When I coach an actor for television, I’m forever slowing him down. My sense is that if I can get him to take his time at least for the two or three hours he is working with me, I’ll have opened him up again to himself and his responses. I’ll have reminded the actor to trust himself, and that reminder can stay with him. Then, even on camera, when the actor is being pushed to go fast, a piece of him will be saying, “Trust yourself. Take your time. Breathe. Explore.”
Taking time to prepare in advance helps the actor to feel free and unpressured on the set. When James Gandolfini brought me the first episode of The Sopranos after our work on the pilot, I told him he would have to stay several days ahead of the shooting schedule in his memorizing and preparation if he wanted to be relaxed and available on camera. This much memorizing can be daunting at first. But it gets easier and quicker as you get into the routine of the show, especially if you continue to take the lines off the page properly. Getting to know the other actors and their characters helps. You will hear them in the lines as you go through the script. And when you are filming, all you have to do is listen, and your line will come to you in response.
Playing Major Roles on Episodic Television
Jim Gandolfini recalls that I helped him early on in our work together when I told him, “You don’t have to know what a scene’s about when you’re doing it. Sometimes in real life you don’t know what you really want or what you need.” In episodic television, the major characters go through many episodes. The writers keep rewriting episodes and scenes, sometimes until the last moment before shooting begins. The actor doesn’t always know how the story has changed from one week to the next or what will happen next. So it is best not to think about the story. Just go with the flow. Otherwise your effort to make sense of the story will show, and your acting will become repetitive, predictable, and melodramatic.
Even when you know exactly where the story is going, you must never play the story. To make a major character in episodic television multi-dimensional, you must play the moment. Respond to the lines, and let them take you through each change in the scene. By not playing the through-line of the scene, the actor lets the story play itself and opens up the greatest possibilities for character twists and surprises.
At the same time, a major actor in a series can’t try to make every moment happen. If he does, he will wear himself out in a few episodes, and he will wear out the audience along with him. He must simply be available to the moment, without censoring himself or trying to make too much sense of it. There will always be another moment to stimulate him.
“You’re the main character. Let the other actors come to you,” Jim remembers me telling him. He elaborates, “I’m surrounded by great actors—Edie Falco, Lorraine Bracco, Michael Imperioli. I’m in awe of these people, the way they come in and do stuff. If I had tried to push it, to control the scenes—me, I’m swimming through muck, trying to figure out what to do. You said, ‘Let them do their thing, and you just gotta be there and react.’”
Many of my students tell me they love Jim Gandolfini’s acting because he’s alive every moment on camera. They forget where he’s coming from, and they can’t guess where he’s going. When I mention this to Jim, he says, ‘That’s because I probably don’t know what I’m going to say next.”
In one Sopranos episode, Tony gets angry at a telephone call and starts smashing the kitchen phone with the handset. Finally, he pulls the phone out of the wall. Jim told me that just before the take, he told Robert Her, the actor who plays his son, to stand still. “I winged the thing this close to his head. I’m so glad it didn’t hit him. It ended up in the dishwasher. That was all surprise. It’s the best thing that happens.” Surprises on set are not only good for the actor, they’re good for the show. But the actor can’t surprise the audience if he’s thinking about what’s going to happen next, or even what he’s going to say next. You can’t plan a surprise.
Acting is acting, whether in film, theater, or television. Except for these problems I’ve pointed out, an actor playing a major role on episodic television should be doing what he always does—finding the way to free himself from Acting, playing it moment by moment, letting his instinct and his emotions take him wherever they go, trusting the script to sculpt the character.
However, sometimes a young actor joining a series in a major role feels the pressure of his acting training weighing him down. Chris Noth told me about his work on Law and Order, which he had done before we started to work together. “It was a disastrous first year,” he said. “This huge mountain of information—this technique that puts you in your head—makes you feel inadequate.” He was talking about the techniques he had learned in acting school, which he was trying to apply to his episodic work on Law and Order. “I have to do all this stuff. If I don’t do all these exercises my talent or instinct isn’t going to catch on fire. I’m playing the history and pretty soon nothing is real. You’re thinking about all that and the moment is escaping you. And on Law and Order I’m dealing with a text that’s all procedure, indicated character references—truncated, staccato style.”
Chris was on the show as a major character for several years. “But finally, I thought my best work was toward the end when I just didn’t give a shit about that and I was playing the moment—being in the moment with the text. By that time I had done all the research, which didn’t really kick in during the first year. But it did when I let it go, when I wasn’t playing the work. I wasn’t playing the research, I was playing the moment.”
Guest Roles on Episodic Shows and Small Parts in Film
The biggest problem directors have with small parts in film or guest parts on television is that the actor playing the role wants to make a big impression. The actor wants to make a whole meal out of a snack. And when all the actors surrounding him are in a groove, an actor trying too hard to make a small role important will stick out even more.
Jim Gandolfini points out that playing small parts can be more demanding of the actor than a major or ongoing role. “Sometimes your character’s got four or five scenes. He’s there for a reason. So you’ve got to figure it out. ‘Okay, what’s this guy’s life like?’ It’s not in the script. You’ve got to work ten times harder, cause it’s not there. Tony Soprano is easy to play because it’s there. I don’t have to fill in the blanks. Every time I turn around, they’re filled in. Sometimes it’s harder to be the guy who comes in and is just there, has a few lines, and doesn’t really have anything pushing him along.”
With parts like this, it’s important not to make a fuss about your acting. The way to do this, paradoxically, is to prepare as if the character were central to the series or film. Think of yourself as if you are on the show every week, or in the film throughout the entire shoot. Imagine that a given scene is just one of many in which you will act. Don’t try to do too much. Talk to yourself before each take. Tell yourself, “I’ve been living this character. I know him better than anyone else. This is just another line, another thought, another moment in the character’s life. So don’t make it a big deal.” You’ll look more secure, and you’ll act your best too.
So prepare as you would for any character. Anything you don’t know, research or figure out. Let the lines, no matter how few, take you to your imagination. But do this, as always, instinctively. Don’t struggle to be “imaginative”—just making up things about the character because you think you must. Let the character talk to you and let him take you wherever he goes.
Comic Roles
If you land a role in a sitcom, remember that like all acting it’s about character. Yes, sitcoms have to be funny. You’ll be told that by the director, the writer, the producer, the network executives, and your out-of-work actor friends. So you may be tempted to go for a big, silly, over-the-top style of acting in an attempt to please them quickly.
Don’t. This approach will only make your acting general, whereas every successful character is funny in a specific way. True, sitcom acting can often be bigger th
an acting in dramatic series. But the truly memorable sitcom actors have been memorable because their characters, not their acting per se, have been bigger, more outrageous, or extravagant—and utterly real. The audience won’t find over-the-top acting funny, but a character that the audience believes is over the top may be funny.
For an actor to be funny in general, whether in sitcoms, film, or theater, he must be dead serious. Comic acting is about taking an assumption or idea to its illogical conclusion. It’s Lucille Ball working in a chocolate factory, stuffing the chocolates into her mouth when the conveyor belt goes too fast for her to pack them. It’s illogical to us but completely logical to Lucy. She has been told that, above all, she must not let the chocolates fall off the end of the belt or she’ll be fired. So when she can’t keep up, she eats one chocolate, then another and another. Those she can’t cram into her mouth she puts in her bra. She can’t swallow. She starts to get sick. But she stuffs her mouth with more and more chocolates because she doesn’t want to be fired.
If a moment is illogical to the audience but logical to the character, it will be both true and funny. The more illogical to the audience and the more logical to the character, the funnier it will be.
GETTING TO BIG EMOTIONAL MOMENTS
For young actors, big emotional moments, whether on stage or in film or television, can be daunting. This is because of their fear that the emotion won’t be there when they need it and the distraction of what they think is expected of them. So they push for a bigger feeling than they need, which makes things worse. I know because I’ve been there. I found it hard to be as emotional on stage as I was in life when I was a young actor. And all the exercises to free my emotions only exacerbated the fear of not having them in performance.
What I have been striving for in this book is to help young actors attack their fears by placing their concentration on what really matters—being in the moment without censoring yourself—in order to access instinct and emotion. This process gets easier as you get older, simply because for most of us, the older we get, the less we care about what is expected of us. When we do what interests us and what we really want, our emotions come along for the ride. They are a natural by-product of listening and responding. I don’t believe an actor needs to do anything special most of the time for his emotions to be available to him. And whatever feelings arise in him can be used for the character.
Every actor finds his own way to get to his emotions in tight spots. Glenn Close put it vividly when she said, “Actors are like car radios. You put ‘seek’ on, and we go back and forth and back and forth until we home in on something that will elicit a response. We’re all emotional station seekers.” It doesn’t matter how we hit the emotion, as long as we are open to the script and to ourselves—not only our memories but our imaginations.
For me, surprise is a major element. In each take, I go to a different place, to surprise myself, to see what happens. Sometimes I’ll yell in inappropriate places or take a pause where it doesn’t belong. If it doesn’t work, I always have another take and another surprise. I remind myself to be bold in the take, not to try to sneak into the emotion. If you have prepared well, this is the time to take your chances—to go somewhere new, do something different, shock yourself.
There are times, however, when we have to get to a big emotional moment quickly. In the theater this is not so difficult. Usually a play develops in a sequential way for the character, so the actor’s feelings build naturally to even big emotional moments if he concentrates on what he hears and says, moment by moment. His natural response to the text will take him to his feelings, as long as he doesn’t care what feelings come up. If, however, the actor is preoccupied with the emotion he believes he must reach later in the scene, he will be distracted by it and unable to concentrate on the present moment. He will no longer be listening or responding, and his fears will take over. He will find himself with no emotion. Then he will try to push his feelings, and that’s what the audience will see.
And in film and television, when we don’t have the luxury of performing in sequence, we can’t always rely on the script alone to provoke our feelings. Sometimes, for technical reasons, even a given scene will not be shot from beginning to end. For instance, if a scene starts in the bedroom and continues down the stairs, through the living room, into the kitchen, and then back up into the bedroom, the beginning and end will be shot first, to accommodate the camera and crew. So in movies, emotions frequently can’t be carried through. And the actor may have to be able to get quickly to an emotion—particularly a big one—especially for a close-up.
I’m not a big believer in exercises for actors, but I have developed one as an aid for the actor who, after thinking about a scene and preparing it, feels compelled to explore the lines with a deeper emotion or to go to a very big emotion. Jim Gandolfini refers to it as The Breathing Thing. Here’s how it goes:
Take a quick breath in and hold it. Contract and release your diaphragm in a very fast rhythm, so that it feels as if it is vibrating. The sensation will be like a fast panting. Let your entire chest start to shake. This allows your solar plexus, which is in the center of your chest between the left and right ribs, to shake as well. Let your mind wander—picking up whatever memories, images, or thoughts come to you in relation to the scene you’re playing and the emotion you’re exploring. Your held breath should feel stuck in the vibration, as if you cannot expel it easily. The sensation may remind you of what you felt like as a child in the grip of a sobbing fit, your diaphragm contracting spasmodically and your breath caught up in it. The images may keep changing. Different faces or experiences may surface, remembered or imagined. Imagine yourself growing chilled, cold, even freezing. It doesn’t matter how odd the shaking becomes as long as you do it.
Continue until you must have air. Then let out your breath and begin the exercise again. Repeat for twenty minutes, no more. You may be surprised at how quickly the feelings come upon you. Within a very short time, you may be crying or raging. When that happens, stop! You are finished for the night, even if it’s only taken you five minutes.
Here’s what happens to me one evening when I do The Breathing Thing:
I take a breath and let my diaphragm begin to vibrate very fast. My mother’s face comes to me. I keep the shaking in my chest going. I see her at my father’s funeral, pushing his casket so that it gently rocks back and forth on the canvas ropes that are ready to lower him into the grave.
I let my breath out and begin again: quick breath, hold it, diaphragm shaking. My mother’s face comes to me in her shroud, in her simple casket. I can’t breathe, so I let the air out.
With the next breath, the shaking comes very fast. I am cold. My mother’s sweet face comes to me like a sleeping, swaddled baby’s. I see my grandmother’s face in hers, my uncles’ faces. I have seen these images before but the exercise makes them come one upon the other, flooding me with emotion. I can’t hold back. I let my feelings up the back of my ears into my sinuses, and into my eyes. I let the tears fall. I don’t judge whether it’s enough tears.
I take a few moments to let myself breathe naturally, to let the image go. When I am breathing calmly, I am finished with the exercise.
At first you may be distracted by the technical aspects of the process until you get used to the breathing. You may also find that you get mildly light-headed as you do the exercise. That’s as it should be. The exercise works by changing your natural breathing pattern, bypassing the usual distanced responses to go quickly to the feelings we have when we are startled by an image or thought that has real emotional power—the strong emotions we associate with the state of bodily agitation we have artificially created. The shaking prolongs and intensifies the feeling and won’t let you get away from it. In other words, the exercise throws the actor into a physiological state that reflexively generates the intense images, thoughts, and emotions that would typically have brought on that state in the first place, and that are indelibly associated with i
t in our deepest being.
“It throws everything off,” Jim Gandolfini says about The Breathing Thing. “When you do it, you can go a lot of places really quick. It helped me because when I’m doing The Sopranos, sometimes I literally only have time to change clothes before I have to go to a scene where I have to get angry.” Jim does The Breathing Thing in his trailer, and reports, “You get angry real quick.”
Bernadette Peters uses The Breathing Thing not only in film, but in concert. She told me, “When I have to change moods quickly—go to an emotional song, an emotional place, a place I know I want to be—during the intro to the next song, I turn away from the audience and do The Breathing Thing to prepare myself. It wakes things up!”
In order to get comfortable with this exercise, you should do it every night over a period of several weeks. Pick a different emotion each night, unless you’re already filming. In that case, use the emotion coming from the scene. Even then, don’t feel obliged to stick with that emotion. Let your mind wander to whatever feeling comes up. And don’t obsess about doing the exercise perfectly. There is no exact “right way”—everyone does it his own way.
Don’t judge the success of the exercise by how much you cry or how big the feeling is. You must never judge your feelings because you’ll never think they are enough. Then you will do too much. The next night, do the exercise again. Maybe nothing will happen. That’s all right. Work on it for twenty minutes, then stop, even if nothing has happened. Go back the next night and try it again.
How to Stop Acting Page 15