Have you noticed that the thing you seek is always in the last place you look? Have you ever wondered why? The answer is simple: because once you’ve found it, you stop looking. Why waste any more time than you need to?
Imagine you’re looking for $1o that you know you left somewhere, and after five minutes of searching your apartment you find it. Do you continue turning your apartment upside down? Of course not, because you’ve already found what you were looking for. Surprise, surprise, it was in the last place you looked. But why stop at $10 when there may be $30, $50, or $100 lying around somewhere? And not just dollar bills and coins, but also a check from that gig last week, or casino chips you forgot to cash in at the end of your last trip to Vegas.
As actors, it’s far too common for us to predetermine what we think it is we’ll find, and then call off the search once we’ve found it. We pick up a scene, define immediately what it is we think we want (an emotion, an objective, or a general mood), and once we feel we’ve discovered it, we stop searching for anything else. This is why the rehearsal process for so many actors includes a little bit of genuine exploration and a lot of simply running lines in a predetermined way.
To find things you didn’t even know were there, you must search in places you don’t think they’ll be—even if it seems like a waste of time. If it’s possible to create a great scene by following habitual assumptions in the first five minutes, then it’s possible to do that in the last five minutes before your audition or walking on set, too. Leave assumptions and predeterminations until the very last minute.
Let’s say you’ve just picked up a scene between a guy and a girl, and all you know is that they once dated and both now have new partners. The text mentions that both of them felt hurt in some way when they broke up, but that’s pretty much all the scene tells you. The rest you begin to eke out in your rehearsal process. What kind of exploration might you make with this scene? That they are still in love? That they hate one another now? That the girl is secretly pregnant with her new boyfriend’s child?
OK, good start, but what about wasting even more time with options that may prove to be entirely worthless? Let’s embrace the fact that much of our exploration will never end up in the scene, because if we only search for what we believe the scene must contain we will certainly not find the gold it might.
Go ahead, waste some time!
Is it possible that the guy has a wedding ring in his pocket, which he will give to this girl if she shows him a glimmer of hope? And if not, he’ll give it to his new girlfriend? Yes, of course. Is it possible that the girl has joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and she’s working through her 12-step process by making amends with people from her past? Yup.
(Hint: The answer to “Is it possible?” is always yes. It takes a second to say yes and find out you were wrong, but 10 minutes to justify why you assume something won’t work.)
Is it possible that the two just intuitively know deep down in the bottom of their souls that they’re supposed to be together, regardless how circumstances have kept them apart? Is it possible that the guy has already married the new lover, but is keeping this information to himself because he’s not entirely happy in that relationship? Is it possible that the girl has been “researching” the guy since they broke up, checking out his every move online and even following him to work and social events sometimes but staying out of sight?
Don’t judge your choices, and don’t worry if such choices are not already written into the script, or if they even play against the dialogue in some way.
The only rule is that they cannot be directly contradicted by the given circumstances of the script. (For example, deciding that the guy was in prison since he saw her last is totally fine, as long as the script doesn’t show that he’s a detective who has worked constantly on case after case since they separated.)
Many years after the fact, Meryl Steep revealed in an interview that her secret in “Kramer vs. Kramer” was that she was never in love with her husband, Dustin Hoffman’s character. You’d need to see the film to understand the ramifications of such a choice, but it is an incredibly interesting one. Though not mentioned specifically in the script, it’s certainly not contradicted by the script, which makes it an intriguing and entirely valid choice.
Most of the greatest breakthroughs, innovations, and inventions in the world did not come from people running headlong into an issue and then stopping once a rudimentary solution had been found. The great aha moments come from tinkering around an idea and finding what else is there—even if a perfectly acceptable solution has already been found. Wasting time, if you will.
In your search for the $10, look long and hard with curiosity into every nook and cranny, even if you find the money on the coffee table in the first five minutes. It will never truly be a waste of time. Along the way, you have no idea what treasures you may find.
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