Training For a Career As An Actor

Learning, irrespective of the discipline, takes place through meaningful repetition of the fundamentals, over time. By practicing the same fundamentals that all great actors share you create those same habits. This is not new principle. Practicing those fundamentals in a way that will cultivate your talent requires a specific approach in training.

What are those habits? What are the fundamentals of acting? Exactly what is the talent of the actor?

Another word for the talent of the actor is, humanity. The ability to be affected emotionally and motivated by something you see and hear. When an actor is permitting his or her talent you can see the experience really happening. If, for example, you see an injured person by the road and are compelled to stop and help, but the driver of your car says, "They'll be fine," and keeps going, then your driver has no talent for acting.

Cultivating your sensitivity and permitting your honest responses requires practice in a specific direction and environment.

You have to practicing listening, taking personally what you see and hear, letting it affect you, then letting out your emotional response. You have to practice all that until you do all those things, automatically, without thinking (and ONLY when you ACT). Along the way you must become increasingly willing to be emotionalized by what your practice partner is feeling and doing. Those things are fundamental to acting.

Since all acting takes place in meaningful imaginary situations, students of acting must have a healthy way to invent meaningfully and become immersed in their imaginary circumstance. A strong imagination is also fundamental to acting.

Emotional depth and range have to be conditioned. They are the actor's stock in trade. The actor with greater depth and range of emotional responsiveness can be cast in more roles than his counter-part. This too is a fundamental shared by all great actors.

Speaking in one's optimal pitch, walking straight, hitting your mark, even memorizing lines are superficial requirements without having learned the fundamentals. Emotion and behavior are the vocabulary of acting, the words ride out on top of those things. Without the emotion and behavior all you're doing is reciting lines.

The hack actor will make a habit of planning out 'how' to say his lines, without regard for the way his scene partner is behaving. The great actor listens to and takes notice of his scene partner, takes personally what he sees and hears, and permits his honest emotional response; the words ride out on that human response. That's what the audience sees, an honest human response. The response that happens to you, not the one you happen, that's what the camera catches.

Look at 'feeling' and what a feeling really is. Let's say you are 57 years old, 5'-6" tall, and overweight; you walk into a bar where everyone is dressed in leather and boots, sporting large tattoos, and is over 6' tall. That feeling you got when you saw where you were was your 'passive' or honest response. It was organic. Then, like any good 57 year old, you immediately stuffed your emotions and tried to be charming. That is an 'active' response, one that you created. You were faking and everyone in the bar knew it. You had an instinctive emotion (fear, anxiety, submission, etc.) but you habitually suppressed it. Permitting your feelings when you act is a habit all great actors share. Developing that habit is fundamental to acting.

The path to your career looks something like this: First, learn to act. Do this before you start auditioning or you will embarass yourself and damage your reputation. After you learn to act (a couple of years of training) then you start to audition. Audition like crazy. You learn how to audition by auditioning. Audition five days a week. As an actor you will audtion for the rest of your life. Getting your next job IS your job. A couple of years of auditioning and you will have established a reputation and you might start working. You should work with Central Union / Central Non-Union during this time to get experience on a set (Registration information in Burbank: (818) 562-2755) and to meet the requirements of your Union Membership. When you start working a lot you'll get an agent, they will find you, you don't have to find them. You get a job offer and walk into any agent's office with a contract to negotiate and they will take the work. Somewhere between eight and ten years of this effort and your career will begin to take off.

I go into greater detail on http://www.losangeles-acting-school.com and you are free to visit there and read further.