Yeah, I thought about that but didn’t mentioned her because as you noted, Lebowitz isn’t a professional actor (at least in the sense of pursuing it as a primary profession although she has done a few other roles) but the show also featured some real world NYC minor officials that nobody outside the city would likely recognize, and one unfortunately appearance by Rudy Giuliani.
Stranger
I can’t reply at length right now, but yes. Thank you for your in-depth reply.
You were ninja’ed 21 hours ago by bordelond. 
One thing about good actors that’s always impressed me is the ability to deliver a line multiple times, each time sounding like the first time the words have been uttered. First, there are rehearsals. Then there are the performances, whether takes and retakes for movies or seven nights a week plus a matinee. I can’t imagine keeping dialog fresh after the hundredth performance.
Are there tricks actors use to prevent a performance from being stale?
I’m thinking of “Bookstore clerk who is glad to look up sales records, while blinking repeatedly” and “Secretary who leaves no doubt that she’s from New Yawk” (from the accent and the fact that she’s unfamiliar with any human inhabitation west of the Meadowlands)
It’s been (Og help me) 50 years since my college days as a Theatre major and I haven’t done any acting since then, so I unfortunately never had a chance to keep up my skills, such as they were.* One thing I remember from my acting classes was being told to observe people as much as possible in order to pick up on mannerisms and actions which you might be able to use as part of a performance. I remember I used to practice eating “European style” (keeping your fork in your left hand instead of always switching it to your right) and practicing different ways to hold a cigarette while smoking.
*On my desk I still have an award I received for “Most Improved Actor” in my senior year.
In Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Michael Palin as Pontius Pilate supposedly made up a new name for Biggus Dickus’s wife on each take so the guards would genuinely appear to be on the verge of cracking up each time. (The actors playing the guards had been told nothing about the scene except that they had to keep a straight face or they’d be fired.)
Just in Season 1: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Cynthia Nixon, Aida Turturro, William H. Macy, Patricia Clarkson, and Samuel L. Jackson.
I don’t have anything to add, except that taking an acting class will give you a really good appreciation of acting.
And it’s cheap therapy
Good catch on Hoffman; for the others it wasn’t technically a first role (nor was it for Maura Tierney; mea culpa) but certainly it was before they were widely recognized.
Samuel L. Jackson had been working since the mid-‘Seventies, albeit mostly in roles credited as “Black Guy”, “Hold-Up Man”, and “Ulysses - Three-Card Monte Game” (I recognized him from the last one from A Shock To The System, which was a great dark comedy with Michael Caine) and played Stacks Edwards in Goodfellas as the driver who neglected to dump his truck and gets whacked by Tommy DeVito, but was still widely unknown until the mid-‘Nineties when he was in Jurassic Park and True Romance, and then his star role in Pulp Fiction. Imagine a world in which which Samual L. Jackson is a bit player doing two or three line roles for scale instead of carrying films like A Time To Kill, The Long Kiss Goodnight, and of course his underrated turn in Deep Blue Sea.
It doesn’t always work out, though.
Stranger
This was going to be a follow-up question. I’ve heard of “method” acting but don’t know what it is or how it differs from other approaches. What is the underlying theory of Meisner?
Happy New Year and thanks so much for taking the time to craft that thorough response.
I kind of understand this, but if I get angry I look different than when Walter Sobchak gets angry. So I can’t just be me getting angry. How does an actor create a character? I would think that the script doesn’t always tell you everything you need to know.
Agreed! Spectacular is the word.
I imagine what’s worse is when an actor’s role is as an actor who is bad at acting in a performance. How do you know if they’re doing a good job? They’re supposed to look bad, so if they look good they’re bad… Right?
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.
Thank you @Cervaise
I wish my Theater teacher had explained these points as clearly.
This thread reminded me of an exercise we did in class after being given scenes we would perform.
Each of us was interviewed (in character) by the teacher. She asked probing questions that determined how well we understood the character and how they might respond in certain situations. The interview approach initiated responses far removed from just the lines in the script.
I would have done better if I had considered the points you explained.
An interesting choice, esp. since Scott’s performance in Strangelove was mostly Kubrick’s doing, telling him to do some hammy takes first before the “real” ones-then he just used the former for the film, to Scott’s ire.
I thought it was mostly knowing your lines and not bumping into the furniture! 
I’m not an expert or anything, but for an example of playing a “bad actor” watch Natalie Portman in May December where she plays a somewhat pretentious (and ultimately mediocre) actor preparing for a role. The “real” acting throughout the movie is very good, but the scenes where she is portraying the “made for TV” film are just a bit “off”. Not like over the top bad (like Matt Damon doing Loki’s play in the Thor movies). But just bad enough that you realize the movie she’s making is probably not as good as all the bullshit she was going on about in the making of it.
You could also check out Sabrina Grdevich as Claire in Slings and Arrows, who turns in some very convincing performances as a talent-deprived actress at a Shakespeare festival.
I heard a similar story about Bruce Willis in Die Hard 2. Apparently he wanted to play John McClaine all serious as opposed to the jokey-wisecracking hero from the first movie. The director did something similar with serious takes and jokey takes and then picking the best ones…