An Actors Conundrum

We actors live in such a conundrum. We chose a profession where our craft requires us to be the art that's on display. A painter, sculptor, poet, and other similar forms of art that are consumed by the public, can personally stand apart from the work they put out. We as actors cannot. We're it. Yet to really do our work well, we also must learn to step away from it. Therein lies the conundrum. How does an actor successfully allow the story they're telling to be front and center, without that nagging self-consciousness of the awareness of being seen creeping in? It's my belief that this is what Stanislavsky, and others before and after him, were in search of. They knew that an individuals default mode was, to put it in the words of Laurence Olivier when Dustin Hoffman asked why he thinks they chose this profession, Olivier replied… “Look at me, look at me, look at me.”

To a degree Olivier was right. That is the impetus that propels us to become actors. We want to be seen. Perhaps more to the point, there is something inside us that needs to be seen. But just like a sculptor needs an unshaped pile of clay, or a slab of jagged marble to begin to create with, we need our messy, egotistical selves to start our journey as actors. Why? The Sufi poet Rumi said of love… “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” This is what the journey of an actor is. To seek and find all the barriers within themselves that they’ve built against becoming fully vulnerable, fully unself-conscious, fully accessible. There is something within an actor that first starts with a desire to find out who it is they are as individuals. If they keep on that path, then that slowly begins to transform into a deeper understanding of the overall human experience of being alive. Once there, the actor can allow themselves to become a sort of empty vessel. A writer can then pour the world they created into that vessel with confidence that the characters they’ve written will show up in all their glory. We as actors must honor the story the writer desires to tell.

Yet… if I had to give a brief rundown on what it is an actor has to do to have the audience believe they are the character they’re portraying, it would be this.

1. The actor first needs to kill the writer (metaphorically of course.) An actor needs to work hard to forget that what they’re doing started with words on a page. So in a sense, you must get to a place where you forget that there was a playwright that wrote them. Words cannot be fully realized (become the active sparks of behavior that they are) until they are in your body. If they live only in your head, then the audience will hear the writing. This kind of acting is but a few notches above recitation.
2. Next, and far more difficult to do, is to kill the actor (again, speaking metaphorically.) This is where the challenge lies. Even if you can successfully fulfill the above step of killing the writer, there can still be that need in you to “act.” Here is where you must overcome that predisposition of “look at me, look at me, look at me” that may be of some use initially to get us up and out there as actors, but fails us if we ever want to achieve even the slightest mastery at the craft.

We as an audience can always spot the actor who had made the decision to put themselves on display, instead of allowing themselves to get lost in the story they’re telling. And we as actors know when we’ve paraded our egos out onto the stage. How? Because we’re exhausted and unfulfilled by the end of the performance. We know we’ve cheated, and we feel it, even if everyone tells us what a great job we did. Yet, when we can courageously move out of the way of ourselves, taking the attention off our desire to be seen, and fully commit to telling the story we’ve been given the task to tell, there is absolutely no greater thrill in the world.

An actor will always have to struggle with self-consciousness. Even the most seasoned actors admit this. But the more we do the work, the more we learn what it means to truly be a teller of stories, then the more fleeting those moments of self-consciousness become. In the end, this commitment to your craft doesn’t only make you a better actor, it makes you a better human being.