We all know that playing murderous villains or miscreants is often a quick ticket to an Oscar for A-list thespians. Joaquin Phoenix (“Joker”), Denzel Washington (“Training Day”), Charlize Theron (“Monster”), Javier Bardem (“No Country for Old Men”), and Anthony Hopkins (“The Silence of the Lambs”) are but a few notable actors who’ve dipped their toe into the darker waters and come out of the other side victorious.
But what can an actor do to protect themselves, and what is the mental toll on putting your mind and body in such a precarious place? Or does that risk even exist if you’re a thoughtful, careful performer? Brooklyn acting coach and studio proprietor Terry Knickerbocker walks us through a good way to approach this shadowy terrain for maximum results without the unpleasant residue.
“Acting is meant to be enjoyable, and not depleting,” Knickerbocker says. “How civilians think about intensity or evil in the real world isn’t the way an actor feels about it. Someone could say, ‘Oh my God, I had a terrible fight with my wife, and then I went to work and I got fired, and then I went to the doctor and I found out that I have cancer.’ They’re going to call that a bad day. An actor is going to call that a meal.”
Knickerbocker believes the sense of play, even in these insidious roles, should never be far from the actor’s toolbox. “I want to take away the idea that anything is inherently draining, because it’s all imaginary,” he says, adding that an actor’s recovery can be compared to that of an athlete. “LeBron James has physical trainers that he works with after a game, who are icing and massaging his body, and there’s a nutritional…and a sleep component,” he says. “Knowing what you need to restore yourself on a physical and emotional level is [also] important. It might be that you need a hot or cold shower, or you might need to go to a sauna, a yoga class, or you might need a meal with friends. If you’re playing, say, a serial killer, and you have young children at home, I don’t think you want to bring the serial killer home.”
Knickerbocker cites acclaimed actor Michael Shannon as a great example of someone whose persona is the polar opposite of the roles he plays. Shannon has a very intense presence and is known for his creepy, unsettling roles, but, Knickerbocker notes, he does not possess those attributes at all in real life. Sometimes this logic needs to work itself out in reverse. “If you’ve had a hard day and you have to play a happy-go-lucky person, you’re going to have to do something to kind of shake off and compartmentalize the hard day to…transform,” Knickerbocker says. “There’s no one formula for it. Just do what you need to preserve your body, to be healthy, to have a logical work-life balance, so that your experience is not draining.”
7 Tips to Getting Out of Your Own Head as an ActorOne of the best ways Knickerbocker finds to illustrate this is how the central nervous system often processes emotions the same whether they are real or fabricated, and how we naturally deal with that dichotomy. “When an audience watches a movie, everyone knows it’s not real, it’s just being projected on the screen. But they get scared, they cry, they get upset, because they believe it’s happening if the actors believe it’s happening,” he says, citing examples as wide-ranging as the depiction of 100-foot heights to jump scares and sexual gratification on film. “The mind knows it’s not happening, but the nervous system kind of responds as if it is. And so that’s wonderful for acting, because you can have an experience and believe in it, even though you know it’s not happening.”
Terry Knickerbocker is the studio director of Terry Knickerbocker Studio in Brooklyn, New York, with 30 years of experience as an acting coach and professor for institutions such as Yale University and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. His past and present clients include Sam Rockwell, Natasha Lyonne, Chris Messina, Yul Vazquez, and Emmy Rossum.