The actor's first contact with a play, film, or TV show is with the script. His or her approach to that script will determine success or failure in the project, independent of any other factor. So what are the rules, if any, to guide the actor's approach to the written word?
To begin with, the script is the only real authority for any dramatic (serious or comic) production. The script is the source of the story and characters and the basis for the project's very existence. For that reason, the actor's first responsibility is to respect the writer's words — all of them. Neil Simon is known to have interrupted a rehearsal to shout to an actor on stage, "The word is a, not the." When I was working on the film Lucky Lady for the great director Stanley Donen, I was in a scene that included all three stars — Gene Hackman, Liza Minnelli, and Burt Reynolds. When one of the other actors in the scene repeated a word in one of his lines, apparently to give it some added emphasis, Donen stopped the take and asked the actor, "How many times does that word appear in the line?" The actor replied, "Once." The director's response was short and quite to the point: "Then let's just hear it once. Otherwise we'll have a very long scene and a very boring movie."
Avoiding embarrassment on the set is not the only reason to respect a writer's words. The primary reason is that the script provides the only real source material for an actor to discover, understand, and ultimately demonstrate the character envisioned by the writer. Whether the material is a play, screenplay, or teleplay, that script may be the result of many weeks, months, or years of writing, editing, and rewriting, sometimes with several writers collaborating and/or in collaboration with a director or even a producer. This is why an actor will be well-served not to assume the production team will automatically be thrilled to hear the actor's "improvements," especially if they alter or obscure some aspect of the character intended by the writer. It's also very important for actors to remember this when participating in the reading of a new script. The purpose of a reading is for the writer to hear the words as written, to see if they work. Changing words doesn't help.
Here are two fundamental truths actors need to accept about every script they're given, whether they're auditioning or performing. First, they should assume it's the best script ever written. Don't find weaknesses in the material, because every perceived defect creates an obstacle to giving a good performance. (Typographical errors, omissions, and inconsistencies invariably creep into the drafts of even the most carefully crafted scripts. It's the actor's responsibility to call those to the immediate attention of the production department.) Second, they should assume the script was written for them. Accepting these premises gives actors absolute ownership over their roles.
To Tell the Truth
In life, when we speak, we choose words to express our thoughts and feelings. Actors, however, too frequently use words in ways that sound as if they're merely delivering information. Without communicating the meaning — the thoughts and feelings that the choice of those words would have naturally conveyed — actors too often engage in what I call double talk: speech that seems truthful but conveys little or no truthfulness at all.
Here's an example of what I mean. The great character actor Hume Cronyn used to tell a story about studying acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York with the legendary teacher Charles Jehlinger. In one scene, young Cronyn couldn't get past the phrase "steel ships" without Jehlinger shouting "wooden ships." After several such interruptions, the exasperated Cronyn grabbed a script and confronted his teacher. "It says 'steel ships,'" he protested. Jehlinger's reply: "Yes, but your ships are wooden ships."
In addition to the subject and object of every sentence, there are some categories of words that demand special attention from actors because the speaker — that is, the character — has a particular intent for those words. Those categories include absolutes (tallest, frozen); extremes (obese, quickly); unusual conditions (bankruptcy, priceless); qualities (beautiful, yellow); quantities (ninety, gallon); horror (zombie, blood-spattered); feelings (lonely, joyous); and verbs that express qualities of thought, feeling, or behavior (frowned, whispered). The intent in the foregoing categories usually includes thoughts as well as feelings. Actors should always think the thought and feel the feeling before speaking those words, for the way an actor will say them will indeed convey the actor's thoughts and feelings about them. Actors who fail to do this become reporters. Actors often mistake reporting for acting. Audiences never do.
Let's explore this concept further. As important as memorization is for an actor, the actor's ability to not "know" his or her words in advance is of paramount importance for his or her character. In other words, actors cannot allow themselves to speak the words before their character has decided what to say; the character must be allowed to process the information that causes speaking (or any other behaviors). While a character may speak effortlessly and quickly — as we do in life — such speech must come out of a motivated selection process, not a storage bank in the actor's head.
Besides meaning and feeling in the words we choose, we also express ourselves in life by the way we phrase a sentence or a group of sentences together. Clearly, spoken language is not the same thing as written language, yet scripts are a literary form, with punctuation in all the grammatically correct places. Not so when we speak. Instead, we speak in fits and starts, pausing in the middle of sentences (this is phrasing) and running sentences together (this is grouping). Actors are frequently misled by a writer's punctuation, and when obedience to proper punctuation begins to sound like reading, the result is unfortunate. Actors should let their characters' speech patterns be governed by the essence and circumstances of character. The results will be surprising to the actor and, equally important, may startle the audience.
A common problem for actors is the mistaken notion that speaking lines in a "naturalistic" way will seem truthful. It may seem truthful, but it will be merely stylized speech, much the same as phony "classical" speech used to be a popular approach to Shakespeare's plays and similar works. When Marlon Brando died, in contrasting his work to a different kind of acting, one of his obituary writers observed, "Even with naturalistic film actors...audiences knew they were watching rehearsed make-believe." In life, people do not behave naturalistically. They behave and speak in real circumstances, moment by moment, free of stylistic contrivance.
The celebrated television writer William Blinn described the writer's task this way: "Just tell the truth in an interesting way." To the actor, then, I say this: Just tell the truth. That will be interesting enough.
Basil Hoffman is an actor and acting coach. With the author's permission, this article contains some copyrighted material from the author's textbook Acting and How to Be Good at It (second edition), with a foreword by Sydney Pollack. More information can be found at www.basilhoffman.com.
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