The Great Acting Blog: “Allow Nothing To Sway You”

The Great Acting Blog: “Allow Nothing To Sway You”

The actor’s job is to perform the actions of the character as they have been discerned in the script. That’s all the actor needs to worry about. They don’t need to worry about the other actor’s performance, they don’t need to worry about the costumes, or the production’s marketing, or how the scene will be edited, those tasks are done by someone else with a different job title.  The actor needs to be totally focussed on the actions of the scene – allowing focus to shift on to anything else is simply procrastination, an attempt to distract the mind from facing up to the scene at hand. That might make the actor feel more comfortable temporarily, but the scene at hand isn’t going to go away, it will be done sooner or later.

To act well requires energy, it requires aggression, it requires intense focus and commitment. Nobody can afford to impair those qualities by allowing their mind to drift on to issues which have got nothing to do with performance. Rather than do a mediocre or bad job and then make excuses, the smart thing to do is to pour all effort and energy into giving the strongest performance possible, allowing nothing to sway you from that objective.

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