Theater Acting VS Film Acting: How to Change Your Acting Based on the Medium

Hello, and welcome to the Akinotes Podcast, the podcast where we talk about all things acting from tips and tricks to business information. I'm your host Justin Powell, and today we're going to talk about how we can transition our craft from stage to screen. I'll explain. I feel like sometimes we hear from different acting coaches, or at least I have in the past that there's only one type of acting, the truth. And that's kind of true in some senses, but at the same time, it doesn't fully work when you actually apply that to the different mediums you will be performing it, right? If I take the same focus and energy required in a close-up on camera, and I try and deliver that exact same performance on stage to an audience of a thousand people, well, something is going to get lost in translation. So why does this matter? You might be thinking all I do is, all I do is the movies. I don't do none of that, theater stuff, I'm assuming that's how all of you think in that voice, but you might change it up and it's better to be prepared and to be versatile, I think, as an actor, than to just hold ourself to one standard, plus maybe you are someone that has only done film or TV work. Challenge yourself with theater. Try something new, see how it helps your craft grow. Maybe you are just in love with the theater, you don't want to do any TV or film. Well, same thing, try it out, try to grow in that direction as well. The more versatile we are as actors, the better overall. The lessons you learn from theater will help you with your TV and film, the lessons you learn from TV and film will help you with theater. So let's start talking about this, because I'm someone who came up in the theater. That's how I began my acting career, all of my early performances were theater based. And so because of that, I've had to train myself in TV and film in a different way. I think with theater I became so used to expressing everything very fully, to projecting a lot, to using my whole body for the performance, and on TV and film, that's not often necessary, right? It's so tight on you, a lot of the time you're going to be living in a medium shot, you know, which is like, waist up and usually they're going to punch in for close-ups and things like that. And if you are moving around too much or being too overly expressive, it can start to read as phony on camera. That's why a lot of the great actors will talk about how particularly in close-ups, all you have to do is be thinking. Right now there's a great clip of De Niro saying like you have to do nothing, just do nothing. So it's important we understand these differences, right? When you are jumping to theater, if you're coming from the TV film background and you're trying to do theater for the first time, instead you need to start working on how you open up your whole body to the performance. You know, how do you express anger in a way that will reach the back row, right? That's something you'll hear a lot in theaters, are you reaching the back row? As a TV performer, you might think of it as a wide and a wide, you have a lot more freedom to express with your body, right? That's something that is pretty common in a lot of theater. Now, it depends on where you're performing, right? If you're performing in a black box, then you probably don't have to be as big because the back row you're playing to is, you know, maybe 15 feet away from you. Then it becomes a bit more like you're on a TV or film. Now with film and TV, we also want to talk about the subtlety, right? The micro expressions because the camera it catches everything. So a look of anger might just be a simple eye twitch, you know, and really I think it's just you need to be keeping your thoughts going the whole time, constantly be thinking. You can literally be thinking of something that has nothing to do with the scene and it can still be impactful on TV and film. I think it was a Tom Hardy interview where he was discussing a very particularly challenging scene. I don't remember what film it was, but he talked about how the take the end of going with that was the best take was on when he was thinking about what he wanted for lunch later that day. Had nothing to do with the circumstances of the script and nothing to do with the character, but the thought process made him look active, right? It keeps those eyes looking active, which is engaging. Now that's a little bit different. I think if you're just focused on your thoughts on stage, then your performance might start to get a bit too internal. It becomes something where you're not connecting with your scene partners or connecting with the moment at hand and not openly sharing as much. Because while we can get away with that on film because the camera is picking up everything, it's tougher to get away with that in stage, in stage work. Also rehearsal and preparation tend to be pretty different, right? You know, in theater, you are working on the project for months usually. You're going over to the scenes again and again discovering new things and even when you open, right, that's not the end of your exploration. You get to keep finding more stuff throughout the run of the show. That's why a lot of people that I know that love theater will tell me that they don't like to go to the opening weekend. They want to wait a couple of weeks so that the show can really start to hit its groove. Because it is different when you're rehearsing versus when you actually get up on stage and you have an audience there. Any theater actor will tell you the audience is half of the performance. Their energy, what they're giving you, are they laughing at the joke, are they gasping at the dramatic moments, are they dead and tired and not really paying attention? That will affect your performance. It's your job to, you know, ideally balance that out and remain truthful in the work, but also recognize that's going to happen. And the rehearsal is something that helps keep that balance because you've run through it so many times that that audience influence or even your daily influence, right? Because one of the things I love about theater is every performance is different. The audience is different the way you're coming in is different. Maybe you've had a great day and you're coming into the show. Maybe you've had an awful day and you're coming in to do the show and that will affect the performance in interesting ways. But with film and TV, you're often not going to get a lot of rehearsal time. Usually, you don't get any. Now occasionally you might, you know, the last film I worked on, we went over the scene and we rehearsed a lot, but it's rare. Most projects I work on don't have a lot of rehearsal and if they do, it's maybe a day. You know, you run through the scene a couple of times, you go for blocking and that's kind of it. You know, dig your teeth in and explore the scene the way you do in theater. The other thing is a lot of times these scenes are shot out of order. So you might show up day one and you're filming the climactic scene of the movie where your partner dies and you are forced to tears. Then the next day you're going to go back and you're going to film the beginning of the movie where you just bought a new dog and it's super happy. This is a great movie, I don't know. No one take that idea and turn that into a movie where they get a dog at the beginning and then the partner dies at the end, usually it's a dog that dies in those kind of movies. But because it's shot out of order, it can be a bit more challenging to keep things straight. And that's part of the joy of theater too is that, you know, when you start the show and that curtain comes up, you are on the rollercoaster ride of that show. There's no starting and stopping. You are riding it through to the end, each moment before is informing the next moment. With TV and film, sometimes you are relying on your imagination of what came before because you haven't shot that scene yet. So it changes how we have to rehearse. I think in TV and film, we need to be a bit more clear in our choices of what we're bringing to the table of what we know of this character. It doesn't mean that we then step into the scene and solely focus on our homework. At that point, you know, take some advice from Viola Davis who says, "I leave everything I did at home at the door and I play with what my scene partner brought because that energy, the way they're going to deliver the lines versus how you think the scene ought to go, is going to be the more interesting thing to tap into and the more truthful thing." You know, I've seen actors who are so stuck in their choices that they don't hear how the lines are being said to them. And sometimes I've been kind of bad in that regard when I've worked with an actor like that because I've specifically tried to break them out of that habit, which isn't good for my acting, right? It's not good for me to try to control how another person performs, so that's something I always have to watch out for, is thinking there's a right way for the scene to go. or a right way even to approach the scene. But if you come in and your line is, I love you. That's your line. You're gonna say that to your scene partner. And their line right before is, I think I love you. But maybe that day, they come in and they say, I think I love you. If you just deliver it the way you practiced at home and you don't take in the way that they just said it to you, there's going to be a disconnect. So we have to keep ourselves open once we're there. And that's true for theater as well, right? You know, we do all of that blocking, all of that work on the scenes, so that ideally, when we perform, a lot of those same interesting triggers show up, but we can't control that. We have to just trust that what is meant to show up will show up. Because if we try to just hold on to blocking because, well, I have to walk over here at this point, it's not going to be as honest. And I can already hear, I just watched a video recently of an acting coach who talked about how the advice to never do something unless someone makes you do it is horrible because in a professional setting, you'd get, you know, walked off set. And I think she was perhaps misinterpreting someone's advice, although I haven't watched the video, so maybe it was dead on what the guy was saying. But I think in that regard kind of similar to the blocking, I'm not saying disregard everything the director says. Instead, we have to work, you know, offstage on figuring out what that motivation is. What makes me want to go over there. So that kind of can be grooved into place for every performance. And so it's natural for you. So it's not moving because you are told to move at this moment, but moving because, you know, this is a random example, the person is being so aggressive, you just want to step away from them. Finding those reasons so that then you kind of intuitively notice it is going to lead to a more truthful performance. And quickly, I want to dispel the idea that you need to be 100% truthful all the time because I don't think it happens for a lot of performances, you know, but I also think it's something that as actors, we are more aware of when we don't feel truthful than the audience is necessarily. I think they can pick up on it sometimes as we all can. But often if we feel we're being inauthentic in a moment, I think actors are far more likely to allow that to kind of pull themselves out of the rest of the moment. If you feel yourself disconnected, just reconnect. It's not a big deal. Two seconds of disconnect is not going to be anything, anyone notices, and even if it is, you're going to be okay. It'll be fine. Just dive right back in. Now let's talk about some of the technical adjustments, right? I mean, with film and TV, there's continuity, right? You don't get the same liberty of having a different type of performance every night as you do in theater. There's some, there's some flexibility. You know, I've heard some people who say that you should just throw continuity out the window. I think there's a time and a place for that, depending on who you're working with. But I think a lot of people on the other side of the camera will not like you if you do that. If you pick up a cup in one shot and the next shot you knock it over and the shot after that, you throw it at someone, they're not going to be able to cut that together. It's going to be a nightmare for them. Now, usually there's someone on set that is keeping track of that, right? That says, hey, you picked up this cup on this line, make sure you do it again. But sometimes you have to keep track of that on your own. And as I said before, you know, do your best. It should not be the thing you're necessarily focused on. Although if you got a great take and they're just doing a pickup, then yeah, maybe you do only focus on that. Make sure you pick up that cup at the right time. We have to hit our marks, right? We have to make sure that we step to the place they want at times so that they can be in focus and have the shot they want. I think acting for theater is more often the actors medium, right? Because once this curtains up, it's your show. You know, directors are not going to be able to come up and stop at or anything like that. You're on the run. Film is more of the directors medium. And they're telling a story not just with the actors, but visually, right? So if they want you to step in a certain place, it's because that's conveying something to the audience as well, not just your performance, but how you're framed within the camera, the kind of shot they're using. And so it's our job as actors, as professional actors, to help them tell that story, right? Not just in our performance, but in helping them get the shots they need. So you have to find ways to naturally hit those marks. And again, time it out. You know what I'll do is I'll take my normal stride steps to the mark so I can get how many I need to take. And then I let go. And you know, nine times out of 10, I hit it perfectly. Every now and then I step a bit too far, a bit too short. And then you just roll again, not that big a deal. But if we make it a big deal, then it becomes this little weight on us that makes it tougher to be free and act in the moment. So don't, don't do it. And then of course on TV and film, you have to adjust right for the size of the shot you're working with. If it's a wide, you can use more of your body. It could be more expressive in that way. If it's a close up, focus on the thoughts. Stay connected to your scene partner. Don't blink as much. That's such a simple rule that I noticed recently in a film I did when I saw it up on the big screen and I saw how much I was blinking. It really made me think of that. And now it's something I consider whenever I'm working. I don't hold on to it. I don't, you know, my eyes aren't bleeding because I refuse to blink. But I think about that. I think about how it's easier to convey things if my eyes stay open. So what are some common mistakes? Oh, actually, sorry, before I jump onto that. For the theater, we talked a bit about the blocking. Now that's technical, about the audience's energy. But vocal stamina, too, right? I think the warmups are a little bit different. You know, I warm up differently for theater than I do for TV and film. I activate my body more. My vocal work is far more focused on enunciation and clarity of diction. I do some of that work for TV and film, but not as much. I bring it in a bit more naturally. So when it comes to transitioning, you know, there are some mistakes that people have. I talked about it a bit at the beginning, but people that will overact on camera. You know, that will almost give too much to a point where it doesn't feel honest. And vice versa, people that will not give enough on stage. I think when you're transitioning to film TV, sometimes people ignore the camera's role in it, right? They think they just need to connect. Do their thing. And that can mess up the eye lines, can mess up framing, can mess up, you know, having stillness in the work. It can also be a problem when you're coming from theater in that you still maintain some of those theatrical rules like keeping your body open and things like that. You know, on stage, you want to keep yourself open to the audience to a certain extent. So they can see what's going on. If you are turned away, they can't see you and it hurts the story. In TV and film, you know, the camera's gonna find you unless the director gives you a specific note about opening up the camera, just be natural and trust. With our delivery, you know, in stage, we want to be able to project again to be heard in that back row. In TV and film, we want to be TV on film. In TV on film and just TV and film, we want to be natural, you know? We want the conversation if I'm talking to someone who's sitting next to me in a coffee shop, I want to talk the same way I would in real life. Whereas if I'm on stage doing that, I'm probably gonna talk a lot louder, you know? I'm gonna make it a bit more pronounced so that everyone can hear me. And we gotta find our way into that naturally as well. We'll talk a bit more about this after our break. I'd like to think better help for sponsoring this episode. You know, I think mental health is something that is important for everyone in the world. I think therapy is something everyone should do, really. And I think it's important for actors too. One, this industry is hard, right? There's lots of challenges and obstacles oftentimes you're getting told no. You're grinding and working so hard and sometimes that can take a toll on your mental health. Well, it's important beyond just the career that we take care of ourselves and better help is something that can help you with that. 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And I think there's some value in that because I've seen a lot of great film acting where it doesn't really feel like you're acting. You just feel like you're connecting and talking with the person. And I think, as actors, sometimes we want it to feel like this Herkulean effort. It doesn't always feel that way. Sometimes it's just connecting with your scene partner and listening. Listening is such a huge factor in all acting, but especially in film acting. Something else you can do is work on eye lines, work on hitting marks, you know, in your self-tape auditions. See what it's like when you place the reader just off camera versus a little further back or a little further left of camera. Look at how that changes your performance. There's a great tip that Michael Cain gives, which is when you are, and they're doing it over the shoulder, they're focused on you. And you are speaking to the scene partner, the camera's like, you know, to the right of you. Then look at the eye of your scene partner that is closest to the camera. Focus on that eye because that will open yourself up more to the camera. In a subtle way, but in one that shows your inner process more. If you're a screen actor going to stage, try to do some vocal exercises to build projection without straining, you know, without feeling inauthentic. Work on physicality exercises to fill a space. Something that works here really well is taking your dialogue and seeing if you can express it without using any words. Only your body. And the other thing is start to embrace that immediacy of the live performance, you know. Start to grapple with the fact that there's no takes these backsees once that curtain comes up, you just got to play, play and trust. An exercise you can do is try performing a line for stage and then a line for film. And just see what that evokes out of you. How that's different. So here's some final advice. Watch plays and films with a critical eye, particularly if you can find a play that transitioned to film, especially if it has the same actors, watch and see how they change their performance. You know, right now, I believe on YouTube is Andrew Scott's hamlet. It's incredible. Watch that and then watch him on Sherlock, where all of us strangers are fleeing back and see how the performance is different. Take classes in both disciplines, take some on camera classes, take some scene study classes, and put yourself on camera more. You know, you can put yourself on camera every day and you can learn a lot from that. And you know what, here's some homework. That's right. You thought I wouldn't give you homework because I never do. But I'm doing it. Get a short scene together. You know, a page, two pages, perform it once for stage and once for screen and compare the differences. You know, you can do this by again, filming yourself in a wide and then film yourself in a self-tape and a medium close-up. So thanks for listening to the Acting Notes podcast. I hope this helped. If you are enjoying the podcast, maybe go check out our YouTube page at the Acting Notes. I have a very exciting interview coming up with Ivana Chubbock that will be dropping next week. Stay tuned for that. And if you have any topics you'd like me to discuss on the Acting Notes, let me know. Leave a comment. You can also reach me on Instagram at the Acting Notes or my own Instagram at Justin_R_Powell. And thank you so much for listening. I'm Justin Powell. Have a great day. Peace.