The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act

by Isaac Butler

Experiencing does not mean to fully become the character, or to lose sight of the self. Instead, the actor’s living consciousness and the fictional consciousness of the part they are playing meet.

Experiencing does not mean to fully become the character, or to lose sight of the self. Instead, the actor’s living consciousness and the fictional consciousness of the part they are playing meet.

In “Why We Delight in Representation,” Plutarch wrote that an actor who “is really affected with grief or anger presents us with nothing but the common bare passion, but in the imitation some dexterity and persuasiveness appears.”

But unlike other kinds of artists, actors are their own material. They are the painter and the paint, cursed to never see the results of their work in real time.

One must love art, and not one’s self in art.

There are no small parts, there are only small actors.