The Intent to Live: Achieving Your True Potential as an Actor

by Larry Moss

The Green Mile,

Betrayal.

Edward Albee’s play The Goat,

The Glass Menagerie

In-Character

Character Improvisation

Neil Simon’s play Chapter Two

Sophie’s Choice, the movie

As Good as It Gets,

Good actors are good detectives,

excellent book Audition, Michael Shurtleff

Othello,

Tuesdays with Morrie,

George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion,

you can’t play passivity

you can’t play indifference—

you can play tryi...

above feeling, trying to make the person feel they’re being dismissed, but that’s because of ...

your relationship with the audience.

Lunts’ great hits (later made into their only film) was The Guardsman, by Ferenc Molnár.

The lesson here is that in order to have a healthy relationship with the audience, you don’t try

to get the audience to love you, you don’t try to get them to laugh or to cry, you just play the reality of the scene.

Alfred Lunt fell into the understandable intoxication of encouraging th...

and, without meaning to, he abandoned his character, his relationship, and the play. Every ac...

time and a hundred times in an acting career: don’t court the aud...

Michael Chekhov: to find

the center of energy in the character’s body.

I asked her where the center of her body’s energy was

The three primary ways of creating physical life for your character are destination, business,

and gesture.

Boys Don’t Cry, Hilary Swank

To learn by observing brilliant physical

acting, watch these performances: Vanessa Redgrave in The Loves of Isadora, Julia, and the television movie If These Walls

Could Talk; Nick Nolte in Q and A, The Prince of Tides, and Down and Out in Beverly Hills; An...

the Day, The Silence of the Lambs, and Amistad; Daniel Day-Lewis in My Beautiful Laundrette, T...

My Left Foot; and Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice, Death Becomes Her, Cry in the Dark, ...

Co...

A private moment always reveals

character.

Orpheus Descending, before Vane...

stop talking and do the

scene without words. Almost instantly the scene becomes clearer to them and to us, because they have to understand

and physicalize the wants and needs underneat...

every human being moves specifically based on class, education, nationality, gender, and

psychological baggage.

Come up with your six descriptive words or

phrases for any character, then physicalize them.

Class, education, and social standing powerfully shape physical self-presentation.

Harold Pinter is helpful to work on to develop specific physicality,

Betrayal,