So this is my first blog post...ever...I know I am a shame to our generation so let us hope I do not botch this up too much. My post seems to be different from the other posts so I hope I am not doing this wrong. This entire weekend I have been home attending my friend's father's funeral and Shiva, I am not going to lie it has been mentally and physically exhausting for all parties. While I was sitting at the deceased's house nibbling on a Jersey Sloppy Joe, which seem to have a monopoly on every funeral/wake event I have ever attended, I found myself thinking of actors, specifically Method Actors.
In a nutshell method acting is using real emotions, and real life experiences to act out a scene. Many method actors believe that they actually are the character they are portraying. Some of them also say that you can only properly perform a role with actual experience, for example you cannot play a lawyer without actually being a lawyer since the emotions and actions would not be genuine.
Thank God he doesn't think this way or it would have been very...messy on set.
Jumping back to the Shiva in a small Jewish house in a small suburb in Jersey I am still sitting down with a New Jersey Sloppy Joe watching my friend's family grieve over the loss of a loved one and I cannot stop but think about how crazy some actors can be. If a method actor has to play a role in which their father is dead they actually believe that their father is dead and some do not think you can play the role unless your father was actually dead. This is something that I cannot fully grasp, I have recently seen this raw emotion of agony and despair and the slight thought of losing my father is something I loathe to have in my head. But there are actors out there that willingly endure these thoughts and feelings to make genuine characters.
Eventually we will all work with actors one way or another and I thought I'd share this information so we can acknowledge or even appreciate this level of determination, commitment (and in my opinion zealotry) of actors.
Actually no method actor would ever say that you need to be a lawyer to perform a lawyer. Rather that you have to find in yourself (after careful and extensive research), what in your life would have some equivalence.
ReplyDeleteYou yourself hit on the answer (from the Method point of view) by "seeing the raw emotion of agony and despair and the slight thought of losing your father". If you were a Method actor portraying someone who has lost a dear one, you in fact have some internal emotional resource to access. And the Sloppy Joe might actually be the trigger of that memory or emotion.
However, Method acting is just one of the many and not necessarily the best way to approach movie acting. We will talk and show in class some different effective approaches.