Okay, so… the topic of “how do actors do what they do?” has been a common one on the boards forever. I’ve previously written lengthy responses here and here among other threads. Those go back twenty and twenty-two years respectively, and I stand by everything I wrote previously. This thread originally started with a new and different question, one I don’t remember being asked before — how is an actor trained. Since I’ve never written anything here on that previously, I was happy to respond. Now, though, it’s leaving that question behind, and evolving into the more fundamental, and well-plumbed, topic of how the craft of acting simply works. On that, I’ll just point back to those earlier comments, as they explore the topic thoroughly and there’s nothing significant I would retract or rephrase.
Similarly, this is a question that has previously been explored. I would commend your attention to this earlier thread. It’s short, but the replies are lengthy and detailed, and provide an excellent overview comparing the various theories and schools of acting.
I will also address this question directly:
I talked about this in my original response above. I will repeat those points for clarity.
In the modern theories of acting, character is revealed by action. An actor may have chameleonic talents for accent, or changing posture or attitude, but it is the actions chosen that illuminate who someone really is. By action, I mean “the things one does to pursue the things one wants.” If the character is romantically interested in someone and wants to convince that person to return the romantic interest, how does the character go about it? Blunt pursuit? Indirect pursuit (e.g. talking to the person’s friends)? Manipulation (e.g. setting up putatively platonic interactions with the conscious intent of building a relationship)? Outright deception? What the character does illustrates who the character is. The character is not a funny hat, or a funny walk. Those are just decoration. The character is what he or she wants and how he or she pursues it.
You get some of that from the script. A well-written piece of material will give the actor most of the raw material they need to start building the character. Some basic script analysis will reveal the character’s narrative spine, and deeper analysis, moment to moment, will provide a map of how the character proceeds along that path. However, there is creative latitude for the actor to make different choices, scene to scene and beat to beat. An experienced, well-prepared actor will come to a scene with a range of options that are supported by the text. It will never be the case that there is a single correct answer, a single correct choice, for a given moment. The actor will instinctively understand that the choices fall into a specific area, and will eliminate other possibilities, but will be free to explore those choices during rehearsal. Or, in short — the script (hopefully) gives you everything you need to get started, but it (probably) doesn’t answer every single one of your questions.
Say the script presents your character threatening another character. The scene is about your character trying to convince someone to quit their job and leave the company. The script has your character revealing possession of compromising information to the other person, basically engaging in extortion. That’s a broad-strokes tactic, and defines the boundaries of what the character is doing in the scene. Your character is not “negotiating,” your character is not “charming,” etc., and actions in those areas are not available. Your character is “threatening,” so your choices must fall into that tactical range.
But there is still a range, and the specific choices will be informed by given circumstances, and reveal the character. Do you threaten desperately, because there’s a ticking clock and if you don’t succeed your own career is screwed? Or do you threaten coldly, because you secretly like this person and hate ruining their life so you have to clamp down on your own emotions? Or do you threaten jovially, because you’re a psychopath and you enjoy watching them squirm? And on and on and on. These are the things that expose and explain the character to the audience — but in all cases, the actor must bear in mind that they are fundamentally actions that affect the other character. This is not about “emoting,” taking a paintbrush and dipping it into an emotional bucket and slathering the performance with feelings. This is about internalizing the given circumstances, and then looking at the other character and trying to make something happen to, with, or by them.
(This basic approach originally comes from Stanislavski, but has been much elaborated in the years since.)
You asked, if I get mad “like this,” how do I make a character that gets mad “like that”? Well, an actor (at least, a modern actor experienced and/or trained in modern acting traditions) doesn’t really think in that way. The actor starts by thinking about who the character is in the context of what the character wants, and then starts charting out the actions the character performs in pursuit of that goal. Then the actor (if they’re any good) chooses the most interesting possible actions, eliminating the obvious and uninteresting ones, and brings those potential actions to rehearsal. The other actors will do the same. In rehearsal, you put those choices in the back of your mind, and you listen and pay attention to what the other actors are doing. Based on their choices, you reach into your grab bag and start trying out your own choices. Or, perhaps, the other actor is doing something really interesting, and gives you a new choice. These choices are always actions. These choices are not “funny walk” or “foreign accent.” Those are technical layers on top of what the actor considers to be the real performance, which is the sequence of active and responsive tactics in pursuit of the objective.
I’ll give you two performances by one actor that crystallize and illustrate what I’m trying to explain.
Watch Dr. Strangelove and pay attention to George C. Scott’s performance. Then watch Patton and, again, pay attention to George C. Scott. In both movies, he’s playing military men — both generals, in fact. He isn’t really changing his voice. He isn’t doing anything obvious with his physicality, like a limp or whatever. And yet, both characters are completely distinct. Turgidson does things Patton would never do, and vice versa. Only some of this is in the script, in terms of how the dialog is technically written. Most of it comes from performance, the moment-to-moment choices Scott is making about who each man is, what each man wants, how each man attempts to affect those around him. And if you put those two performances side by side, you will see a veritable acting class in the importance of distinct and interesting choices.
If you’ve already seen those movies, don’t just rely on your memory. I implore you, if you’re genuinely interested in the subject, to watch the movies again, and ignore everything about the movie except the performance of Scott in each one. Devote close attention to Scott’s work as an actor, which is both technical and instinctive, and watch how focused he is on the other actors. It’s a brilliant demonstration of how to reveal character through active moment-to-moment choice.
I’ll also add a postscript here, on a topic that hasn’t really been raised yet in this thread but that, in looking over previous threads, seems to come up a lot: how does an actor keep things fresh, when performing and re-performing the same scene over and over, with the same dialog, the same blocking, the same necessary actions, and so on? If you’re on stage, you may rehearse a scene a hundred times or more, and then perform it several dozen times (or hundreds of times, if you’re lucky enough to land a Broadway hit). If you’re working in film, you may repeat the scene for five, ten, thirty, fifty takes, and then repeat that again for two, three, or five camera angles. How do you keep it alive, every time?
This is hard to explain to anyone who isn’t an actor, but there’s an analogy, I think that everyone can identify with.
Think of your favorite personal story. Your go-to entertaining anecdote that you love trotting out in social settings, or when meeting new people, or whatever. You’ve told the story many times, you’ve got it down pat, you know where to draw things out for effect and where to skip over unnecessary details. From experience, you can predict where your listener may react in certain ways, and you’ve prepared for those potential reactions with pauses, tangents, and other adaptations. We all have at least one of these stories. Most of us have more than one. When the conversation takes an appropriate turn — that time I got one over on a terrible boss, or that time I realized I was having a health crisis, or whatever — we can reach into our back pocket and deploy the story.
You may have told the story ten times, or a hundred. But you know, as you look at the person listening to you, they’ve never heard the story before. They don’t know the details. They need to have certain things explained for the story to make sense, and they need to have certain things emphasized for the story to be entertaining. You know this, so you tell them the story knowing it’s the first time they’ve heard it. No matter how familiar and rote it is to you, if you want the other person to enjoy the story, you have to tell it a certain way. If you have any instinct for storytelling at all, you naturally understand this, and click into the appropriate rhythms.
Acting is like that. Fundamentally, above everything else, it’s storytelling. As an actor, you are telling a story. You’re telling the story of your own character, and you are collaborating with the other actors to tell the collective story of the play, or movie, or TV show, or whatever. The only distinction is that you’re telling the story from inside, as a participant, rather than from outside as a narrator. You are re-enacting the story, rather than telling it in past tense after the fact, but at the same deep, underlying level, you still snap into the same storytelling instinct.
Just imagine how you feel when you get the opportunity to tell your very best personal story to someone who’s never heard it, and that’s approximately how a good actor feels when acting.