On Behavior in Acting
In acting, behavior covers the entire canvas of human action from the myriad of facial expressions, body postures, quirks, jerks, tics, nods, turns, eye positions, pauses, tones of voice, sounds, timbre, and many other undefinable factions that encompass all the ways that human beings react under stimulus.
What keys all behavior, is emotional truth. How we actually feel. If the emotion underneath the behavior is false, the behavior will be indicative of, but not truthful of, what your character is actually going through, and will therefore be...false. And it will not get the reaction that you are aiming for. Why? Because; Say it with me, “All audiences are perfect, and everything you do reads.” It is our strength, and our conundrum. But...the “Foundation” of good acting, is emotional truth. That's what leads to good behavior. We literally have to “feel” our way to a great performance. We must believe the circumstances we're creating. The body is meat, and our voices are produced by meat. They are our instrument, and like a virtuoso, we have to put the feeling of believability through our instrument to create our “music.”
So, the most important facet of your “instrument” is emotional accessibility. If you cannot create tears, or rage, or euphoria on que, you will be severely limited as an actor. All good, creative choices are anchored by truthful feeling. It translates to us as an audience on some invisible channel, we literally “feel” what you feel. Or not.
The second most important facet, is coming up with interesting, creative physical behavior (funded by truthful emotion) that communicates to us what the words in the script REALLY mean from the character's perspective. There are many ways to say the same lines. And spoken by different types of people under different conditions, they will evoke many, many different meanings.
And finally, the source for behavior, is found in the choices that revolve around the actors' study and understanding of character, relationship, and place coupled with their understanding of human, psychology, human interaction, observation, experience, all filtered through the prism of their imagination. A true actor is always studying his fellow man. The more you know, the more you have to draw on.
The really creative actors we all admire, that do the breath taking suprising, unpredictable work we all love, Anthony Hopkins, Merrill Streep, Robert DeNiro, Christopher Walken, Denzel Washington, Emma Thompson, and many, many others, all – do the work. They all study and continue to grow. They all can access any emotion and make us believe we are whoever they want us to believe they are. And it's all done the same way; Emotional truth throughout interesting, human, physical behavior. Go and do likewise.