Growing up, people around me tended to believe that acting was a form of pretending, or that actors were liars whom everybody chose to trust. Whether watching a screen or sitting among an audience in front of a stage, is an actor’s true purpose to lie? Do performers spend years refining their pretending skills?
Actually, the answer to those questions is what sets a compelling actor apart from an unconvincing one. When discussing professional – or at least high-quality – acting, what matters is how someone makes the audience forget, even briefly, that the character is the result of study, discipline, and the interpretation of a fictional role.
A production is the translation of a story, not a fake version of it. When hiring actors, directors search for people who can inhabit their characters by externalizing emotions and inner experiences drawn from real life. Imagine you’re at the supermarket and a lady accidentally gets cut. If she starts screaming and exaggerating every reaction, even if you’re on her side, you won’t fully believe she’s in that much pain. That’s because you’ve already been in a similar situation.
That’s, to sum up, the Lee Strasberg method. Strasberg believed that actors shouldn’t hide from themselves, but instead use their own experiences to play a character so the performance feels real. The actor should use deep emotional memories and relive feelings to achieve authenticity in their performance, which is essentially what makes the audience believe in it.
And his method does have a scientific basis: the human unconscious. Even if we don’t notice it, every time we’re about to watch a performance, our brains “sign a contract” with us, deciding that we won’t truly believe anything happening on stage or screen. However, an unconvincing performance can break that contract, which is why the actor also needs to do their part to maintain it.
Here’s where the meticulous work begins. The human brain can often pick up on lies through involuntary microexpressions: facial muscles we cannot consciously control move when someone is lying. That’s one of the reasons the Strasberg method became so influential. By applying it, the actor is not simply faking a reaction, but genuinely experiencing it instead, making the reaction appear more natural to the audience.
In the end, acting isn’t about “great faking”, but the way an actor truthfully represents a character’s emotions. Even if the performer has never been through a specific situation, they already have all the emotional material to portray a genuine reaction – and this authenticity is what defines an outstanding actor.
