Three Dog Night sang, “One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do.” To assist you in your acting think of it this way, “one is the boringest number that you’ll ever do.” By that I mean there is nothing more boring than playing a single emotion through a scene or a long stretch of a script. It is boring for you, your colleagues, and the audience.
It is up to you to make sure that you don’t just play things one way because emotions are not composed of a single, pure feeling. Think of emotions as colors. No emotion is one single color. Jealousy is not a simple, single shade of green. Anger is not red and sadness is not blue. Each of those emotions is actually a mix of emotions and a mix of colors.
Inside the emotion of anger there can be fear, rage, self-pity, sadness, nervousness, jealousy, and even a little joy at being able to express yourself. With that in mind, the red of anger is suddenly awash in dots of green, purple, black, orange, yellow, and magenta. Emotions are like a pointillist painting, dots and dots of many colors coming together to create a sense of a color but with remarkable variations and elements.
This means that your acting should be as textured and varied as that pointillist painting. Rather than play one single color through a long stretch of text, you need to change what you are doing and use different responses and approaches to reveal them all. This is going to make your acting textured, interesting, and honest.
Don’t just play the emotions. That will be boring. You need to know your character’s objectives, obstacles, relationships, attitudes, and place in the world. But then as you work through the character’s emotional journey, look at the possible variations in the emotions so that they are an interesting mix of colors to play and to watch.
Eric Barr. All rights reserved
