Acting Tip: Emotion for the Camera

Actress Ingrid Bergman relates this exchange with director Alfred Hitchcock: “I said, "I don't think I can give you that kind of emotion." And he [Hitchcock] sat there and said, "Ingrid, fake it!" Well, that was the best advice I've had in my whole life, because in all the years to come there were many directors who gave me what I thought were quite impossible instructions and many difficult things to do, and just when I was on the verge of starting to argue with them, I heard his voice coming to me through the air saying, "Ingrid, fake it!" It saved a lot of unpleasant situations and waste of time.”

Faking it has a lot to do with the "outside in" approach to acting favored by the British and Europeans, and the more experience I gain as an actress, the more I think there is something to it. Get the walk and the talk and the rest of it will come. In many situations, it does.

Example: I was on set yesterday for a television episode in a scene that the director wanted played with high emotion. My character had just been told that her only son had been found murdered, and I was to be hysterical and on the verge of physical collapse through multiple takes and close-ups from different angles.

Now I'm a born stoic and not given to tears at the drop of a hat. But what I have found in such situations is that if I get all the physical things that happen to me when I cry - tight throat, quivering chin, hyperventilation, tight ribcage, shoulders shuddering, etc. - and ad lib the things I have said when I've received shocking news ("oh no, oh no, oh my God") - i.e. the walk and the talk - my brain seems to say "Oh! She's crying!" and I begin to actually cry tears.  In fact, the emotion snowballs - in this case to the point where the director came over and patted my arm between takes.

So one doesn't need to think of dead puppies, as actors like to joke, in order to express emotion.  It is possible to launch into the physicality of the emotion and trick your body into expressing emotion you don't necessarily feel.  In fact, acting coach Harold Guskin gives a version of this in his book How to Stop Acting.

The acting you are most satisfied with may indeed come in those intense scenes where you get caught up in the action and your scene partner is giving you a ton to work from and everything you feel is real and in the here and now. In those moments even taxi drivers from Minnesota can put in a Hell of a performance (Captain Phillips).

But more often than not you don't have that to work from and you're being paid to deliver for the camera.  In those moments, try "faking it." It can work.  #KathrynBrowning