Acting is not emoting. But it is emotional. Great actors are able to be open to experiencing fully the things they are going through without pushing, forcing or trying to show us how they are feeling. Great actors do not gild the lily when it comes to their emotional life, but they do experience things intensely. With that in mind, I think it’s important to address something that always comes up in our classes: resistance to feeling.

Recently, while working on a scene, an actor threw up his hands, stopped the work and told me that he wanted to step out and take a break because he was feeling really vulnerable. He told me he wanted to collect himself so that he could continue on rehearsing. He was working on an intense break-up scene in which both characters finally express long-held resentments and secrets. It’s the climax of the play. It is, no doubt, a tough scene, and they had been struggling with it for too long. It was flat and lifeless, the paint-by-numbers version of a break-up instead of the rich, very human life that could have been there.

If I’m honest, I was frustrated too. The actors were simply not listening to each other and the intensity of the scene was lost in a muddle of unsupported yelling. I felt like they had fallen back into bad habits, habits we’d worked long and hard to end. Instead of letting us take a break though, I told him to put his attention on his partner and go into repetition. (For those who are unfamiliar with the Meisner approach, repetition is a foundational exercise in which partners work honestly off of each other’s behavior, expressing what is actually happening moment to moment). He asked again if he could have a minute. Again, I told him to put all of his attention on his partner and work from where he was. He bristled. I told him again. He got upset with me, which his partner noticed and told him:

“You’re upset.”
“I’m upset.”
“You’re upset.”
“I’m upset.”
“You’re upset.”
“I’m upset.”
“You’re mad.”
“I’m mad.”
“You’re mad.”
“I’m so mad.”
“You’re so mad.”
“I’m so mad.”

In that moment, something shifted and the actor began to cry. Actually he began to weep. Which his partner worked from:

“You’re heartbroken.”
“I’m heartbroken.”
“You’re heartbroken.”
“I’m heartbroken.”
“You’re heartbroken.”
“I’m heartbroken.”

The other actor put all of her attention on him and worked from the truth of what was happening in that moment between them. Being the deeply attentive and sensitive actor she is, she too began to cry.

“Now I’m sad.”
“Now you’re sad.”
“I’m sad.”
“You’re sad.”
“I’m sad.”

I fed them a line from the script and told them to put the words of the scene on top of what was happening between them. They did. Line by line. Moment by moment. Listening with new purpose, telling the truth. It was truly surprising and painful and beautiful. And all of us in the audience went for the ride.

After the scene ended, we all sat in silence for a moment before I asked both of them to sit down and talk to me. I asked them if they thought there was anything valuable about what they had just done. He paused, began to well up and blurted out, “I just hate feeling like that, you know?”

I know. No one likes to feel terrible. Of course not. But if you are an actor, you will sometimes have to play roles that require you to go through painful things. If you inhabit those roles fully, you will experience things that are not comfortable. I believe if you are truly doing your job, you have to actually go through the things your character is going through. How else will it be true? How else will it go from basic pretending and reach the level of art?

If you want to act, you must accept that you are an artist working to express the fullness of the human experience in your work. It is not enough to express just those parts that are comfortable and positive. As actors, we get to experience the widest breadth of humanity. We get to. It’s an opportunity and ultimately a joy. My frustration with that student was not that he was resisting me, it’s that he was resisting the fullness of his own experience. He wanted to take it easy on himself rather than let go of his ego and venture into the unknown.

Steven Pressfield writes in his wonderful book The War of Art:

“Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.”

Our emotions cannot hurt us. They are part of the whole of us. When we resist them, we diminish ourselves. We make our work smaller. When we try to stay in the comfortable place, we let ourselves down. Comfort is overrated. Dive in.