“I don’t believe it” is what I say to actors when they aren’t properly connected to the material, their character, or the moment in which they find themselves.  Much like the models in the photo above.

It’s a catchall phrase I use to describe everything that doesn’t fall into any other category.  Yes, you aren’t believable when you anticipate what you’re going to get from your scene partner, but I’m talking about a different sort of believability.

When I use this phrase, it just means that the moment to which I refer isn’t anything I am mistaking for real life.  It is artificial on some level.

I typically use this phrase to refer to a single speech or line that isn’t working.  If an entire scene is unbelievable, that’s another matter.  Then it’s time to revisit the given circumstances, the verbs, the character’s motivation, or some other large scale problem.  No, in my parlance, “I don’t believe it” generally means that the actor has just withdrawn from the reality of the scene for a moment or two.

Usually he’s being superficial, relying on externals and line readings rather than connecting to what is going on inside of his character.

Even good actors are susceptible to this.  We dig our way into our characters and get to those real moments over time.  We are inclined to focus on the more difficult moments and let the easier ones slide, and sometimes we forget to go back and work on them.  It takes a lot of energy to stay focused and connected to the material without abatement, so it’s easy to take a moment to “rest” and coast for a line or two.

I regularly vet my own work for such moments, listening to myself in rehearsals.  “Does that really sound believable?  How can I make it even more natural?”  (A topic for another day.)

I use the phrase “I don’t believe it” when I direct, because I find it generally does the trick.  I’m simply giving the actor feedback on how it looks from the audience.  It is up to him to figure out why what he’s doing isn’t working.  My comment sends him back to the drawing board, and the modifications he makes usually pull him further into the material.  Maybe he makes it work in the first attempt, maybe he needs a few tries to get it to a stage where it IS believable, but a good, intelligent actor can figure it out on his own, once I’ve alerted him to the problem.

Surprisingly, even new actors respond very well to this approach.

The intention behind this comment is critical, however.  If you’re a director who wants to employ this technique, please pay close attention to what follows!

“I don’t believe it” isn’t a criticism – that is, it isn’t a negative.  I am not ridiculing what he’s doing in any way.  On the contrary – I deliver it as a really supportive, respectful comment.  It’s nothing personal; it’s factual.  It just means “you aren’t there yet, keep trying.”

When I say it to an actor, the implication is that he can certainly get to his destination, he just hasn’t arrived yet.  Sometimes an actor will respond, telling me what it is that he is trying to do, and I may say, “I think those are good choices.  They just aren’t coming through in what you’re doing, that’s all.”

If an actor continues to have trouble, I will try to tell him why it isn’t believable.  Depending on the actor, I may do this with the initial comment.  I’ve worked with actors for whom the simple identification of “this moment works, this one doesn’t” is sufficient.  But less trained actors may need to know why it isn’t working.  “I don’t believe it, because I don’t think you’ve really heard what she said.”  Etc.

It’s not just about saying the lines.  If it’s not believable, it doesn’t work.

Telegraphing is when we know what you’re doing or feeling before it is appropriate for us to know.  We know what’s coming next, it’s because you’ve sent out a signal ahead of time.  It’s a form of anticipation, but rather than anticipating your scene partner’s next line, you’re anticipating the play itself.  You’ve jumped into the next beat or one even further down the line.   You aren’t building toward anything naturally, because you’ve already arrived.

It’s when you and your boyfriend are having an argument, and you know that the scene is going to end with the two of you breaking up.  Instead of fighting to save the relationship, which is the action of the scene, you let the climax – when he storms out of the apartment – inform everything that comes before.  You’ve either stopped fighting for the relationship long before the end actually comes or else the nature of your fight is colored by the fact that you know the relationship is doomed to failure.

Not only does this eliminate the dramatic interest of the scene, but you’re cheating your character.  Your character doesn’t know the break-up is coming until the moment it actually happens.  Even if it seems to her that it’s moving in that direction, that the argument is escalating in a way that it hasn’t before, that things are being said that are hard to take back, the moment he says he’s leaving and not coming back should still hit you like a ton of bricks.  Reality, no matter how predictable, is nonetheless shocking in its event.

Spending a week at the bedside of someone who is dying doesn’t take away from the impact of the moment of his death.

When we say that we need to play the scene “moment by moment”, this is what we’re talking about.  It’s all about “staying in the moment”, but the phrase “moment by moment” reminds us to not get ahead of ourselves, to let the story unfold in a way that surprises not just the audience, but the characters we play as well.

If you’re human, you know just how unpredictable life is.  “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.”  How many times have you rehearsed a difficult moment in your life – confronting someone who has been creating a problem for you – only to find that all the things you planned to say get thrown out when the person you’re talking to throws you a curve?

Perhaps what you should do is give some consideration to how your character thinks the scene is going to play out, and compare that expectation with the reality.  Where do differences exist?  If you can spot the differences, you can discover when your character is surprised or has to take another approach to get what she wants (new beat, new tactic, new verb).

Many actors interpret the idea of “receiving” from another actor to mean that they actually have to “process” the information or emotion that they get before the can respond, or react, to it.  This misinterpretation has led to the development of the actor’s “transition”.  As in, “Can you pause just slightly before you say that last line, because it will be easier for me to make the transition?”

This is bogus.  People don’t make “transitions” from one emotion to another.  Actors shouldn’t either.

This is a good time to go back and re-read my post on “Why It is (Ultimately) Easier to Act Verbs than Emotions.”  But let me carry the comments in that post just a little bit further.

If you touch a pan that has just come out of the oven, you won’t need to “transition” before you yelp in pain.  If you get a phone call that tells you that your immediate family was just killed in a ten car pileup on the freeway, you won’t need to process anything before you begin to wail.  The winner of a beauty pageant doesn’t wait to hear her full name called before she looks astonished at her good fortune, she just hears “Miss Ari . . .” and she knows they mean her.

So the heavy-handed transitions that we sometimes see on stage, when the actor moves from happy to shocked to fury in the five seconds following the delivery of bad news, are never believable to an audience because they seem like what they are:  unnatural delayed reactions.

An actor who claims he needs a transition has plotted his emotions (“I’m happy to this line, then I get surprised when she says this, which makes me angry.”)  He isn’t connected to his own emotional life overlaid by the character’s life story and situation.  He’s playing externals.  And when you play externals, charting the “transition” from “happy” to “angry” takes more than the split second it takes in real life.  It takes a few seconds, because we’re not reacting to the events of the scene, nor are we reacting to what we are getting emotionally from the other characters.  We are painting by numbers.

These are the same actors who like to throw in a few extra words in a challenging moment, because those words give them the time they need to make their “transition.”

But if you play the verbs – that is, if you just try to get what you want, and if someone throws a roadblock in your way that makes you have to change how you’re trying to get what you want, and that roadblock gets you angry or frustrated because you think you’re being perfectly reasonable, or you have a brilliant new approach you’re sure will work that makes you proud or delighted, or you have to laugh at how ridiculous your “opponent” is being – well, that “transition” will happen naturally.  You won’t have to pre-plan it or force it.  It will just show up on its own, and it will be better than anything you could possibly have planned in advance.

If you are struggling with a moment in a scene, and it feels laborious to move from one emotion to another, so you temporarily forget this post and say to your director, “Gosh, I am having such a hard time making this transition!” – there is really only one cause and one solution.

The thing that is causing your difficulty is that you aren’t connected to your character and what he really wants – you’re floating on the surface, like oil on water.  In other words, you’re faking it on some level.  Stop faking it, get yourself in touch with what is really going on for you emotionally in this scene and go after what you want, and the transition will become effortless.

Why are you faking it?  Either because you haven’t yet learned how to connect yourself to your emotional life, or because whatever is going on with your character, emotionally speaking, is something that is making you very uncomfortable.  You’d rather not dig into it.  But digging is the only way to give the audience a moment worth watching.

The first thing I do with all of my new acting students is introduce them to their feelings.  Even the people who seem quite emotional avoid their feelings, they just do it in a slightly different way than everyone else does.

Because feelings are an actor’s stock-in-trade, his primary tool, you have to be comfortable experiencing them.

Experiencing your feelings is different than feeling them.  Experiencing your feelings is about letting them be, sitting with them without trying to change them, for longer than you are probably comfortable doing so right now.  It’s about letting them exist without judging them.

Feelings aren’t bad, you know.  Even the negative ones – anger, frustration, sadness – aren’t bad.  They are trying to tell you something about your life, that’s all.  When a negative feeling wells up inside you, the best question to ask yourself is, “What expectation did I have that isn’t being met?”  (There are also a couple of follow-up questions to ask yourself, but that isn’t the purpose of this blog!)

But somewhere along the line, we got the idea that it isn’t good to feel our feelings, and so we opt out of them as much as we can.  Even the positive feelings.  We are only slightly more comfortable with letting ourselves feel positive feelings to the fullest than we are the negative ones.

I am always surprised when a student reveals to me, usually in the first class, that he doesn’t feel his feelings.  I use the male pronoun arbitrarily – I’ve had just as many women acknowledge this about themselves.  For me, missing out on your feelings is missing out on part of life, and knowing that I don’t feel my feelings would send me on a mission to understand why (but that’s just me.  You won’t travel that road until you’re ready to.)

It’s interesting that someone who knows he doesn’t feel his feelings would come to an acting class, but perhaps it’s his inner self sensing that he’s ready to try to do so.  Not all of the people like this who come to class stay, but the ones who do are very courageous, and they tell me the class has had an impact on their personal lives, as well as their acting.

But even the ones who don’t know they aren’t really in touch with their feelings realize it in short order.  And while it takes some time to really get comfortable with them, they also know in that moment that only by doing so can they produce acting worth watching.

Feelings aren’t bad; they’re just scary.  Which is why you want to make friends with them slowly.  By gradually getting in touch with them, and by starting with the most benign feelings you can, you’ll realize that they’re just the boogeyman in the closet.  That nothing really terrible comes from feeling them; on the contrary, extraordinary good can come from feeling them, both on stage and off.

Here’s what I tell the people who are most afraid:  When I was little, I was the Good Little Girl.  I seriously believed that Perfection was possible long after I should have realized it wasn’t.  This wasn’t a stance forced on me by my parents in any way; on the contrary, it was entirely my choice.  Feelings like anger and disappointment and sadness were all things to be sucked up and ignored.  Surely no one would like me if they saw that I was capable of such terrible feelings!

But from the very beginning of my life, to the extent that one can imagine such a thing, I wanted to be an actress.  I think on some very instinctive level, I gravitated toward it because I understood, even at that tender age, that it was okay to feel all of my feelings on stage, including the “bad” ones.  It wasn’t me up there, after all – it was a character written by a playwright.  I could use all of my own emotions in service of creating a believable character without anyone judging me as wanting.  In fact, crying and screaming and being afraid – when appropriate in context – actually earned me praise.

Acting was very cathartic, because it gave me an outlet for feelings I wouldn’t release in real life.  As I got older, I realized that while those feelings I expressed on stage did indeed have their root inside the real me, no one watching had any idea what their deep, dark source was.  So I was completely free to indulge them as much as I liked!

I wonder, too, if the willingness to be so free with our feelings is one of the things that non-actors admire about us (aside from our ability to memorize all those lines!)  They know they could never be so brave, and admire those who can.

While the feelings that we feel on stage are, indeed, our own, they are conjured up not by our own experiences, but rather by what we imagine the character might feel in this particular set of circumstances.  This creates a little more freedom to let go; because the circumstances are entirely imaginary, they can’t harm us.  And when you are really working well, you become a way-station for them, not a holding tank.  By the end of the evening, if you’ve fully released them to the audience, you can make your way to that after-show party without the remnants of the tragic figure you played on stage following you home!