Acting Tips 2023

On my site you will find hundreds acting tips for beginners and seasoned pros alike to help you start your career or enhance your career and even make you smile :-)

**Click Here To SUBSCRIBE to my FREE Training Videos

So what do you need to succeed? These acting tips and tricks will help :-)

• You need an unstoppable drive. If you're not sure how to develop this...ask yourself inside. "How best can I develop and increase my determination when things get tough....?" Listen and follow your intuitions advice..

• You need humility - without it you will never be able to open up to the lessons that life is offering you. Open up to life - hear - appreciate - enjoy.

• You need to have "a good ear" as an actor, you need to really listen to what people say and how they say it - you need to be able to open up to receiving the precise sounds people make - but more than that you need to develop a "feel" for language...especially in your acting auditions

• You need to be a "pleasant pain in the ass..." Huh? What does that mean...Being tenacious, focussed and determined...but always pleasant. People want to work with people they get on with. People employ people they KLT - Know Like and Trust. Become someone people know like and trust.

Time is money in this business - so there is no time for show offs and time wasters - or egos. Leave "your issues" at home...be here to work:-)

• Develop a sense of humour to deal with the hassle that is out there. And boy will you need a ton of that...ha ha ha...x

• Learn to love and handle rejection. One door closes, another one opens...all the way. Enjoy the acting tips from actors down below

  ---

FREE Self Taping Training Click on pic below 

More Acting Tips from actors

Perfect your craft. The more skills you master the greater your chance of success. As an actor you must know how to take a character from a script and inhabit that character in your own unique way.

How do you do this?

You can learn a great deal by watching and observing people. Modelling their behaviours, so begin to relax and enjoy your observation time. Imagine being them...becoming them, step inside their minds and bodies...Go out and spend the day at a park or mall and just observe how people act throughout the day. 

What should I look for?

Watch for things like hand movements, eyes, gestures, body alignment, and the way they interact with others and take note of the characteristics that truly strike you, even if they seem a bit odd....especially if they seem a bit odd.

Then walk about inside the feeling of your chosen character - learn to inhabit, become, absorb...for me it always starts with the feet. Get inside their shoes.

Vulnerability - Super Important

Status - Acting for film tips

So often overlooked - begin to consider "Status" in a scene. Who is on top, who's on the same level, who's beneath. Peple are always jockeying for posiyion. How do people show higher status than others? Tone, Language, content, pressure, pushing their ideas on to others, accepting other peoples ideas....

Status is a key ingredient to any good acting technique. Most of human interaction can be broken down into the changing nature of status.

During the course of a conversation, a person's status may change from high to low, and back again, depending on the nature of the conversation. Generally people are trying to raise, lower or level someone else's status. Don't take my word for it - listen out for it - hear it - notice it...

Voice Quality

Take note of the quality of your voice. Is it clear and confident or low and quavering? What does that tell you about someone?

Confident, wary, shy, bossy...what? These ideas determine your status in a scene, and establish your position and goals within it.

Status game - Acting tips for auditions

You and your partner take a card each from a deck of regular playing cards.

Do not share the number you have. Face cards (KQJ) count as 10. Ace is 1.

Begin a scene you are working on. The higher your number, the higher status you should play. Play the scene full out inhabiting the number you chose.

Once the scene is finished, compare numbers to see how accurate you have been.

I use this all the time, it was taught to me by director Max Stafford-Clark. Get stuck? This will loosen you up instantly....

What are you like when performing at your best? Watch this...

Still Stuck?

Join my facebook group for free?

Take your career to the next level?

Or..REALLY change things and fly with the eagles?

**Click Here To SUBSCRIBE to my FREE Training Videos

In-Vulnerability - The pitfalls

Acting Tips From Actors

Roger Allam - Really good actor - says this...in an article from The Guardian

1. Learn your lines so well that you never have to worry about them.

2. Keep a notebook about the play, the character, the period, your moves. It'll help you remember what you have done so far – especially if you're having to rehearse in your spare time rather than all day, every day.

3. Never go dead for a second on stage. Even if you are doing nothing, do it actively. Listen.

4. If something goes wrong – say someone drops something – don't ignore it. Try to deal with it in character.

5. Warm up your voice and body. Get used to the size of the auditorium; if you don't know it already, go to the worst seats in the house and have conversations with people on the stage so you get to know what kind of energy is needed to be heard.

6. Be ambitious. The great actor, director and playwright Ann Jellicoe commissioned writers like Howard Barker and David Edgar, and put on magnificent, large-scale plays in Dorset that involved the whole community.

7. On the other hand, probably avoid Aeschylus's Oresteia or anything by the German dramatist Heinrich von Kleist.

8. Try not to worry about embarrassing yourself. That's a lifetime's task.

9. The Victorian actor Henry Irving said: "Speak clearly and be human" – but if you listen to his recordings, the boundaries of that are pretty vast. James Cagney said: "Never relax, and mean what you say." I think that's pretty good.

10. You are released from the miserable aspects of having to earn your living in this marvellous business called show, so have fun: be as serious as you like, but enjoy yourself.

Roger Allam has worked with the RSC, the National, Shakespeare's Globe and in the West End. TV and film includes The Thick of It, Tamara Drewe and Parade's End.

Read this it's genius...see when it was written - what's changed?

Acting Tips For Film

These are from some backstage experts - good stuff here guys

Know your nonverbal skills.
“To define the difference between acting for the stage and acting for the camera, all stage actors are trained in two channels of nonverbal communication: the body and the voice. However, what separates the on-camera actor from the theatrical actor is the on-camera actor must know the three channels of nonverbal communication: the body, the voice, and the face.

Some people are wired to internalize emotion, meaning what they’re feeling isn’t being revealed, whereas there are externalizers who know what emotions look like but they don’t connect to the intensity unless they have a lot of stimuli. This same idea can apply to your headshot, too, if you’re wondering why all of your headshots look exactly the same!” —John Sudol, acting coach and author of “Acting: Face to Face: The Actor’s Guide to Understanding How Your Face Communicates Emotion for TV and Film”

Relax into your performance.
“Start by relaxing and getting into your body by just ‘slobbing out.’ You need to get out of your head and into your body. It’s important to physically loosen your body and to unfreeze it so that natural life energy and subconscious reactions are set free to happen.

“I always teach students a simple relaxation technique of breathing in through your nose on a count of four, holding for a count of seven, and breathing out through your mouth on a count of eight. Deep-breathing is the fastest way to balance and relax.

The counting helps your brain to shut down so that you can be more in the moment instead of spinning past everything.” —Cathryn Hartt, Dallas-based acting coach, founder of Hartt and Soul Studio, and Backstage Expert

Stop trying so hard.
“Actors feel like they have to entertain. That is a noble desire. But I am going to ask you to please stop—stop feeling like you have to do something. I’m not saying you will never do anything in a film performance. But trust me, do more nothing. There is a lot to nothing.

“Look in the mirror right now. Now, stop making that pursed lip ‘good looking’ face you make every time. Knock it off. Backstage, no doubt, has the best looking readership on Earth. You look great. I want you to just relax every one of the 43 muscles in your face. Now that is a work of art.” —Ryan R. Williams, Los Angeles-based on-camera acting teacher, founder of Screen Actors System, and Backstage Expert

Seriously, do less.
“I believe the ‘secret’ to film acting is telling the story as simply as possible. In the theater, a performance must carry to last row. In film, cameras and microphones are perilously close and capture even the smallest gesture and sound, but the ‘internals’ for the actor are exactly the same as they would be for the stage, only their outward expression must be much subtler.

Theater-trained actors, with limited or no on-camera experience, tend to reveal too much of their work externally. ‘Less is more’ is never truer than when it comes to acting for film.” —Todd Thaler, casting director, acting teacher, and private on-camera audition coach

Get to the point—ASAP.
“Most actors, whether they realize it or not, are trained for the stage. All of the famous methods and techniques were designed for the stage, not the camera. These methods carry with them certain assumptions. For example, most methods presume a long rehearsal time that gives the actor a chance to explore the text and the character deeply with the help of a supportive director.

“This, of course, falls completely apart if you’re working in TV/film, where there is sometimes no rehearsal and oftentimes the director doesn’t know your name. Actors who recognize the difference are able to immediately adapt to the rigors of film by finding the most compelling intersection of themselves and the character, and are able to call up the right qualities whenever action is called.

They don’t need tons of rehearsal, they’ve done the work themselves and are ready at a moment’s notice to connect and shine.” —Craig Wallace, acting teacher and Backstage Expert

Specificity is invaluable.
“On camera, limitless possibilities translate as general. Human limitations translate as clearly defined character. Human beings, and therefore characters, are defined by their prejudices which limit the ways they see and respond to the world. Watching a limited human being or character clash with the world is what makes a story interesting.

The ‘you are the character and the character is you’ approach would actually work if actors isolated specific qualities or character traits (or character limitations if you will) that they themselves possess and let those specific qualities dictate how they play the entire scene.” —John Swanbeck, director, author, and Backstage Expert

Let the camera come to you.
“Camera acting is acting ‘without an audience.’ Think about it: Although there might be 30 crew members standing around when a TV show is being filmed, there’s literally no audience present. The camera is there only to record what happens between the two people. You do not have to “send” your performance anywhere. Unlike stage work, the camera comes to you.” —David Dean Bottrell, veteran actor and acting teacher

Over-enunciation is an enemy.
“Even if you’re loud enough on stage, you still have to speak clearly and enunciate your words so the audience can understand you as well. But when stage actors bring that practice into on-camera acting IT CaN SounD LiKe ThiS, which can be very distracting, obviously. I have to remind actors that it’s actually very hard to not understand someone speaking English, so feel free to be Mushmouth. Not mumbly or slurry, but you just have to know when to let go oF BeinG So CleaR WiTH EaCH WorD.” —Shaan Sharma, co-founder of the Westside On-Camera Acting Studio

Save