Is acting difficult?

In My Humble Opinion
21

I wrote a big huge response but the server ate it. Let’s see how well I do at re-creating it.

There are two things that haven’t been mentioned yet, and a third that I think requires elaboration. Last one first.

It’s about ianzin’s contention that “getting into character” is a crock. This is true, yes, for Alan Alda, plus Bruce Willis, Julia Roberts, Andie MacDowell, and any number of other examples you could name. But what about Kevin Kline, Cate Blanchett, Ben Kingsley, Helen Mirren, and others like them?

The thing about character is that it is illuminated by action. And by action, I don’t mean physical action, like going across a room and flipping a light switch. I’m talking about the active emotional tactic used to have an effect on somebody else. We all do this, all the time; if we think a waitress is being dense, for example, we may layer sarcasm into our response, partly to imply that she should stop asking stupid questions. We don’t actually say “stop being dumb,” but we communicate it clearly enough.

Say my character must decline a dinner invitation. The way I choose to do this provides insight into the character. I can do it scornfully, apologetically, absently, or whatever, all with the same line of dialogue. If I’m a bad actor, I just paint the dialogue with that emotional tone, and I’m basically mugging. If I’m a good actor, I make an internal adjustment to personality so my character expresses himself naturally in attempting to have an effect on the other character. Cumulatively, these moment-to-moment choices of emotional action are, really, all we have to understand somebody, and a good actor understands that assuming an entirely different emotional architecture and point of view is necessary to creating a standalone character. Freddie Prinze Jr doesn’t bother to do this, which is why he’s exactly the same in everything.

The thing about this is, I have to know myself inside and out in order to be effective at it. A carpenter has a hammer, a musician has a violin, a surgeon has a scalpel; those are their tools, and they have to know them intimately to be good at what they do. An actor’s only tool is himself, and if he doesn’t know himself, he won’t be as flexible and effective. If I know that when I’m overworked, I get an edge of anger, or that my normal conversational rhythm causes me to pause for a split-second before replying, I can then make those tiny adjustments and come out with a subtly but totally different character. If I don’t know that about myself, I’m helpless to change anything. As my movement teacher used to say, “You can’t do what you want unless you know what you’re doing.”

So yes, there absolutely is something to “getting into character.” (It’s a matter of how highly I think of ianzin that this is the first time I’ve disagreed with him.) The American method style, especially when taught poorly, frequently causes actors to take a few seconds before a scene to look within themselves, to recall a sense memory, or whatever; I find this to be generally indulgent. If the actor has done his work, he can snap into this alternate viewpoint by making an active emotional choice befitting the created character, and sticking to that alternate menu. He will find himself falling immediately into the rhythms of that character, and will naturally make choices from that point of view. If you watch the Barton Shakespeare tapes, you’ll see that those classically-trained British actors barely take a breath before beginning a scene; they launch right into it. But they launch by immediately making a specific choice that snaps them into character.

The second thing worth mentioning, and the first I’m going to add to this discussion, is the importance of listening. Most of the above assumes that if you are able to memorize your lines and gestures and blocking, you can “act.” This is not the case at all. The other actor may try something slightly different, and if you aren’t paying attention, if you’re doing exactly what you’ve always done, then your rhythm will be off, and you won’t connect. Audiences, being human, are very good at reading subtle emotional cues, and they’ll recognize that the performance isn’t working, even if they can’t say why.

So, say you’re in a scene, and your co-performer is having a particularly intense moment, more than usual – tears, anger, genuine laughter, whatever. You have to be – yes – in character so you can “naturally” (for your assumed identity) react to the emotional reality in front of you. Jack Nicholson is notorious for slightly varying his line deliveries across multiple takes, trying to draw new responses out of his actors and giving the director a variety of raw material to put together in the editing room. If the actor across from Jack isn’t keyed into those subtle shifts, the scene doesn’t work, and Jack gets (rightfully) mad.

The last thing to consider is the big difference between stage and film acting, the reason the latter is so much more a technical craft: Movies are almost invariably shot out of sequence. If some of the scenes are in a house, and others are in an office, it makes more sense logistically and financially to shoot all of one location first before moving on to the next. Frequently this means the actor is “cherry-picking” scenes, which means he or she must carefully consider the overall arc of the character and be able to nail the specific points along that arc, so that when the scenes are edited together, the performance flows. This is much, much harder than you’d think it is, especially for a lead role with a variety of emotional challenges and action beats. If the first scene in the movie is happiness and light, and the last scene in the movie comes after much heartbreak and ruin, and the actor has to shoot the first on Monday and the second on Tuesday before proceeding to various scenes in between the two extremes – you can understand the challenge.

So, anyway, the point is, yes, acting well is difficult. It isn’t hard to be a mediocre actor, but if you want to be any good, be prepared to put in the effort.

22

Of course, acting is difficult. Surely everyone has seen their share of lousy community theater, performed by well-intentioned but hapless people. It’s like any craft. It takes practice and skill.

One of my best friends is a Shakespearean actor. Not only does he have to memorize his lines, he has to know what they mean–in both a historical and literal context. Anyone who’s read Shakespeare knows that it’s hard to do, especially without training. In an upcoming production of Romeo and Juliet he’s playing four characters, including Mercutio and Lady Capulet. It takes a lot of mental and physical dexterity to shift between multiple characters convincingly.

I think one reason that people assume that acting is easy is that good actors make it appear easy, a feat in itself.

23

My last acting I did as an undergraduate, more years ago now than I like to admit. What strikes me now, looking back, is the exhaustion I felt after many of my roles. The most demanding, physically and emotionally, was a background part I had in Marat/Sade. The full title gives an idea of what everyone had to do: The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, As Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. So every blessed performer is playing a part-within-a-part: I not only have to act, but act as if I’m a nutjob acting. Spiffy. Oh, and everyone’s on stage for the entire show.

“Knackered” doesn’t begin to describe the effects. After each perf I just wanted to curl up in a ball.

That’s why I have such enormous respect for the truly talented actors out there - those who really inhabit their roles, rather than have them written for their personalities (paging Ms. Roberts). It’s also, I suspect, why so many actors have serious mental and addiction problems.

24

Cervaise offers a charming and cogent rebuttal to my points. May I try to respond wth equal good grace and respect.

I acknowledge that many aspects of the acting life can be ‘difficult’. Learning a lot of lines is difficult, like any other memory task, but actors have less memory work to do than, for example, a London black cab taxi driver, who has to study the streets of London for about 3 years to get his licence.

Acting can be physically draining, of course, but it’s a stroll in the park compared to many other choices. Dancers and athletes face far more demanding physical challenges. So do singers, or anyone playing in a concert orceshtra, or mothers looking after young kids while shopping.

Acting can require stamina. For stage work, endless rehearsals can be quite a test of endurance test, as can all the delays and hold-ups involved in movie-amking. but actors have little to complain about compared to anyone on any production manufacturing line in the world, whose patience and stamina is taxed for more strenuously.

So if, when we say ‘difficult’, we are making these kinds of points, then acting is slightly difficult, perhaps, but a soft option compared to many others.

However, what I find highly contentious is the suggestion that acting involves anything more than I said originally: delivering lines so they sound like talk instead of recitation. Let us return to the sacred cow called ‘getting into character’, and see if anyone wants to see the naked Emperor, or whether you will all continue to praise the finery of the stitching.

Point (1). I’ve heard actors described as if they have to ‘get into character’, but I’ve never heard a plumber thus described. Both people might prepare themselves to do their daily job, and maybe give sme thought to how they might best tackle the challenge of the moment, but from whence comes this pompous phrase ‘getting into character’, when all that is meant is, as I’ve already pointed out, thinking for a moment how to say the lines so they sound like a person talking, not someone reading out loud. It makes no more sense to say an actor ‘gets into character’ than it would to say a dentist ‘gets into his “dentist” character’ before he does a day’s work. Conclusion #1: it’s a very pompous, pretentious and self-inflating way to describe a very simple thing that millions of people do every day viz. getting ready to do their job.

Point (2). If actor A says he ‘gets into character’ before playing a role. and actor B says he does NOT do so, how would I tell the difference? You might say that A would deliver a better performance. But I might equally say I thought B was miles better. It’s an entirely subjective call. Take ‘Marathon Man’. hoffmann famously ‘gets into character’ and does the whole ‘method’ bit. Olivier famously did not, and simply suggested to Hoffmann “You should try acting, dear boy”. Conclusion #2: if a supposed ‘process’ delivers no discernible or detectable consequences, it is not unreasonable to suggest that process is a chimera.

Point (3) What, if any, might be the difference between what an actor calls ‘getting into character’ and what a child calls ‘pretending to be someone else’? I see no difference, and no-one has ever been able to suggest one. Perhaps actors are simply unwilling to use this entirely accurate phrase, since they prefer something more pretentious? Conclusion #3: ‘pretending to be someone else’ is as apt a term as any, and perhaps more accurate.

Point (4) If ‘getting into character’ is part oft he acting craft, then why are so many actors very successful while being manifestly unable to offer any character except their own - a point not seriously denied by anyone on this forum. Choose your own examples: Sean Connery, Hugh Grant, Alan Alda, Woody Allen, Kevin Bacon, Harrison Ford… etc. Conclusion #4: even if ‘getting into characer’ were a real process, of real benefit to an actor’s work, it is plainly a non-essential one, and failure to be any good at this ‘process’ is plainly no impediment to success.

But hey, just look at that pretty new robe the Emperor is wearing…

25

I think playing ianzin would definitely call for “getting into character.” :smiley:

26

Myself, likewise. :smiley:

The job of an actor is not analogous to that of a plumber or dentist. The comparison would be accurate only if the plumber spent a few days or weeks studying the pipes before actually doing any work.

And let me point out exactly where you’re glossing over the important point:

Not “you” – “a person.” The question is, which person. Different people will perform exactly the same task and speak exactly the same words in subtly different ways. It is by these differences that the audience understands the nature of the personality being displayed, and a talented and skilled actor, by internally adjusting one’s personality, will evoke the chosen character.

It is a common misconception to label “method acting” as “getting into character.” Just because Laurence Olivier eschewed The Method doesn’t mean he didn’t understand his own way of getting into character. As I pointed out above, the American Method school allows actors to indulgently take a few seconds or minutes to do some emotional spelunking as a means of flipping the necessary internal switches. Many British actors, especially those with classical training, recognize that after they’ve done the architectural work of understanding the character, they can immediately impose an external choice with the first moment of the performance and thus snap into the new personality. But the point is, “method” as displayed by Dustin Hoffman compared to “non-method” as displayed by Olivier says absolutely nothing about “getting into character.”

“Pretending to be someone else” does, in fact, more or less capture what’s going on. However, it isn’t valid to compare this to the general sense of a child’s pretending, because children usually don’t undergo a thorough transformation. When a five-year-old says, “I’m a pterodactyl,” he forgets that the animal doesn’t have logical reasoning and can’t talk. An actor – at least, a good one – will spend some time researching the reality of the character in question and examining the emotional underpinnings of his/her experience. In that respect, you could very well label this as “pretending to be someone else,” but it’s a lot more than just putting on a hat and an accent (community theater notwithstanding).

The examples you cite are “stars.” Their onscreen success, as you correctly note, comes out of displaying their own personality. However, the number of people who can do this is numbered in the low hundreds; most people simply aren’t charismatic enough to hold an audience’s attention without doing anything. For every Harrison Ford, there’s a Gary Oldman or fifty to provide a counterexample.

Methinks your naked emperor has a staple in his midsection. :wink: