This is especially true when you realize that for every project, there is a different process that needs to happen in order to meet the needs of the director, the story line, and the actor’s own necessarily new technique born of having grown and changed herself or himself.
I just finished watching the 1987 show, hosted by Johnny Carson, about Jimmy’s life. It’s a tremendously revealing and moving show, being about a performer who lived a balanced life of work and family, creativity and service – a life based in a kind of integrity that was rare then, and is even rarer now, in my opinion.
Johnny said to him, “You make it look easy. Is acting easy for you?” And Jimmy said, “No. I don’t think you ever stop learning to act.”
I love that. It’s kind of a koan of meaning, that sentence, because acting is about not acting. In fact, a man I hold in highest regard – Harold Guskin, actor, director, acting coach extraordinaire, drily humorous and laser-like servant of the craft of acting rather than the well-behaved servant of the business of acting – wrote a seminal work called “How to Stop Acting” that is an unparalleled insight into that lightning-in-a-bottle experience of being in the creative moment as an actor – that moment in which we are being lived by that pure creativity that is far more long-lastingly addictive than any drug.
In other words, as I’ve probably said before, acting is not about pretending – it is about living out loud. And none knows that better – nor teaches it and lives it more relentlessly than Harold Guskin. Acting is not something you do, it is something you come to understand enough about to allow it to do you, and it is a high privilege to be a part of it, particularly when you are in a project in which your process is permitted to live and breathe and develop, and is supported in that birthing process.
Some things that happen with actors are simply magic. I don’t know how on earth Johnny Depp came up with his swaggering Captain Jack Sparrow, but it’s magic! Keira Knightley said in a video interview that she was totally unprepared for what he brought to the role – that when she hit the set and was confronted with that characterization for the first time, without warning, it was a genuine shock. That’s the kind of ownership of interpretation, the kind of devil-take-the-hindmost surrender to the high-dive risking of self-expression that is the epitome of great acting. And lest you wish to argue with me about whether Mr. Depp is a “great” actor or not, let me make something clear: acting is about living out loud, living emotionally turned inside out, about reaching for something or some character aspect that is like flying into the Grand Canyon without a net, willingly! That is greatness, and that is why, as George Clooney said on his appearance on Inside the Actor’s Studio, that we “celebrate celebrities”, once they reach that state because they do what ordinary people spend their time trying not to do, and would never do! And that is: Express oneself as fully as possible, as foolishly or passionately, as lovingly or hatefully, with as much abandon, surrender, and (ironically and confusingly) mastery as possible, publicly!
And just to make it even more interesting, some of what has come to be well-known moments in film, or characterizations in film, came about from nothing at all related to actor techniques.
Jimmy Stewart and his stuttering line delivery are an inseparable duo. But the truth, he says, is that the stuttering was not what he set out to do; that what his delivery was revealing, actually, was that he was thinking about what the next line was! He had some difficulty in learning lines, it turns out, and I can really relate to this because for me that is the greatest “work-like” aspect of this process. Whether it’s a song or a script. But of the two, as far as I’m concerned, scripts are easier because they have a preexisting setting, and most often a back and forth with another character, which songs do not usually offer.
And then there is Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man in the famous bath scene where he has a panic attack as the bath is being drawn. He has been lauded for that scene. And yet, he revealed in his appearance on Inside the Actor’s Studio that the take that ended up in the movie actually was not a character-focused choice, but was him “just” pitching a fit because he couldn’t “get” that moment the way he wanted to. Host James Lipton listened to this with his customary respectful disbelief, looked to his students in the audience, and said, ” ‘Just’. Right.”
Acting is lightning in a bottle. It’s risking showing up, and allowing one’s self to show.
And the reason that one is never done learning how to act is because one, one’s own self, is the process, and we human beings are always in flux, ever changing. We are the lightning in a bottle, we human beings. As actors, we simply celebrate that incredible, miraculous truth of human existence, and we do so publicly, with our own bodies, our own emotions, our very beings. And what it is that makes that such a necessity for every actor, that’s a passion deeper than I can put words to. And that is why Jimmy Stewart’s words hold incredible weight for me.
Thank you, Jimmy.
