Movie Acting – Should You Go Straight Into It?

  The steps you take in the first stages of your acting career will have a huge impact on your entire acting future. One of the most important decisions you can make when embarking on your journey to becoming a professional performer is whether or not to go directly into movie acting. Stage, television and…

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Philip Seymour Hoffman – The Master of the Method

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  Today marks the first anniversary of the tragic and premature death from a drug overdose of master of the Method, Philip Seymour Hoffman. If it is true, as Richard Brody writes in The New Yorker, that:   “Work that’s only good is limited to its technique; when it’s great, a work is virtually inseparable…

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Battle of the Brits: Our Picks For Awards Season 2015

  Happy New Year! We hope that you all had a festive and relaxing Christmas, and are raring to go for 2015! The arrival of January can mean only one thing for the cream of the acting crop – awards season! With the Golden Globes just around the corner (11th January) and the Screen Actors…

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The Unconscious – Saturation & Character

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“At times I thought he was me” Eddie Redmayne   When talking about his portrayal of renowned scientist Stephen Hawking in the upcoming Oscar contender The Theory of Everything, Eddie Redmayne encapsulates the essence of a tried and tested method acting technique – saturation. While he had some documentary evidence and a short audience with Hawking…

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Using Your Body and Voice

  “Actors should…wear a costume, adjust the volume of their voice, achieve physical transformation into the character they portray, allocate their muscular energy efficiently, and model themselves into anything in gesture, voice or musical speech.” Yevgeny Vakhtangov   Movement and, unlike our mime artist friend, voice, are important parts of an actor’s training. The body…

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Freeing Your Instrument

  “It’s your own self-serving stuff that gets in the way. You get out of the way of yourself to be able to express what it really is. It’s all about getting back to being free of yourself.”   Al Pacino Where a painter has a paintbrush, a violinist has a violin, you, as an…

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Is The Method Too Much For Actors?

Shia LeBeouf

    In a recent article in The New Yorker, Richard Brody asked whether method acting is destroying actors, citing the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix and Shia LeBeouf (pictured) as examples. Brody argued that the act of linking experiences and emotions from our own lives with those of a character, and playing a…

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Method Acting Exercise – Sense Memory

“An actor’s job is to “feel on cue.”” Backstage Every great actor uses their own lives to the full, and constantly exercises their emotional muscles. One of the most daunting and challenging parts of being an actor is portraying extreme emotions on cue. In auditions, on stage and on screen we are called upon to…

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Daniel Day Lewis – Mad Or Our Greatest Method Actor?

“films don’t begin only when the camera starts rolling” Daniel Day Lewis   Most headlines you read about Daniel Day-Lewis, will talk about the “madness” of his method. Is it “madness” or a unique and brilliant brand of method acting that has brought his widespread and universal acclaim? Despite only having made a dozen films…

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Method Acting Exercise – The Private Moment

When someone watches you, you change. Research conducted in the personal training industry has discovered that when someone is simply watched while they work out, they greatly increase their efforts. This is bad news for actors. How to Avoid ‘Overacting’ I say ‘bad news’ because an unjustified increase in effort leads an actor to FORCE…

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