No matter the context or story, if the actor can feel, the audience will too.

How do you help an actor feel?

I find that regardless of the context of the particular story, there is usually one key that unlocks the actor’s heart: one key that will make their feelings accessible to them. Once you earn their trust and are given that key, they will be able to access any and all emotions. Find one true feeling, and the rest will come like dominos.

An actor, like all people, has a wide library of many emotions, but you need the key to be allowed into their library.

A great actor knows the way in, has ownership of this key and go there regardless of what a director will do (and sometimes despite what the director will do). However, if you can get a hold of this key, even the most experienced actor will breath a sigh of relief for having a partner on set with them – for not having to go it alone.

Actor Jeremy Renner in the Hurt Locker talks to his baby son, envying him for his ability to love everything. You love less and less things as you get older, Renner explains. When you get to be my age, he continues, you love only one or two things (paraphrased).

Your actor is most likely at that age: scabs and scabs have built up, covering our truly loving nature, and we end up only being able to really feel the love for those one or two things.

If you find just one thing, that your actor truly loves, you will find the key to his or her every performance. This one thing is usually a relationship.

The key to an actor’s heart, the key to everyone’s heart, (for you writers out there: the key to your character’s heart), is any spot at all where they can tell that they care.

A good question to ask your actor is: “Who is your biggest ally in the world?” Or you can ask them whom they most care about. Which direction the caring goes doesn’t so much matter. They can be the lover or the beloved. We’re simply aiming for the one relationship in their life about which they are able to feel something.

I had one actor who thought about her mom in order to open up. Another actor loved her grandmother who had always been an ally to her. I made sure to have her grandmother’s picture with me on set. I handed her the picture during those scenes in which I needed her to feel most intensely. Another actor was thinking about a lover she had just broken up with. When she played out a scene with her fictitious mother, a scene that had nothing to do with romance, feeling her love propelled her into one of the most real and compelling performances I had ever seen.

You want your actor to be able to feel – anything. Even if they are playing an “unfeeling character”. Why? Because a true-to-life unfeeling character wants to be able to feel. An “unfeeling character” is hiding the fact that they really actually care. They may even hide if from themselves, but it’s in there.  If your actor feels nothing while playing someone who doesn’t care, you’ll get a melodramatic and clichéd performances. What you see is what you get.

But if your unfeeling character is played by someone who feels, the character will come off as complex and conflicted.  They will do and say all the unfeeling things that the script prescribes, but their eyes and body language will communicate at least a hint of anguish or self-doubt. The lack of caring will come off as a veil on top of something human that is happening in hiding. The audience will be involved and wait to see if that layer will ever get shed.

THIS WEEK’S ASSIGNMENT:

Excavate for the key to your own heart. Who moves you? Who would you jump off a bridge to save? Who is your biggest ally in the world?

Ready to get brave...? Now make your love public :)

Post a comment below naming someone you love, and recount a favorite moment/memory that you share with them.

the picture above: me and my big brother, Oren. 1974 :)