Oh Hell No.
I couldn’t say how hard acting is, but I believe it takes quite a bit of talent, tempered with training, to be good at it.
A good example of real acting was from the old Smothers Brothers Show. Ocasionally, one of the guest stars would come out on stage and do a “dramatic reading” or scene.
In the last incarnation of the show, Geoffrey Lewis came out on stage; no props, no scenery, no costume, no music - totally black stage. When he first walks out, you immediately recognise him as the actor, having seen him in dozens of movies. He does about a three minute scene, all by himself. When it is over, you suddenly realize that for three minutes you have totally forgotten he is Geoffrey Lewis the actor, and were so completely absorbed into the scene he was doing that it is almost a shock when he finishes, the lights come up, and the audience applauds. Suddenly, he is Geoffrey Lewis again.
It is incredible when someone can transport you into a different state of mind with the power of his words and body language. I saw more raw acting talent in that scene than some entire movies contain.
One of the more mysterious experiences of my life involved this fact. As a high schooler, I dallied in theater. I played Linus in “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” in my local community theater, but our director wasn’t a local, she was some kind of real live accomplished director or something from the big city nearby. Needless to say, I was not very good. None of us were.
But on one particular day, I was thinking about dropping out of the play and told the director so. She griped me out. I was having doubts about my ability to keep doing the play and also do my schoolwork. I was stressing out pretty badly, and was just generally in a Very Bad Mood.
So, during rehearsal, I walked onto stage feeling angry. Now, anger had nothing to do with what was happening in the scene, (I was supposed to be comforting Lucy about something, I forget what the conflict was), and I didn’t act angry. But in a way I can not explain, I used my anger. Anger makes you do things you wouldn’t do otherwise, and I used this. I dropped some inhibitions, and probably for the only time in my four years of dalliance, actually acted.
And it showed. The director joked afterwards “I don’t know what problems you’re having in real life, but whatever they are, they’re working. Keep having problems.”
It was a seriously interesting and fulfilling experience, one which I wish I could turn on at will. But I can’t. I never really acted again, and my performance on actual show dates completely sucked.
-FrL-
He was awesome as Orville in Every Which Way But Loose and Any Which Way You Can.
The best explanation of this I’ve ever seen was shown to me by a director friend. It’s a really rare chance to see just how good acting shapes a scene, compared with mediocre acting of the same material.
Before David Mann made “Heat,” he made a TV pilot called “LA Takedown” that used a lot of the same material (same story, same characters, a lot of the same scenes). It didn’t get picked up, so thankfully we got “Heat” instead.
Why thankfully? Well, what we got was Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro doing the material at the prime of their careers, and not the too schlubs who Mann used in the pilot. Observe: this is the infamous “Diner Scene,” the first screen exchange Rob and Al ever had, as done by the masters:
And now here’s the exact same scene, almost word for word, done by two guys from TV:
Heat the travesty
There’s no huge, apparent difference between the scenes. They’re both quiet intense discussion. But DeNiro and Pacino absolutely blow these other guys out of the water, and it’s difficult to pin down all the reasons why. But the biggest is, the guys in the second clip are working SO HARD to be INTENSE and to ACT and to RAISE THE STAKES, while with DeNiro and Pacino, it’s as embedded into who they are as what they had for lunch that day. And that’s why acting (particularly good acting) is hard; you gotta be able to find those subtle ways to elevate a scene, and you’ve gotta do it over and over and over again.
Writing. I have lots of rejections, very few sales.
I was watching the last of season one of Burn Notice last night and checked out the special features. They included the actors’ audition tapes, and I watched Jeffrey Donovan’s audition. He had no trouble falling into that role; it was his from the moment he was handed the script. I wonder if anyone else even came close. There was a huge difference between the woman reading the lines he was to play off of and him, and she was a decent enough reader.
I find it much easier to act for films than for live productions; partially it’s because there is less to memorize all at once, but also because I have a better sense of what the audience is going to see; is it a close-up? Am I backlit? How much does it matter what I do with my hands, or my eyes? To me, it’s kind of like the difference between executing a painting (the frame of reference and lighting and so forth are all controlled) and sculpting a statue (better look right no matter what angle you see).
Two other actors who just nailed it on their first audition are Hugh Laurie’s House and Nancy Cartwright, who was the first to audition for the voice of Bart Simpson.
There was a long time when I didn’t consider acting for film to be “real” acting for just this reason. I am a theatre person, I have my degree in theatre and am trained and work professionally as a director for theatre. So I see first hand a lot of what stage actors do. The ability to create and maintain a total character arch in a two hour period, day in day out, regardless of how you actually feel that day, is very impressive. I always felt that film actors had it easy because they only have to get it right once.
But as I have spent more time in the world out of college I realize that film acting is just as difficult and there is (when the actors are good) just as much craft involved, it’s just focused in a different direction. For film you have to be able to be good in a totally broken and sensless, from a character perspective, order of filming. You have to be able to do the same thing over and over again for all the coverage and make the physicallity connect for continuity and the emotional through line. And because of that it is very easy to go way over the top, since it’s simpler to get back to that intense energy over and over again than it is to repeat something subtle and keep it consistant.
Acting is tough and I love talking about acting, but I would never want to be an actor.
I’ll echo the sentiments of people above who eloquently explain how believable acting is fucking hard.
My only “acting” experience was in a documentary where I had to “play” a Stone Age guy going about his business. No lines, no dialogue, no acting, just me doing stuff I’ve done hundreds of hours before (sneaking in the woods, clad in buckskin, bow in hand etc.)
Even the most familiar motions become difficult when you have to do them on camera, 20 times in a row, exactly the same way each time. Especially when the director tells you to do something differently than you would ever do IRL, for it look better on film, all the while making it seem natural. And NEVER glimpse at the camera! Even if you have to consciously alter your behavior to keep that from happening. Twenty takes, exactly the right way, always looking perfectly natural. At the end of the day (not that many minutes of final product), I was exhausted. And this was like a whisp of what real acting (portraying living, feeling, speaking human beings interacting with other people) is, just a portion of the mere mechanical side of an art form.
Screenwriter chiming in.
Fuck yeah, GOOD acting is hard. And it can actually be hard to find good actors. A lot of people in Hollywood can’t act their way out of a paper bag, but they sure look purty. We can do a lot with 45 takes and a couple of good angles…
(Also? Acting’s hard. Reacting is even harder.)
Well, and the converse of my last post (and a bit reason why I felt that screen acting wasn’t really acting for a long time) is this:
On film how you look is more important than how well you can act. You don’t have to be pretty, but you have to be interesting to look at. A good director and a quality script can cover for a bad actor, something that just isn’t true in theatre. On the stage, no matter how good the director and script are, if the actor doesn’t know what they are doing it will become very obvious very quickly.
Ditto everything here. I direct for the stage, but am a very mediocre actor. I find that to be a good stage actor your brain needs to do simultaneous but contradictory things: 1) Remember your lines and blocking, so you are saying the right things at the right time in the right place and 2) Immerse yourself in the scene/moment so that your actions and reactions are authentic and real. It’s very difficult, IMO. I can usually do one or the other, but not both.
Anyone who says (good) acting is easy doesn’t know what they’re talking about, IMO.
Stage or screen, most actors and directors, no matter what their level, will tell you that doing “nothing” is WAY harder than doing something. “Just walking” across a stage is harder than a swordfight. Sitting quietly in a chair is about the hardest thing of all. Hence my favorite director’s favorite command: “Don’t just *do *something, sit there!” 
That was a very good contrast, and I think you’re right that the acting is far superior in the first one. But in fairness, other production and post-production values like lighting, sound, and editing are superior as well. They really do make a difference too, which is partly why great actors can be in one or two one-star klunkers.
Like anything else, doing it is easy. Doing it well, however, is a whole different thing.
Oh, definitely. Even in a totally static scene like that, production values are going to determine the majority of the way the final product looks. Most of all, the budget probably determined the number of takes they could do; “LA Takedown,” as a TV show, probably had a handful of takes at best, while “Heat” could’ve spent all day on it if they felt like it (and it was in the shooting schedule). But all the lighting, costuming and re-shoots in the world couldn’t make up for the gap between the “Intense Face” that the guy playing the criminal in the TV version has on the whole scene and the seeming nonchalance that DeNiro masks his intensity with in the “Heat” clip. The TV actor, as someone put it up thread, is ACTING, in all caps, while DeNiro is much more focused on reacting to the scene, and the other person in it. There’s a real connection there that’s missing in the TV clip.
Hell yeah. Some days I can’t even muster up the energy to fake enthusiasm. Imagine having to recall a whole bunch of emotions at your fingertips, scene after scene, take after take no matter what you are feeling.
Sometimes when I watch a well-acted scene I marvel at how well the actors convey emotion through the tiniest of gestures, glances and expressions. Good acting requires a mastery of not just dialogue but body language, something which I probably will never achieve. Plus it requires a level of openness, both emotionally and physically, which most people do not have.
Depends on the type of writing. My wife is a freelance medical writer, and people come to her. She has very few rejections. She is nowhere near the A list, where an actor would have to be to get her hit rate.
I did a lot of acting as a kid, through high school and college. I had no trouble at all getting inside the character and expressing myself appropriately and authentically . . . and I got some really encouraging reviews. But memorizing lines was a real bitch for me, though I always nailed it in a performance; I envy actors who can do that easily. And I suffered from unbelievable stage fright (performance anxiety), industrial-strength butterflies before every performance . . . though, somehow, I didn’t let that get in the way of either acting or public speaking (the worst) or musical performance.
These days my only performing consists of singing in a chorus. But my acting background is a tremendous help in communicating to the audience.