Why Act?
I am not asking this in a "Should I give up" kind of way. However, it shouldn’t surprise you that throughout my career I have frequently considered throwing in the towel. I may yet, but if I do, it will not be due to outrage at spurned entitlement, at the end of a spiral of negativity and self doubt, nor even perhaps due to a lack of paid work. I started this blog thinking it was going to be an analysis of the links between spiritual training and acting, but instead it has revealed itself to be something else that has been cooking away in me since 2019.
Making high stakes decisions aren't easy - especially if it means turning your back on something you have dedicated your life to and made sacrifices for, harder still if you have thoroughly enjoyed many of the jobs you actually worked on. But there’s the time in between jobs, the constant fear you won’t get a next job, the disappointment of not being as good in jobs as you hoped, the disappointment of jobs you valued not being appreciated, the hours of work committed to self tapes thrown into a file of lord knows how many other hopefuls, financial insecurity and so on.
In Canada for castings it is expected that you be off script. Faced with three sides of A4 with only one line from another character I will need to start right now - I have to drop everything else I am working on. Then the thoughts line up…. How can I possibly deliver my best!? What’s the point in trying!? There are 20, 30, 100 other actors they will rather pick than me! This has already been cast anyway. I’ve only got this casting just to tick the box they attempted to cast in Canada…
Yeah.
Entitled.
Ungrateful.
Human.
“Give up and do something else!” says every person who is close enough to me to see my anger and frustration.
“The casting IS the job” I hear Richard Dorton saying.
So add guilt for allowing it to affect others, and shame I seem to have the emotional resilience of a teen, unable to appreciate the extraordinary privilege to even feel this way.
Despite the self-pity party, I learn the lines, work on the script. I normally enjoy the resulting self tape.
I remember Richard E. Grant saying after each job that he was terrified that he would never work again. And talking with others I know I am not alone on this emotional rollercoaster - especially after Covid changed everything. I remember older actors reminiscing about the British Repertory Theatre circuit of the 1980’s. Casting suites and just having to walk in and audition with a paid reader will be just as otherworldly in no time.
It was another actor, Ivan Sherry, who got me thinking, when he framed a big decision we both faced as - “What would we lose?”
Independent of the industry - what do I lose if I stop work on speeches, scenes, and embodiment exercises never to be seen? Would I miss the pleasure and challenge of the good castings that I am lucky enough to be asked for and deliver?
I have spent a career and thinking about it, and in the past three years I have had to come up with an answer. Happily I was/am helped by a tribe of like minded vocational actors brought together by my online classes I started during lockdown. Through them I discovered that I really love teaching and that being part of an honest, accepting and non judgemental society of curious actors is a true and unqualified gift. This has given me time to really understand my values and the true motivation of why I remain an actor.
So where have I got to?
Acting is a strange art. I remember being taught that Acting was a secondary art form, a craft of interpretation rather than original creation. This suggests that primary artforms - Painting, Sculpture, musical composition, writing, are at the top of the tree. As a Brit brought up by parents who lived through a more unapologetic class system, this left a lingering feeling that I wasn’t a real artist at all. I was just an interpreter.
I propose that not only is acting of equal merit to any other artistic expression, it is the only fully corporeal artform that can affect personal, emotional and social growth in the real world. I argue that an actor can aspire to be “In the world but not of it” - at least to the degree that it allows them to bring both objective and subjective wisdom to any character they play. As such acting should rank as a craft and artform of primary importance in both the social and personal realm.
PLAY
Much has been said about the use of the word “Play” in western culture. It is valued as a worthy ingredient of good acting - the sense of play, of make believe. In fact, play is the foundation on which most of the best things about acting are based. Play is seen in the animal world too, and transcends differences in animal hierarchy. Higher status animals “lose” to lower status in order to keep the willingness of others to play. It could be considered the fundamental purpose of life itself - the means by which life celebrates itself. Rather than quote Shakespeare so early I’ll start with Alan Watts….
“This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.” Alan Watts
Even if you don’t agree with Mr. Watts there are some very real and immediate benefits from having a sense of play whether in the rehearsal studio or your living room that can extend out into everyday life.
A sense of play can lighten even the darkest trials and it can be infectious.
A sense of play can lead to creative solutions and novel discoveries
A sense of play can lower the stakes of hot topic discussions thus avoiding damaging conflict
A sense of play is the source of high quality learning
Play can transcend boundaries of class, culture and social position.
Play can challenge the supremacy of ego (by loss or deliberate accession to another)
Play is at the heart of what actors do, and the healthy progenitor of the desire to become someone or something else with all the required skills and resources that follow.
This can be considered an Axiom*
If the experience of life is illuminated by Play and Acting is Play, then:
Axiom 1 “The experience of life is played through Acting”
Here’s another Axiom.
Axiom 2 “Acting tells stories”
Jung observed that throughout the history of storytelling, archetypes, symbols and narrative structures repeated themselves across time and culture. Christopher Booker in his “7 Basic Plots” did a great job of outlining Jung’s discoveries in a more digestible form - a mere 728 pages edited down over 34 years! In “World Tales”, Idries Shah, teacher and translator of Sufism in the UK, prefaces many of the stories with near identical tales from other countries, cultures and centuries that did not develop in a linear geographical or temporal fashion. Instead, these stories seem to “appear” and persist in totally unconnected human societies.
By playing parts in narratives that have a beginning, middle and end, actors live in short form versions of narratives that the audience can “try out”. They can experience the attendant risks and a defined end point that would be impossible in real life. For instance the Hero’s journey can give the audience member a sense of responding to a call, being tested and facing despair, transcending weakness and vanquishing a destructive and negative force (often the dark mirror of the hero). It’s Judy Dench making me and the rest of the audience want to jump up from the balcony seat and shout “No!” while she made a speech at the end of a rather average play. It is a narrative that is also at the root of our pleasure in sports. The achievement of hitting a target (goals) against physical, emotional and psychological opponents and teammates. That also makes you want to get up and shout “No!!!!”.
However, as Sartre suggested “Man is… a project which possesses a subjective life, instead of being a kind of moss...”, and the actors job is to be in the story, a story more complex than a sport, with a greater range of narratives. In Satres’ terms, an actor plays the subjective life of an “Other” ‘s project.
Axiom 3 “Acting is walking in the shoes of an OTHER”
Acting means learning this through the physical, psycho-physical and emotional embodiment of the “Other”. This is actually analogous to an aspect of many a hero's journey, where the hero develops the skills and empathy to become a fully integrated hero by living as and experiencing subjectively the world of the other - Henry the V got drunk with Falstaff, Katness Everdeen lived as one of the have-nots in District 12, Harry Potter lived with the worst kind of “Muggles” under the stairs. You get the idea.
Becoming someone or something else is no small endeavor. You will always be tethered to your own reality and your own subjective experience of life. We all have our maps of the world - our shorthand understanding of how things are. A cartographer cannot detail every stone and grain of sand, or the finest details of the shore of a lake. Instead it is a useful approximation. Many of our own maps, and therefore the character’s, are not useful or out of date. If the “The Map is not the Territory” (Alfred Korzybski, but look here for similar thoughts elsewhere), the director’s job is to know the Territory, the actors job is to behave according to the character’s Map of the territory. The antagonist in the movie doesn’t think they are unjustified.
It is in our attempts to understand motivation, the effect of history and experience, the relationship to the world and the people around them, that characters become conduits of new perspectives and embodied wisdom for us as the actor.
However ultimately impossible, it is the closest thing that humans can do to live the experience of another person - to live in another person’s map of the world. In private embodiment practice I suggest that it can include any Other - regardless of gender, race, or culture. In this sense it is a human first approach. Looking at the skills involved to do so it could be mistaken for a secular version of a spiritual training process.
Speaking the words of another - Linguistic otherness
Moving in the physicality of another - Kinesthetic and proprioceptive otherness
Reacting through the lens / map of another - Psycho-physical otherness
Perceiving the world through the senses of another - Perceptual otherness
But to what purpose? Laurence Olivier who, reflecting the desire of every actor to disappear into the flow of a part, said after such a performance “I wish I knew what I did”, meaning he was in such a state of flow he was unware of conscious choices. This makes acting a kind of self-hypnosis into an Other’s reality.
“I don’t know what is better than the work that is given to the actor-to teach the human heart the knowledge of itself.”
He also famously asked Dustin Hoffman “Why don’t you just act?”.
And that is also a clue to what I believe is the right attitude. If I were to sum it up it would be something like - A care but not a care underpinned by a practical philosophy, leading to unconscious competence. A recipe similar to Taoism, Buddhism, Stoicism, Sufism, etc…
“Teach us to care and not to care, teach us to sit still” (Ash Wednesday - TS Eliot channeling Buddha and Catholicism)
REJECTION AND STOICISM
Rejection is a fundamental aspect of the artistic endeavor. People ask according to their metric “What have I seen you in” - and that cannot be yours. If you mention that you are in a dry patch, people will tell you stories of other metrics - actors who “made it” after years of rejection, or others who pivoted from one artform to excel and become famous for another. These also can’t be yours. Although well meaning, I see all of these as magical thinking. The world doesn’t owe me success. Plenty of average actors have careers because of dumb luck and not screwing it up. Any competence in another field is achieved from spending time on it. Any other artistic field is at least just as fickle and competitive as acting. We make plans and god laughs…
This is where the stoic ideals, particularly as outlined by Epictetus, are normally developed by any actor that manages to persist across a career.
That we have a choice about how we react to good or bad. Hamlet’s “There’s nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
That there are things we can control such as improving our craft and business sense, and things we can’t. I have assisted and run castings - things actors can’t control are so numerous and varied that there’s no point in listing them.
The love of fate (Amor Fati). This doesn’t mean giving up because you have no agency over your fate, but rather that you love what brought you to this moment. That every rejection required that you got experience and fun working on another scene, another character.
Imagine the worst outcome - that you won’t get the job, that you will never see yourself in a hollywood movie or a TV series etc… If not getting the job has such high stakes then you are living a life that forces you to care too much - this might take time to address. If you believe that actually working the job means you will be happy and secure living a life of milk and honey - that’s a delusion I can’t help with. There is no evidence that Christian Bale is any happier or able to deal with misfortune than I am (we were friends when we were 10!)
I’ll round off with a bit of Rudyard Kipling…
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
So why do it at all, you may ask? You wouldn’t be alone. Marlon Brando was ambivalent about the value of acting and in the end stopped. And anyone who stops and focuses their lives on something else can cite a million decent reasons why acting is silly and a bad idea. Well, it depends on your metrics. If your only metrics are that you are a product and your value is only proven by regular employment in the industry, then the value of acting is based on the value of the things you act in and the values of the industry itself. You are offering up the value of your work to extrinsic validation.
There is some value in public and financial validation.
But that shouldn’t be how you value yourself as an artist. Because the industry does not care and there is no standard career path. Actors rise in the industry ranks and they fall. You may have improved your abilities over 20+ years, but once you are in a demographic that doesn’t fit easily into narratives that sell to younger audiences, your abilities mean little. This is as true for men and women albeit at different ages.
I think this may be why many acting teachers from Stanislavski and to the present day eventually see acting as a spiritual act and try to incorporate taoism or buddhism into acting training.
“Spirituality involves the recognition of a feeling or sense or belief that there is something greater than [yourself], something more to being human than sensory experience, and that the greater whole of which we are part is cosmic or divine in nature. (Quick google search definition - Maya Spenser- Royal College of Psychiatrists…)
I am NOT saying that acting is religious, but rather that integrating your pursuit of acting perfection with a worthy value that you hold in every other part of your life is one way of ensuring that acting itself becomes neither your master or an end in itself - but instead a life’s work - a process.
With this approach you cannot fail to provide a good professional performance, but your sense of self worth will not live or die with commercial validation (and how much validation is enough anyway?) Being an actor is not about fame, pay or identity. So if your values are not about acting but about those aspects of the profession - know it, own it, and pursue it like the high stakes gamble it is. I know others will advise against it, but it is my fiduciary duty to suggest you also develop a plan “B”. Don’t fall for the lie that not having a plan B is somehow a sign of weak resolve, see it as a contingency to survive life's disasters well enough to have choices about how to continue. I believe this is really what is meant by being able to keep failing forward.
Like any primary artform, I see the study and practice of embodied acting as a valuable pursuit in and of itself. It's a way to learn about ourselves, about what it’s like to be others, what it is like to hold different beliefs and values, inhabit different maps. It is a way to understand and share the human experience. Knowing why this is important is what will see us through the darkest of days, and illuminate other areas of our lives - and getting jobs will simply be a bonus.
* Axiom: a statement or proposition which is regarded as being established, accepted, or self-evidently true
