The Great Acting Blog: “Courageous Acting”

The Great Acting Blog: “Courageous Acting”

The obsession with “doing emotions” in modern acting is little short of a disaster. It paints the character (and therefore the actor) as a victim, stripping him of dignity. Further, when an actor tries to squeeze emotion out of themselves, they turn inward rather than outward and so exclude the audience, thus defeating the actor’s key task of communication. Emotion is bad storytelling because it’s vague, it diffuses strong, precise action. It often becomes a form of showcase, bastardising the actor’s performance, and this is especially true among actors who have a knack for turning on the waterworks, leading to; “oh look, he’s really crying” – so it’s bad art too, because it lacks aesthetic integrity. Above all, it’s just false, a lie.

Unfortunately, emotion dominates contemporary acting because it is seen as the signifier of quality, the more emotional an actor can be, then the more talented he is thought to be. Of course it’s complete nonsense, and even a cursory glance at the great actors of the Golden Years of Hollywood (Bogart, Cary Grant, Rita Hayworth etc) will tell us that. Actors at that time eschewed emotionalism, offering dignity, strength, simplicity, generosity and wit instead. There are exceptions today of course, most notably in the work of Finnish maestro, Aki Kaurismaki, but otherwise the tendency to emotion abounds. It’s hard to know when this shift occurred, perhaps it grew out of Method Acting, a technique which fetishises emotion, in the middle of the twentieth century. Perhaps, because Method actors gained such a good reputation (eg – Al Pacino), everyone thought they had to be emotional in order to be respected. Or perhaps it’s linked to the modern trend of “confessing”, of just letting it all hang loose, of telling the world your problems, of “it’s ok to show your feelings”. Whatever the roots are, I don’t care, a technique of acting based on emotion leads to false, weak, vague, self-conscious work.

Emotion in the actor’s performance is only true when it is organically produced by the actor’s attempts to do the action. Even then, it is a trivial by-product which the actor should not concern himself with – it is not the object of his work, that’s to tell the story. To withhold emotion, to exercise refrain, is to maintain dignity – that’s the mark of the courageous actor.

Subscribe to The Great Acting Blog