Stop Acting

You’re trying to get it right instead of letting it be real. You don’t trust your first instinct, so you replace it. You’ve learned how to “listen,” but what you were taught is the technique, not the art form.

That’s the trap. And almost every actor is stuck in it.

In my classes, you don’t work on acting. You experience what happens when you stop. That’s the Art of Not Acting.

I’ve learned something from watching great actors and from acting myself: the greatest acting moments don’t come from you. They happen to you.

The actor isn’t the source of the performance. The actor is the instrument. And if you’re lucky, great acting plays through you.

A true nothing is way more powerful than a false something. That’s one of the reasons I don’t teach actors to manufacture a result. I want to see what happens when you stop interfering with what’s already there.

For me, Marlon Brando is the finest “not actor” I’ve ever seen. Watch what happens here. Don’t watch for what he’s doing. Watch what he doesn’t do.

In On the Waterfront, Brando plays Terry Malloy, who discovers his brother Charlie hanging dead from a meat hook. Most actors would reach for the emotion. Brando does the opposite. He takes in his dead brother. After a moment, he steps toward Charlie and puts his hand on the left side of his brother’s face, with part of his arm over Charlie’s heart. After a few moments he drops his hand. Then, in one of the most iconic moments in film history, Terry steps to the side, puts his right hand on the wall beside him and puts his left hand, the hand he just touched his brother with, on his hip. He drops his head. He then puts his arms around Charlie in a final embrace, lifting him and the hook off the wall.

And in that moment… we feel everything. Not because Brando shows us what Terry feels. Because he doesn’t. He doesn’t reach for emotion. He doesn’t demonstrate grief. He doesn’t tell us what to feel. He simply takes in what is happening. And something happens to him.

That’s a living painting. Picasso. Van Gogh. Brando.

There is no search for truth in acting. That’s another idea that can become something to accomplish. You don’t begin knowing. You begin with “I don’t know.” You explore with “I don’t know.” And you are taken on a journey of “I don’t know.”

You don’t know what will happen. You don’t know what you’ll feel. You don’t know what you’ll discover. And that’s the point.

You’re not looking for security. You’re not looking for certainty. Strangely, you’re not really looking for anything. You become available to whatever happens.

The circumstances play you. The moment plays you. You are played. And when you’re lucky, something comes through that you couldn’t have produced if you’d tried.

That’s when acting becomes alive. Not performed. Lived.

Because you’re giving up something actors understandably want: certainty. You’re giving up the safety of knowing what you’re going to do. You’re giving up the comfort of having something to fall back on. You’re stepping into the unknown.

This may not be for you. Chances are it isn’t. Rare is the bird that wants to fly without the safety of a cage to go back to.

But if you’re the actor who is willing to jump off the precipice of not knowing and take wing, you’ll discover a deeper gift that acting has in store for you. A gift rarely opened but by a few, and ready to be given to all who leap.

That’s the actor I want to work with. The actor I’m dedicated to. The actor who is willing to discover what happens when they get out of their own way.