How do I make my acting more truthful?

One of the reasons I believe this work is so transformational for an actor, is that in order for us to train you to be truthful in your acting, we need to get you out of your head – to disconnect your intellect so you can live truthfully in your work.

“Acting is living truthfully under given circumstances.”

— Sanford Meisner

I think that’s a pretty solid definition of what we do as actors, but how do you do that exactly? In our work, we have 5 exercises, and our first exercise, the foundational repetition exercise, covers the living truthfully part of that equation.

The exercise itself has specific rules, so do not be confused by thinking that it simply means to repeat. The exercise requires (amongst other things) that you to put all of your attention onto your fellow actor, which means getting your attention off yourself (dear actor, it’s not about you) which flies in the face of most acting training. Rather than going inward, we go outward. What’s happening in front of you – not what’s happening inside of you. This path of specificity to being able to see, enables a richness of truthful response to swell up from your inner depths – but you don’t manufacture or toy with it.

Ultimately, our work is to get you to put your attention wholly on your partner, so you can respond truthfully – free of appropriateness, politeness and socially accepted response – but rather, to respond to them with unapologetic truth.

We call each exercise a game – because it has an enormous sense of play to it. Think about the way that children play a game of make believe. They are invested in the game they’re playing, it often involves characters and made up circumstances – is this starting to look familiar? And the children play their game with no worry about how well they’re playing it or what others are thinking about them as they play, they are invested in the reality of their game without even thinking about it. This is the place we want you to be in when you’re acting. After all, it’s called a play, not a serious.

You don’t want to spend your time acting and simultaneously monitoring yourself – remembering lines, hitting your marks (yes, these are very important skills you need, but if you’re thinking about them whilst you’re acting, truth will go out the window) and you sure as heck don’t want that inner critic to pipe up and judge you as you’re going along. And so, through a series of simple (not easy) exercises, you disconnect your intellect from the emotional work you are doing and your acting will inevitably become more truthful.

An audience will always buy the truth over watching actors attempting to be “believable” or where they can see the acting/pretending happen. Believability is subjective, and comes from the audience – truth happens in the actor and the audience will then find your work ‘believable’.