin

  Directors like to direct. They are more than ready to offer direction if you are interesting, even if you’re making a different choice from what they want. But you won’t be interesting if you’re not free. If the director suggests something, give it a try. But also keep exploring the places that are fresh for you. You have to go lots of places in order to find the best one. But even if only one of the choices you make works, the director will see it, and that’s what he’ll remember.

  What do you do if the direction you’re getting doesn’t make sense to you? Just go somewhere other than where you went before. What you just did didn’t work for the director, or he wouldn’t be offering direction. So whatever you did before, don’t do again. Do something else, even the opposite of what you did. But do it consciously only for the first line or so. After that, take a breath and go wherever you want—explore. An actor can do almost anything well for a line or two. After that, you’ve got to be totally free in order to be good. Directors will recognize and appreciate your freedom. They may even think the difference in your work was triggered by their suggestions. And in a way it is.

  Just remember: exploration equals freedom. So don’t try to please them.

  Do Only One Thing at a Time

  If you are reading, you can’t be talking. If you are talking or listening, you shouldn’t be reading. You can’t access a complete range of responses if part of your mind is reading while your mouth is moving, or while the other actor or the casting director is talking to you. When I’m preparing an actor for an audition, I sit across the room from him taking the lines off the page in the same way I’m asking the actor to take it off the page. When the actor is saying his line, I look at him and listen. I’ll know when I have a line. The actor will stop talking, or something will prompt me to look down.

  Even more importantly, I don’t care what my next line is. Sneaking a look at it while the actor is saying his would only take me away from my responses—away from my feelings and instinct. I need to listen, or I have no real response. I let my response to the actor’s line take me wherever it goes. I never know where I’m going and I don’t care. Then I look down and pull up my line. My response to it may take me someplace unexpected. I let that happen because it’s interesting to me, to the actor opposite me, and in an audition, to those watching. That’s because it’s surprising. And my response is real.

  So while the casting director is reading, don’t read his line or your line. Just listen. When he stops—then and only then—look down and get your line. Then look up and say it. Feel free to blurt it out any way it comes.

  I had an audition for a small part in a Sidney Lumet film many years ago. I first read for the casting director. She said her line, and I just looked at her, because her head was in the page. There was a silence, and then she looked up. Then I looked down, picked up my line, looked up, and said it. She was now watching me as I spoke. She was not reading my line as I was saying it. We went on like this, with her looking up at me each time.

  She must have been pleased, because even though I was much too young for the role, she sent me on to read for Lumet. He also read with me. Predictably, his head was down in the page. I did the same thing I’d done with the casting director. I waited for him to look up from the page. Then I looked down and got my line, looked up, and said it with him looking at me. He smiled and we went on like this.

  When we finished, the first thing he said was, “Harold, tell me about yourself. Who did you study acting with?”

  I didn’t get the part. But the director was engaged by me and therefore was curious about who I was, where I came from, what my acting was about. That is all we can ask from an audition—the auditor’s engagement with us. That way, they don’t forget us.

  Many actors are afraid that working this way will leave too many pauses. So what? What’s the rush? Besides, they’re not stupid out there. They see the actor look down to get the line. So of course there’s a bit of a pause. They know this script is new to you and that you are at the beginning of your work on the character.

  And think of this: what they see when you are listening is you. And what they see when you are talking is you, not some actor with his head buried in the page, reading, waiting for his cue, approximating the way the line should sound—in other words, giving a line reading. That’s the best he can do, because operating this way, he doesn’t have a real response. Why? Because he wasn’t listening. He was worrying about not leaving pauses. This is of no use to those watching. It tells them nothing about the actor.

  What do you do if the director or the casting director asks you to go faster?

  Here’s a simple trick. Pick up the cue for the first line you say. Pounce on your line without questioning it at all. Or tie your first two lines of dialogue together so they move quickly. Take a pause and breathe. Then go back to taking it off the page. This will satisfy the director because you can do that for a moment—for a line or two—without being false or boring. Any longer and your responses will become generalized, which leads to repetition and dullness. You will not be responding to what you are hearing or reading. You will be thinking about going fast.

  Work with What the Reader Gives You

  Actors often come back from auditions and complain to me, “When you are acting opposite me, I’m alive and free, because you are a good actor. You’re giving me something to respond to. In the audition the reader was bad. I didn’t get anything from him.”

  I say, “Thank you very much, but that’s not true. You were getting the most important thing from the reader—the line!” It doesn’t matter how badly the line is read. If the actor is listening and not reading, the lines will mean something to him. He will have a real response. And so he will have something to say with his line. In fact, a strange delivery from a reader may create new feelings about the lines—feelings the actor didn’t expect.

  The director and casting director hear the reader’s line as well as the lines from the actor auditioning. But they are only interested in the actor and his response. If he is alive and listening when someone else is talking as well as when he is talking, that doubles their pleasure.

  Attack Your Fear

  Fear is a big subject in acting. It is always with us, no matter how experienced we are. At the beginning of our careers, we’re afraid of being untalented, unprofessional, forgettable, or just plain bad. Later we fear being disappointing and undeserving of our success. But there is nothing more consistently frightening than auditioning for a role. After all, everyone is afraid of talking in front of strangers, especially strangers who are judging us.

  Unfortunately, fear is one feeling we can’t use in acting because it incapacitates us. Fear weakens the actor, undermining his trust in himself and his instinct. Fear keeps him from taking chances, from being foolish and risking failure. Failure is not what we think—failing to get the part. Failure is being dull! So to give in to fear by hiding behind preparation or technique makes no sense in acting. When we are acting, we are already in an exposed place. Everything we do is visible to those watching—they can see our fear, they can see us hiding, they can see our timidity. They may understand it and recognize the reasons for it, but they will not accept it, because our job as actors is to surprise them, to interest them, to startle them. There is no place to hide.

  If you walk into an audition prepared with every choice spelled out you will have to fulfill all those choices. In the tense atmosphere of an audition this obligation will increase your fear and deaden both your instinct and feelings.

  The best way to deal with your fear is to attack it. For instance, if when you come into the audition room you are afraid to take your time, take a long pause at the very start. Don’t say your line. Let the silence make the reader and anyone else in the room look up and stop what they’re doing. Then take a breath and begin.

  By waiting, you will have challenged your fear. At first you will feel the fear intensify. But then it will dissipate, leaving you feeling strong and free
to do what you want. Usually actors don’t take time. They think they want to get it over with. But this is really fear working on them. To get rid of the thinking and the fear, attack it right at the beginning.

  If you’re afraid you won’t be able to get your voice out, yell the damn line. Afraid of being quiet? Whisper the line—barely audibly. Make everyone lean forward to hear. Afraid of moving—make a bold move. Afraid of standing still—stop moving and stand there like a rock!

  What you fear, you must attack, the moment you become aware of it. Don’t try to sneak into it. After you attack, take a breath in and out. Then go somewhere else—anywhere else—so you’re not stuck in the same place. Go to the opposite choice or to any other different choice. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or wrong or if it’s smart or stupid. What matters is that it will rid you of your fear. You will be free, and you will empower yourself.

  You can’t act when you’re feeling weak. You can’t really do anything when you’re feeling weak. You lose the power to act—to do.

  I remember my first professional audition. It was for several roles in a summer repertory company, including Cabot in Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms. I was particularly scared that I could never be strong enough for this powerful character and I had had almost no time to prepare.

  I was on stage. I had just finished reading a scene from Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge in which I had been moving all over the stage, full of anger and tears at the end. I took a deep breath, holding the O’Neill script in my hand. Then I looked down for a moment. I could feel the fear rising in me—the fear that I would have nothing for this character. So, I attacked my fear by doing nothing for a long time. I stood there. Didn’t say a line, didn’t move. The quiet was incredibly intense. Finally, I said the first line. Line by line I challenged myself I let in what was there—what I felt—nothing else. And that’s what I said with the line. I didn’t move at all.

  The director told me later, “When you did Cabot, you just stood there and said it. No one else did that. It was very powerful watching you just standing there with the book. I knew you could play this character and a lot more.” I got the position in the company specifically because of that role, the one I had been most afraid of at the audition.

  The best way to deal with fear is to attack it!

  Take Control of the Audition

  This is a bold strategy, but sometimes it’s an effective one, as Mariel Hemingway once discovered.

  Mariel had an audition for the movie Creator, in which she hoped to play a tough young woman who must seduce a genius (played by Peter O’Toole). The director and producer hadn’t wanted to audition Mariel for the part. They saw her as too soft. Her agent insisted that they see her. I told her, “There’s no way they’re going to cast you in this role unless you take control of the audition.” In fact, I told her, she had to make the director and producer a little scared of her, so that they were no longer sure who Mariel Hemingway was or what she was going to do. If they saw the Mariel they thought they knew, they wouldn’t hire her.

  She asked me how she could do that. I said, “When you walk in, if the chair you’re to sit in is here, say to yourself, I don’t think I want to sit there, and drag the chair—without saying anything about it to them—across the room to another spot that puts you in a different relationship to whomever you’re going to talk to. Then keep doing things with the reader and with them that say, this is my audition and I’ll do what I want! Make them figure out what the hell you’re doing. Because if they don’t have to do that, then you’re not going to get the part.”

  She got it.

  Jon Bon Jovi had a similar problem in his very first audition for a small, serious film, Moonlight and Valentino. The director didn’t want to audition Jon, convinced that audiences would never be able to see beyond Jon the international rock star to accept him in the role of a down-to-earth housepainter. But Jon finally got seen, and in the audition, he had the courage to not act at all. He simply explored the scenes of the script without a trace of performing. The director was startled by Jon’s ease and simplicity; he saw a guy with a sweet, gentle nature who was just another working class stiff. The Jon I knew, and the one the director discovered, was, in fact, perfect for the part (which he got that day).

  Kevin Kline once unwittingly provided me with an excellent case study in the relative effectiveness of different approaches to auditioning.

  The film director Alan Pakula contacted Kevin after seeing him in The Pirates of Penzance on Broadway. He told Kevin he was going to be directing a film of William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice and was seriously considering Kevin for the part of Nathan. “It’s a wonderful character,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it too much.” He said he was months away from making any casting decisions and urged Kevin to read the novel in the meantime: “Then we’ll talk some more.”

  “I said I would read the book and call when I was done,” Kevin remembers. “I am the world’s slowest reader. I am reading, and the more I read the more I realize that this character is a sort of genius! He knows everything about medicine, math, history, literature, art, music. I’m thinking, the longer I take reading this book, the dumber Alan will know I am, and the less chance I have of getting the part. But I can’t speed-read. I’m thinking, I’ve got to lie and say I read it and loved it, get a synopsis of it and talk to someone about it. Luckily, while I was reading and worrying, Alan was busy doing another movie and I guess he never had the time to think that I was illiterate.”

  Pakula had told Kevin he wouldn’t have to audition for him. But as Kevin and I talked about the situation, it became apparent to me that he should audition for Pakula. Months had passed and he still didn’t have the part. No one had even called his agent. Kevin had yet to act in a film at that point. And many big-name actors with far greater reputations than his wanted a crack at what was, after all, a juicy role in an important film. As much as Pakula obviously liked him, Kevin was going to have to make it impossible for Pakula not to cast him.

  So Kevin insisted on auditioning, or as he recalls it, “Harold insisted that I insist.” He and I started preparing for the audition, which turned into two days of battling back and forth about what to do. Kevin said he “wanted to be off book and be able to blow the roof off.” This is how most actors think they must approach auditions. I wanted him to do the opposite. I wanted him to explore the role in front of Pakula—just let himself improvise with the lines, taking it off the page piece by piece.

  My reasoning was not theoretical. Kevin was used to working on stage, exploring the role in depth in rehearsal for weeks before performance. To try to “act” the role all of a sudden in front of the director at the very beginning of his work would make him feel rushed. The pressure of so little time would take away his legs. He would be thinking about results—something he would never do on stage. It would not be Kevin at all that Alan Pakula would see in that audition.

  “We talked about the traps if you are playing someone that is a genius,” Kevin remembers. “I wanted to do it ‘right,’ so I wanted to play someone who has glasses and wears a tie. I wanted to make a series of cliché choices that would say, I am the genius.”

  I believed the genius was in the script and Kevin just had to get out of the way. What I saw when Kevin took the lines off the page was that Nathan didn’t have to look like an Einstein, bristling with a genius’s eccentricities. Nathan was a schizophrenic who could be whoever he wanted to be at any moment. Kevin’s instinct flew in all directions, taking him to magnificently strange choices. His natural responses moved incredibly fast, flying off a phrase to a place so unexpected and yet so real, personal, and brilliant that these sudden shifts in behavior seemed perfectly normal. But they didn’t come together logically. And that was the character.

  Any attempt to order this bizarre behavior would have been too obvious, not attractive and interesting enough for the film. You can analyze the pants off the character but you’
ll never find the territory that way. It’s got to be impulsive. It has to happen in some sort of subliminal way or the audience will catch up with it too quickly.

  I told Kevin that if Pakula saw him at work on the script as I had seen him—free, inventive, absurd, and intelligent—he would know Kevin was the only actor he could cast. Kevin was never more “Nathan” than when he was doing whatever he wanted to do at the moment. But this required Kevin to trust himself and his instinct completely.

  After two days of working with me, Kevin went to audition. I made him promise he would start by taking it off the page.

  He called me the next day, from the lobby of the Paramount building in New York. He had left the audition and called his agent, who had just gotten off the phone with Alan Pakula, calling to say, “Tell Kevin the part is his.”

  What happened at the audition?

  Kevin did sit and take it off the page at first. He told me Pakula was really pleased with what he did. Then Kevin asked if he could do it again. Of course Pakula was interested in seeing more. So Kevin did the scene again. This time he was really going for it—moving, doing it from memory—“blowing the roof off.”

  When he finished the scene, there was a pause. After a couple of seconds Pakula said, “I like the first way better.” Then he asked Kevin to stay and read the rest of his part in the script out loud with the casting director. He wanted to hear the role with Kevin’s responses. So Kevin took the rest of the script off the page and landed the role.

  It was too early for Kevin to perform at that audition. When performing, we are telling the director, This is it—this is what it should be. But we certainly don’t know that at the beginning. And we may not even know that at the end. If we place our trust in our exploration of the text, then we are revealing to the director who we are in relation to this material. If we are performing, we are revealing only our “idea” about the character. The director may not see the actor through the acting.