7. Your throughline is a mantra
This method is simple but challenging at first, just as the simplicity of meditation is to the undisciplined and overactive mind. Like meditation, your mind will ache to do more. You may feel guilty, like you’re cheating by not diving into research, writing background stories and subtext, breaking down the beats and thinking seriously about objective, superobjective, obstacles, etc. Your monkey mind is usually driven by a powerful urge to build a fortress only to knock it down; or as actors are often directed, to do the work and then forget the work. It may not be immediately obvious that the work is in fact a larger and more rewarding challenge: to commit to a creative meditation, resisting all temptation to make it more than it is.
8. Experiment with intensity
Although you must not push the expression of an emotional throughline, you can increase its intensity. Screen actors are inclined to be small, but if the emotion is honest and the intensity heightened, it can provoke big, thrilling responses that will surprise you and will read as honest on-camera—because it is. Always try ratcheting up the intensity of the emotion when experimenting. Conversely, experiment with the throughline resonating in your body in subtle ways. Sometimes the emotion will barely show. It can be a sliver of an expression resulting from a low-intensity throughline coursing through your body. If your throughline is anxiety, different levels, from reserved, low-level anxiety to panic will need to be explored. Again, don’t try to show the level of intensity—experiment with feeling it in degrees. The expression of emotion, whatever the intensity, will always take care of itself. Intensity can have far-flung implications for character. For instance, rage usually lends itself to humor when it’s reactive, sudden rage—when the intensity is so abrupt it overwrites any attempt at filtering. Rage plus the factor of time eliminates surprise and is often more of a menacing, plotting, seething rage.
9. Your character is oblivious to the comedy
* * *
“The way I approach comedy, is you have to commit to everything as if it’s a dramatic role, meaning you play it straight.”
Will Ferrell2
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Commit to playing it straight. You’re not in on the joke. Never laugh at your own jokes. You laugh and your audience won’t. Your character might be smart (Lena Dunham in Girls, the guys in Big Bang Theory), just not so clever they’re aware they’re being funny. Your character must be oblivious to the comedy. Behave with the sincerity of a drama. However, you would not play a dramatic role with such solemnity it becomes melodrama (unless this is a stylistic choice of the director). Likewise, many actors working on comedy try to prevent themselves from smiling and breaking character by pasting an acerbic look on their face. This betrayal of commitment, a self-conscious Band-Aid, is often conceded by the subtlest tension in the corners of the mouth. The tell is the muscles priming for a smile, contradicting the stern facial expression. The sweet spot is an unceremonious obliviousness, and the easiest way to accomplish this is to focus and commit to your emotional throughline.
10. The comedy is in the character
Comedy is said to have a shelf life. You’ve likely been unable to summon more than a painful smile and sense of history or nostalgia while watching older, joke-driven comedies with a succession of setups and punchlines. Jokes are often comments on a particular time, cultural perspective, and way of thinking. Later generations will not have the same frame of reference necessary to experience the humor. Another reason, of course, is that once you’ve heard the joke, the element of surprise that is crucial to experiencing humor is gone. With character-driven comedies however, the character isn’t trying to make an audience laugh with jokes. For the character, the story is a drama. The comedy is a result of the character living truthfully and without irony. For joke-driven comedies, actors traditionally map out the beats, setups and delivery of each joke. In character-driven comedies, you can handle any new script pages thrown at you at the last minute because committing to the character leads to a plethora of ways you could deliver the lines in the moment. Even joke-driven, broad comedies benefit from a comedically rich character that allows the actor to forgo the analytic breakdown of the jokes and keep out of their head. Comedies are traditionally overlooked during award season. I wonder if this is because jokes sometimes supersede a rich comedic character in joke-driven comedies. When a fleshed-out comedic character takes the spotlight, richness and comedic longevity are the actor’s legacy.
11. Playing annoying or obnoxious characters
One of the most important notes for an actor playing an annoying or obnoxious character is to remember that the character invokes those feelings in other characters, not in the audience. The audience must love watching the unpleasant character grating the nerves of everyone in the story. The distinction is that the character should not be insufferable to watch. Allow your audience that degree of removal. Be aware of this when settling on a throughline and any other character choice for an obnoxious role. Think of Pete Campbell played by Vincent Kartheiser in Mad Men, Maggie Smith as Violet Crawley in Downton Abbey, Hugh Laurie as the title role in House, Elizabeth Perkins as Celia Hodes in Weeds, Jack Nicholson as Melvin Udall in As Good As It Gets, and Reese Witherspoon who played the wonderfully annoying Tracy Flick in Election. Annoying and obnoxious characters are immensely entertaining, as long as they don’t annoy their audience.
12. When comedic delivery is planned
If there is a specific comedic delivery you’re aiming for with a line, decide on it but don’t plan on it. Once you have an inkling of how you’d like to deliver it, shelve it in the recesses of your brain away from working memory. Don’t get ready for it while you are performing. Do not anticipate it at any time leading up to the delivery. The anticipation will show and will undermine your delivery. Shelve the plan so that procedural memory may offer it up in the moment. If this does not happen, go with whatever impulse surfaces instead.
13. Scripted comedy = text + throughline + something unnamable
Something not yet fully defined happens when you apply emotional throughlines to comedic material. This something unnamable likely stems from the fact that the process is largely nonsemiotic. My advice, of course, is to simply experiment with it on-camera. What you see on the screen reveals more than anything I could possibly say about it.
14. Experiment with physicality
After settling on a throughline, allow for your character’s physicality to surface organically. Committing to the throughline and the words on the page frees up your impulses to suggest how your body will hold itself while you become this person. Allow every impulse and see how it plays out on-camera. One actor with the emotional throughline curiosity was unaware that he was doing a very slight head bob as a nonverbal response to the lines from the other characters. It came across as a subtle gesture of unquestioning acceptance of what the other characters were saying. If the gesture had been translated into words, the unspoken idea was, “I hear you.” What made it particularly interesting was the head bob preceded his chunk of dialogue that was written in disagreement with the other characters. His dialogue was assertive and intelligent and the most obvious choice might be to play the character aggressively. By maintaining the curiosity throughline, he was able to disagree with the other characters in the script while hearing them and challenging them with an understated sophistication that was borne from his throughline coupled with pointed dialogue. The sounds, gestures, and subtle reactions suggested the habituated tone of a human who had lived in this body for a lifetime. All these subtle nuances surfaced without effort or analysis and created a layered character. Yet all the actor was doing was committing to his throughline and the text. Implicit impulse guided the rest of his performance. Trust that your impulses know more than that voice inside your head.
Note: there is no rule that your character’s physicality must surface via unconscious impulse. Although it has a tendency to happen that way, often you will enjoy experimenting on-camera an
d, through repetition, turn certain conscious physical choices into character habit. Experiment with mannerisms, speech patterns, physical rhythm and tempo, and so on. Experiment with conscious choices and allow for unconscious ones.
15. Experiment with voice
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“Voice is…It’s kind of the fingerprint of the soul.”
Daniel Day-Lewis3
* * *
One evening I was coaching an actress auditioning to play a co-star role on a cable crime drama. The character was a stripper named Amber, and the scene involved her character speaking to the police detectives (played by the two lead actors on the show) who were questioning her about bruises and gashes on her face and body. Amber had been assaulted by the man they were trying to apprehend. We took a couple of minutes to experiment with several throughlines and settled on lust. When combined with the dialogue of her character and the circumstances of the scene, lust brought out changes in the actress’s voice and conduct and colored an unconventional spin on her delivery. The actress’s lines were peppered with details about perilous encounters with the culprit. Her dialogue also included questions about whether or not the officers thought they would apprehend him. The most obvious choice was to play Amber as though she feared for her safety. But the lust throughline transformed the actress’s posture and slight physique into that of a confident, self-possessed adrenalin junkie, unwilling to be perceived as a victim, even when serious wounds and her own description of their relationship suggested she had been victimized. The most interesting impulse that arose out of the throughline was the raspy seductiveness of her voice. This actress had experimented with lust for other roles, but with this character there was a shift of tone and resonance that surfaced instinctively. The lust throughline, coupled with her physical and vocal transformation, added another layer to Amber that toyed with the meaning of her final line, delivered with a raspy curiosity, “Do you think he’ll come back?” The effect was intriguing, and could have led to further development of her character or nothing more than an interesting delivery of information designed to move the story along. In either case, the actress showed her chops. It was plain she could easily play the more obvious choice if requested, or larger roles down the line.
16. Don’t feel a need to add on
Although many characters evolve from the throughline, it is important to recognize that sometimes a great character emerges in an instant. I’m still curious how this happens and speculate that by giving working memory as simple a task as possible, more powerful mechanisms of mind that operate beneath the surface of awareness are freed up to perform at full capacity. During playback you may conclude that the throughline is the only fuel your impulses need. When what you are doing on camera is great, no matter how simple the character’s conception, don’t cross the finish line and hurl yourself into the bleachers.
17. The throughline is a powerful tool for script analysis
Emotional throughlines are indispensable for script analysis, revealing meaning, subtext, and richness. With emotional throughlines, however, complex meanings buried in the script are revealed through discovery, not analysis. Many actors look at a page of dialogue unable to understand why the character would say any of the things written on the page. Once an emotional throughline befitting the character is found, the dialogue jumps off the page. The text suddenly makes sense, and a multidimensional character emerges, a character few actors would likely arrive at through analysis. One actress I coached was auditioning for a role in a film where she played a mother reacting to a car accident. A speech pattern she noticed in the dialogue, how she kept repeating herself, gave her a clue as to which emotional throughline might pair well with this character. While most actresses were playing the scene with the repetitive pleas growing more and more desperate (as heard through the walls in the waiting room) this actress chose the emotional throughline, shock. Shock is the disconcerting state where emotions aren’t being processed because they are so disturbing they overwhelm the nervous system. Shock as a character throughline is often eerie and profound. The director told her that no one had understood how to play this role, and she got the part. At the time of publication, the film is yet to be released so I cannot give away the twist, but it turns out that the clue in the dialogue that prompted her choice of emotional throughline was more appropriate than she could have imagined at the time. This same actress auditioned for a film with sides from a scene in which she and her husband were hurling insults back and forth at each other across the dinner table. There are many choices you could make, but again, listening through the wall, most actresses were hurling the lines with venom and missing some of the subtext. The actress chose the throughline joy, playing it softly, and the love and dark playfulness between the dysfunctional couple emerged. Again, she got the part.
18. Character saves weak writing
Even if the lines seem out of place or awkwardly conceived, your emotional perspective will find a delivery that makes them work. I don’t fully understand why this works as well as it does, only that it’s endlessly entertaining to watch it happen.
19. Let the throughline be a jumping-off point
For roles where you have a fair amount of prep time, your emotional throughline may function as a jumping-off point that then fades into the background as your character evolves. There’s nothing wrong with this. Again, all that matters is what produces great characters on screen.
20. It’s not about the throughline
I often have to ask students to remind me during playback which throughline they were working with because I can’t tell. This is also perfectly fine. Your audience isn’t seeing your throughline. Your throughline works with impulse the same way light filters through a prism and breaks into colors.
21. Emotional throughlines are only one step removed from playing yourself
Your impulses are enough most of the time. They are enough because they are so much. Many mechanisms of mind are at work beneath the layer of explicit consciousness. A throughline, coupled with the material, is all you need to step into the flow, to create out of spontaneity, and surprise yourself during playback. It’s deceptively simple, but when character is required for whatever genre, this method works better than anything I’ve seen.
* * *
“When you start to engage with your creative processes, it shakes up all your impulses, and they all kind of inform one another.”
Jeff Bridges4
* * *
With playing yourself as well as with character work and comedy, the whole approach is conceptually basic: if the role calls for playing yourself, be honest and open, express no more or no less than what you feel and honor any impulse that arises. If the role calls for a character or comedy, use the same principles to stay true to your emotional throughline. Experiment with impulse, physicality, vocal range, and tone, but stay out of your head. The trick to discovering whether the material requires you play yourself or play a character is to try both on camera. The throughline is only slightly trickier than playing yourself in that you are hanging out with a particular emotion, but the task is exceedingly simple when you commit to one word. After a very short time the process becomes streamlined as experience plants the approach in your bones. As simple as the process is, the technical proficiency acquired through working on-camera amounts to a long list of personalized mechanics that help enhance and finesse your screen presence. We will discuss this in Part Three.
Chapter Endnotes
1 Brickman, P., D. Coates, and R. Janoff-Bulman, “Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: is Happiness Relative?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, August 1978, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/690806, accessed March 9, 2014.
2 Ferrell, Will, and Paul Fischer, "Will Ferrell - Cranky Critic® StarTalk - Movie Star Interviews." Will Ferrell - Cranky Critic® StarTalk - Movie Star Interviews, accessed August 6, 2014.
3 Day-Lewis, Daniel, quote, n.d., “First Look: Steven Spielberg, Daniel Day-Lewis and Sally Field,”
Oprah’s Next Chapter,” www.oprah.com/own-oprahs-next-chapter/How-Daniel-Day-Lewis-Found-Abraham-Lincolns-Voice-Video, accessed July 6, 2014.
4 Bridges, Jeff, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, "Jeff Bridges." Interview Magazine, July 1, 2004, www.maryellenmark.com/text/magazines/interview/907I-000-007.html, accessed August 6, 2014.
Troubleshooting Comedy and Character
Can an actor play intelligence?
On a beautiful Sunday I sat in a cozy carpeted room with mismatched sofas and over forty students squeezed cross-legged onto any vacant square foot of cushion or carpet. The teacher called students two at a time to jump up and act out a scene we’d been instructed to prepare. The class was an intensive at a school with a comedy guru. The night before, I’d worked on my own at employing the school’s method. But there was nothing funny in the terrifically unfunny, half-hour, multicam sitcom pages. The role was written for an ancillary female character, a beautiful woman who asks the sitcom’s leading man, whom she’s never met before, if he could help her because she doesn’t know how to fix something mechanical. She then mentions that she and her lesbian roommate are massage therapists, and the guy is stunned at his good fortune…you get the idea. I followed the institute’s instructions to the letter, but was having no luck evoking the magic I was told would come from the work. I wondered if anyone else was having difficulty. Frustrated, I started working the scene on-camera using throughlines. Within three minutes I landed on wonder that inspired a subtle vocal rhythm, and it came together on screen.
The Science of On-Camera Acting Page 8
