As the Beatles sang, "Do you want to know a secret? Do you promise not to tell?"
Here's the secret: Creating and keeping a secret is a wonderful acting tool. Secrets are useful in classroom exercises, stage or screen performances, and auditions. They'll help you to listen better, take after take, or performance after performance in a long run; they'll intensify objectives, obstacles, and subtext; your cold reading will be unique.
Says Los Angeles actor-teacher Wendy Phillips, "In film, it's easy to drop out and stop listening, especially if the other actor is saying the lines the same way for every take. You may think you're listening, but you're not. Having a secret keeps you listening in a very specific way—not just in the sense of listening to the text or to the other actor or in the moment. If you have a secret, you're listening for support of your secret. No matter what the director says, no matter how many times I've done the scene, I have to listen to see if the other actor's lines and performance are supporting my secret."
In choosing a secret, Phillips doesn't look for something that's flamboyant but meaningless: "My father [the late acting teacher Wendell Phillips] used to say that the objective is a paradox: With a true objective, the opposite can also hold true." So she usually plays around, looking for a secret that's the objective's opposite. "That way, the secret stays anchored to the dialogue," she says.
Sound confusing? Let's explore some possible secrets. If the objective appears to be "I want you to like me," Phillips might secretly play "You think I want you to like me, but I really don't."
New York actor-teacher Jim Bonney lists some secrets that a director or teacher might suggest to an actor to up the ante in a scene:
The phone you're using is rigged up to a bomb.
When you make your entrance, someone is waiting to kill you.
The other actor has just hurt someone you love.
In her book The Power of the Actor: The Chubbuck Technique (Gotham Books, 2004), Ivana Chubbuck mentions an ingenious method for creating sexual chemistry with your acting partner, and it involves secrecy: "Sexually fantasize about the other actor, using your kinkiest fantasy," she writes.
"Pretend a relationship is more than is given on the written page," advises Chicago actor-teacher Ed Hooks. "This is particularly useful in cold readings from sides, where you don't have the whole script." If you're playing a boss who must fire someone, for example, Hooks suggests you could have the secret that you're firing your own brother: "That's not what the script says, but playing the scene that way can bring a more nuanced reading. The auditors will be impressed that the firing means so much to you." If you're a woman in a break-up scene, you could have the secret that you're pregnant, whether or not the script says so. "The secret will probably only make the break-up more meaningful," he notes.
Hooks adds that nonpersonal secrets may also work for you. For example, say you're playing Brutus in Julius Caesar. Although Shakespeare didn't mention it, historically Brutus was Caesar's biological son, Hooks says: "The blood relationship gives a deeper dimension to the lines." The point is, it needs to be something that will stimulate you. "Acting choices that do not stimulate you emotionally are wasted anyway," he says.
Actor-teacher Judith Weston writes in her book The Film Director's Intuition: Script Analysis and Rehearsal Techniques (Michael Wiese Productions, 2003), "Sydney Pollack advises directors to talk to actors separately, because in real life, no one knows what other people are going to do. Mike Leigh insists on secrecy, never letting the actor know what the other actors are working on. John Cassavetes often gave actors conflicting direction. The purpose of actors having secrets from each other is not trickery or manipulation but...to engage and have an effect on each other."
Film director Mark Travis uses secrets in another way. As he writes in Directing Feature Films: The Creative Collaboration Between Directors, Writers, and Actors (Michael Wiese Productions, 1997), to establish intimacy between two actors, he has them whisper very personal secrets to each other.
The acting master Sanford Meisner taught his students to make up something about the other actor. Says his disciple Jim Jarrett, who teaches the Meisner technique in San Francisco, "It's not to annihilate the script but to feed it, and to feed the relationship.... It could be that the other actor is a child molester—or wears diapers, so that every time you look at him, you giggle."
Jarrett adds that at a private gathering, actor Cliff Robertson once revealed a secret he used in creating the developmentally challenged character Charley in the award-winning film of the same name: He imagined he had a plate with a hole in the middle balanced on his head, and on that plate was a marble, and he wouldn't speak a line until he imagined getting the marble into the hole. And when he succeeded, he'd beam. "Sandy used to say that secrets are so much fun, they will color your performance—your relationships, your subtext," says Jarrett.
Yet there are caveats: Bonney points out that secrets given to the actor by a teacher or director can backfire. For example, if an actor enters knowing she will be attacked, she may enter warily, angrily, or defensively. Which emotional state will work for the scene? Bonney also cautions against too much thinking, as it could hamper the effect of a secret—that secrets work best when they're spontaneous. And Phillips warns against pushing on the secret too hard: "You don't have to be aware of it all the time," she says. "But it'll be hovering there and will come through for you when there's a lull in the scene, or you're not listening anymore, or you need to reconnect to the other actor."
Phillips adds, "It's like an objective, which exists to help give focus to your moment-to-moment work. In the same way, a secret is there to draw upon when you need it. If you're on your 50th take and you look at the other actor and his mouth is moving but he looks like he's from the planet Mars, you have this secret that will immediately connect you. When you have no subtext or are dead on your feet or whatever, you go, 'Ah, but I have a secret that nobody knows!' "
And that's the most important caveat: Don't tell your secret to the other actors, or its magic power over you will evaporate. Hooks notes that Uta Hagen used to warn her class that if you tell someone your secrets, they'll lose their potency. "I've found that to be true," he says, "especially if you're using secrets about your personal self."
But note that when acting, your concern is not to hide your secrets. In her book, Weston differentiates between having secrets and hiding secrets. "Acting is a kind of confession," she writes. "It is good for an actor to have secrets, to make subtext choices that are personal—and to maintain privacy, to refrain from gossip with fellow actors about her character. But these secrets only work if she gives them away emotionally during the performance. The secrets should be so strong that the actor can't hide them." I think when we see actors who appear to be brimming with inner life, we're seeing actors with secrets. We don't know what the secrets are, the characters may appear mysterious, but the emotions are truthful.
One final thought: As Phillips points out, whether you're using objectives, subtext, secrets, or whatever, ultimately your goal is always to be unaware of any technique when you're in the moment. Just know that secrets, like all other tools, are there when you need them.
Have you ever reprised a role that you played years earlier? If so, I'd like to interview you for The Craft. Please contact
jeanschiff@earthlink.net.