I Don't Need an Acting Class

As an actor, you want to be so much more than just “accurate.” You must have something going on inside of you that makes you alive on the outside. An exercise we can employ that helps us connect to the life inside of us is talking out something you love or something you hate. “You can do this if you will begin to be observers in life and not an audience in life,” Milton says in this episode. “Look...

There was a period where you took the time and energy to communicate, either writing a letter or speaking. We’re now living in a world where language has become truncated into a shorthand of images and soundbites and yes, emojis. This episode is a rant about that. In may not be consequential for most people, but for actors, it’s important that we utilize the muscle of outward self-expression, lest...

The ability to identify what’s going on in any given scene from an actor’s perspective is very important. Instead of getting bogged down in all the elements of the scene— specifically the plot and what your character is going through emotionally— we have to be able to take those facts and translate them into a clear action that activates us. If the action does not bring us to life, we have to find...

Because of the pandemic, the nature of the business of acting has changed, and most likely there’s no going back. Working remotely has become so pervasive that even when theater reopens, self-tape auditions and Zoom readings will remain a vital part of what we do everyday. Because of that, imaginatively *building the place* is that much more essential. We may be in our bedrooms sitting in front of...

In this episode, Milton draws parallels between the actor’s and writer’s process when it comes to creating a character. Both the actor and the writer have to live with a new character, talk with them, walk with them, get to know them fully, inside and out. The improvisational exercises we do as actors allow us to see how they behave, how they see the world. It’s not about getting the answer right,...

It’s ironic that in this present global, digital age where information travels at the speed of light, we feel so emotionally disconnected to what’s happening in our world, whether in our own country or on the other side of the globe. Perhaps our access to all of it has desensitized us. This has affected our acting because of our inability to understand big ideas. “It’s not enough to be truthful or...

Welcome to Season 3! Based on Stella Adler’s work with Stanislavsky, everything we do as actors comes out of the world of the play, or the given circumstances that the writer has given us. One way into the world is understand the playwright’s world view, what they want to say. This season, as the class begins working on George Bernard Shaw, Milton asks us to begin slowly brainstorming what the wor...

WANT MORE? Become a subscriber for bonus content! ⁠⁠⁠https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/actingclass/subscribe⁠⁠⁠ A great technique that we have at your disposal when building a character, is to interview them. Or, come up with interview questions and answer them as the character you’re playing. If you, the actor, could ask your character anything, what would you most want to know? The questio...

Actors often ask: “how is this character like me?” But unless we know how the characters we play are different from us, it’s hard not to fall back on playing ourselves, or a variation thereof. Knowing the clear differences in how you and your character approach the world is the first step in finding actable character traits that will help you eventually embody this human being. Brought to you by w...

One effective way to uncover your action in a scene is to ask: what is going on with him/her/them/you? Actions, as we refer to them in acting, are often misunderstood as “activity” or “plot.” The true action is what’s going on beneath all of that, internally, within the character. It is what you are really doing to your scene partner(s) in order to get something. Asking yourself “what is going on?...

It’s important to realize how conditioned we are to quickly jump to a conclusion about a character when we read lines of dialogue. We will end up playing an uniterteresting cliché unless we slow down and dig deeper to find a bold choice that we love. This will help you enormously in auditions because if you go beyond the obvious choice, you will walk in (or appear on tape) with something whole ori...

“Once you go to the script, all creative work stops” Milton says. It’s a provocative statement but it’s true if you consider how most actors jump straight to a performance or an intelligent rendering of the lines before they ever have an understanding of the world they’re inhabiting, or even a monologue’s sequence of thoughts. In this week’s short episode, Milton uses the short film he’s working o...

WANT MORE? Become a subscriber for bonus content! https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/actingclass/subscribe It’s something every actor can relate to: you walk in the room, onstage on in front of the camera. Your heart is racing, your mouth is dry, and before you even speak, you know your nerves are getting the best of you. In that moment, instead of trusting all the work you’ve done and living...

Stanislavsky’s Method of Acting was born out of trial and error. He was not a natural talent. Had he been, we probably would not have been gifted with his discoveries of the craft. By analyzing his students’ successes and failures, and his own, he created techniques that were practical and coaxed the actor “toward the inner most source of their creativity.” Brought to you by weaudition.com

As you gain a deeper understanding of the role you’re playing through analysis and rehearsal, it’s important that we give ourselves permission for our actions, or impulses, to change. It’s not something static that we decide in advance. And, if an action becomes stale and is no longer bringing you to life, it’s essential that it changes. Brought to you by weaudition.com

Today we revisit a question that actors never stop asking. The ability to know whether or not you’ve made a good choice is part your talent, and it’s a skill you can hone over time. A choice has to feed you emotionally but it also has to be appropriate to the character and the world of the play. And the more you know about the world that you’re in, the more it feeds your imagination which becomes...

Stanislavsky never wanted a set vocabulary of acting. The words he used were an outgrowth of the creative work he was doing with actors. They pointed to ideas that brought actors to life, gave them something to hold onto. In other words, it was never *about* the words. Nowadays, we've become so focused on vocabulary, it's lost its meaning. So instead of asking yourself: what’s your action in the s...

Our job, as actors is so much more profound than playing the part and getting applause. As Stella Adler’s father said to her: “We need to make it better for them.” When we understand what the play is fundamentally saying to the audience, and what your character represents, it not only gives us something to hold onto, but something to aspire to, lift ourselves up to. It is a universal human idea or...

When building a character we can use the facts that are available to us in any way that will help us. Just as this is true for our character’s past, physical life or way of seeing the world, it is also true of the time period in which our character lives. Some helpful questions are: how does this time period effect who my character is? And how can I translate that information into behavior?

“If you’re waiting for the director to help you, you’re going to be dead in the water,” says Milton. This episode is about taking ownership of your process, how you work. This builds confidence and independence as actors. Most directors don’t understand how we do what we do, so we have to be able to translate their effect-directions into something doable. Also, we never want to feel that our perfo...

This week, we return to the Russian word Rasbor, which means “to dig down” beneath what you’re talking about to get to the big, cosmic idea. This is a new way of thinking in terms of acting, a muscle that we’re not accustomed to exercising. When we talk about our characters, it should never be about accuracy, or information or words. When we talk about our characters, it should be in a way that sh...

As actors, it is our job, our responsibility to observe human behavior. We do this to understand what it reveals about people and relationships, because it gives us information that we can use, another frame of reference for an idea or character or relationship. Imitation may be where we start but it can’t be where we end up. To inhabit the character fully we need to scratch the surface of physica...

WANT MORE? Become a subscriber for bonus content! https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/actingclass/subscribe This week, Milton reminds us of the importance of having a specific relationship with everything and everyone around you. According to Stella Adler, the director’s job is to tell you where to enter, hit your marks and exit; your job is to fill in all the blanks, and we have limitless pos...

In this episode, we re-examine the concept of the given circumstances. Every play has its own set of given circumstances, from which all drama emerges. It’s helpful to look at your work from this perspective because it helps you understand what your character is fighting against. Milton’s objection to what is known as “substitution” or “emotional recall” is because these techniques exist in order...

Somewhere in the process of creating a character, it’s helpful to step back and ask ourselves: why are we doing this play? Why are the characters we’re playing important? Why bother in the first place? The answers will begin moving you in the direction of a theme, and remind you that big ideas about the human struggle are timeless and vitally relevant, right now. It's also helpful to ask your char...