Pretend To Be Someone Who...

[darkemeralds]

Who knows something about acting?

It's part of a mental exercise I'm doing: "Pretend To Be Someone Who [fill in the blank]". This week's selection: "Is A Good Actor."

I've done some performing, mostly musical, but acting--real acting, the art and craft of it--is an unknown. More or less completely opaque.

So, have you ever done it? Do you understand it? What's the most important thing about it? How would you define it for someone who has no concept of it? Any good books, articles, videos on the subject that you'd recommend?

Comments

[executrix.livejournal.com]

Y'know, I never rated The Method very highly until I read Robert Lewis' books (amazon lists Advice to the Players and Method or Madness?) about acting. Not incidentally at all for us as writers, what he talks about is how to inhabit a character fully by placing the character in a richly detailed real world. And not at all incidentally for thinking about Right Living, his point is also that everything matters, that the actor has to think about it and value everything and not throw anything away.

BTW, I have done a little bit of acting, but discovered that (quite apart from not being very talented) I liked rehearsing a lot more than performing.