As Cynthia Erivo, Hugh Jackman, and other actors who’ve transitioned between stage acting and screen acting can attest, performing live for an audience hits differently than acting for the camera. Let’s examine the main differences between performing onstage and onscreen.
1. Audience location
Onstage, the audience can easily be 100 feet or less from the performers. And since the audience must see and hear a performance to enjoy it, stage performers must act for everyone from the front row to the back row. The result is a larger-than-life performance, as the other actors are only a fraction of that distance from you.
When acting for film and TV, the camera can always see you, and the microphone can always hear you, so you only have to move and speak so that others in the scene can see and hear you. If someone is three feet away, you speak as though they are three feet away. If they are 50 yards away, you speak to them in that manner. Due to camera work, score, lighting, and other effects, it’s sometimes even better to do less than you would in real life, because so many things are augmenting your performance. So the main responsibility of television and film actors is that they behave naturally—no exaggerated sound or movement is required.
2. Familiarity of the material
Theater is, by its very nature, repetitive; when a play takes hold and becomes popular, it’s put on by theater company after company, night after night, all over the world. That repetition creates a societal image of the story. Audiences think they know the material, and so they want to hear it exactly the way it was written—and they know when it’s changed because the original is so familiar to them. The words of the play become iconic, and any changes of dialogue will sound like fingernails on a chalkboard. Imagine if Richard III chose instead to say, “A horse, a horse...or maybe a camel?”
With television and film, the audience will rarely have seen the scripts. Lines are being changed right up until shoot times in many cases, so performances are fresh. Some actors even go off-script due to the safety net of multiple takes. So, at a TV or film audition, an actor can make mistakes or small changes without consequence. An original and believable performance is king.
3. Characters
In theater, the audience and critics will compare performances to past versions of the same show. Because many stage characters have been played over and over, there is only so much leeway an audience will accept before they start to complain. People often go to the theater to see something familiar—so you better give them what they want, or the rotten fruit will start flying.
In TV and film, you may be the only person to ever play any given character, so what the casting directors are looking for is some version of you. They are looking for the person who fits the world they are creating. No one has played the character before, so there is no reference point. It’s up to you to show them what your part of the story looks like. Generally, this gives actors much more liberty when it comes to developing (or not developing) a TV or film character than when doing the same for an iconic stage character.
Check out Backstage’s TV audition listings!
The views expressed in this article are solely that of the individual(s) providing them,
and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Backstage or its staff.
