18/05/2022

What is the point of acting? It’s to immerse the audience in a particular story. Therefore, how good or how bad acting depends on how well that kind of acting helps immerse the audience in the story.

Good acting means focusing on your scene partners, responding emotionally even when not talking, using body language to show what happened off camera leading up to or after the scene, and making choices that align with the scene’s purposes. Bad acting is the opposite: isolated, out of place acting.

This article contains more details, including explanations with video examples, as well as links to articles to help you improve these aspects of your acting.  

1. Good acting: adapting to scene partners. Bad acting: sticking to what you practiced.

Actors spend a lot of time practicing alone while they’re memorizing lines. For better acting, actors often practice delivering their lines in different ways, so they’re not stuck to just one kind of delivery of a certain line (so that they have enough flexibility to change their line in order to be compatible with their scene partners).

 If you practice saying your line only in one kind of way and then do that in your scene regardless of what your scene partners are doing, then your line delivery might look out of place. In order to make scenes realistic, the way you deliver your lines should look like a natural response to what is happening around you. If your lines look out of place, that can distract, or the scene looks unrealistic. Viola Davis warns against that kind of thing in the video below. 

You can think of good acting as behaving in such a way that everyone’s responses around you feel natural, so that the overall scene feels real. Oscar winner Ben Kingsley says that he tries to make his scene partner look good when acting. He aims to be compatible.

For example, consider the scene below. In this scene, a person is repeatedly asked to say who he is, and his answers do not satisfy the person asking them. You can see how, in the beginning, both actors show themselves talking in relatively casual manner. Now imagine that the person asking the questions (Jack Nicholson’s character) had instead begun in the style of an intimidating interrogation. Responding with easygoing emotions might not make as much sense then. Or imagine if, at the end (at 1:03), the responder (Adam Sandler’s character) had not snapped angrily and instead started crying. Then the reactions of the others, including the facial expression at 1:05, would not make sense.

Therefore, paying attention to your scene partner and responding in a way that make sense is an important aspect of acting. There is a saying that “acting is reacting”. Good acting means good (compatible) reacting, whereas bad acting means bad (incompatible) reacting.

If you want to practice being more flexible in your acting so that you can better adapt to your scene partners instead of sticking to only one type of performance, check out this article about acting exercises for acting flexibility.

2. Good acting: acting even when silent. Bad acting: not acting when not talking.

When reacting appropriately within scenes, that’s not just when you’re talking, but also when you’re silent. Good acting involves really being present in the scene and making it visible that you are being affected by what’s going on in the scene in the moment, even when you’re silent, and even when no one is talking directly to you. Bad acting is constantly just thinking about what your next line is and simply waiting for your turn to talk.

3. Good acting: actions show continuous past/future. Bad acting: nothing in beginning/end.

The camera only shows a segment of the character’s life, but this life continues offscreen before and after the scene, and good acting involves the ability to show that actions continue offscreen. Good acting involves acting as soon as they call action, even before any lines begin, and until they call “cut”, well after all lines have ended. Bad acting makes the scene feel isolated in time, with the character just beginning to “become alive” when they say their first lines and later “turning off” as soon as they finish saying their last lines (even though the camera is still on them).

In other words, good acting involves body language at the beginning and body language at the end (even if it’s subtle).

For example, in the scene below, you can see that the scene does not begin with people just standing in place; instead, people are busy moving about so you get a sense that they’ve been keeping busy for a while. At the end of the scene, you can see the person turn and begin getting to work, giving you the sense that they’ll now be working even after they’re no longer visible on screen. His body language makes the scene feel continuous with the offscreen future.

originalpost:https://theactorsplace.org/good-acting-vs-bad-acting/