I've tried all my life to define the elusive creative process of actors. What makes a performance great instead of mediocre? How do you dive into the heart of the character? What do you need to do to get there?

All of a sudden, I knew! How to define it! Read about it in "The Five-E's to Acting Expression". Simply click on "Articles" above and then on the the title of the article. I'd suggest that you read "The Five-E's to Acting Expression" first to gain a general idea about the Five-E's. And next read this one which goes more in-depth about the acting process. The article below gives you some practical steps you might take to create a character from text.

The First-E—Explore
You have a text . . . a script, a scene, a monologue. You then begin to explore how to portray it. The First-E is the mental work of defining your character and the situation of the text. It's like writing a business plan for creative success for your scene, monologue, or entire role.

The First-E is where most actors I know make a fatal mistake. They begin to create effects instead of characters. They read a script and think . . . "I could punctuate it with a gesture here" or "I could use this vocal effect there" instead of zipping the skin of the character open and climbing inside.

In order for the audience to be moved and for you to have a fulfilling creative experience you have to explore where the character lives inside of you. To do this you have to do what I call the gruntwork of acting. When you are working on text, you have to read and analyze the whole script. Even if you're just doing a scene or saying a one-minute monologue. Analyzing the script is crucial. So get used to it. I've given you some exercises at the end of this section to help you out.

So I invite you to sit down with these exercises, the script, a pencil or pen and a pad of paper and begin to read. I also like to write things in a bound book I call my "acting journal". Pay attention to the thoughts running rampant through your head when you read the script for the first time. Write them down . . . what I call "Wild Mild Writing" . . . just jot down whatever you think or feel about anything that you read without thinking too much about it. Let those first responses pour out of you. Also pay attention to the physical and emotional impulses that the material evokes in you.

When I'm reading something for the first time, my body seems to want to move. And I'm not by nature a physical person. As a matter of fact, I have to schedule exercise in my planner and drag myself into my acting studio every morning to do it. But something about reading a script puts me physically in tune with it. So I move while I'm reading the script or scene. And out of that physicality comes some important things I need to know as an actor to play that character, such as her walk, her mannerisms, and how she physically addresses the world. You may feel the urge to cry or yell certain words or rock back and forth—or do nothing—the first time you read a script. All of those initial impulses to the material are valid information for you.

So allow yourself to fully explore those spontaneous first reactions. Then do the real gruntwork of analyzing the text. If you're doing an entire film or play where you're in many scenes, I encourage you to get those big five by seven-inch index cards and label each with the act and scene number at the top. As you work on the script, jot down thoughts, intentions, adjustments, and successful Second-E experiences on them. Then when you're ready to do the scene you'll have all the information you need to play it. Uta Hagen, the great stage actress and teacher, once said that she had 18 scripts of a play she was working on all over her house and felt she never did enough work on her character. I once ran into a fellow Strasberg alum, the wonderful actor who played Uncle Leo on Seinfeld. We sat together during a memorable night when Uta spoke at the Writer's Guild. He shared with me that long ago he was in Uta's class with Geraldine Page. Geraldine kept copious notes in the margins of her plays. And he didn't. He finished the story by saying something like, " . . . and what does that tell you about her acting and my acting"? Geraldine Page went on to become one of the greatest actors of the 20th century. Possibly because of her commitment, focus . . . and gruntwork.

So do that gruntwork! Find out what other people in the script say about the character and what the character says about themselves. Analyze their behavior by what they do in the script. I like to write a history of the character based upon this information. I also include in the history what I imagine about the character's past life up to the time of the scene or play. This history provides a starting point for creating the behavior of the character.

There are so many things to consider when you work on your material. And many ways to explore it. You can read all about how to analyze a text in many books . . . I particularly like Larry Silverberg's Tackling the Text from his The Meisner Approach series. But figuring out your intention and the adjustments you need to make may be the two most important decisions you make about acting your role.

First, figure out what the character wants . . . the intention. I'm working with one actress right now who has very little experience or technique but plays her intention so strongly she nails the scene every time. Intention is one of the most important things an actor needs to know about a script.

I like to define intentions as "to …." verb forms because intentions are also actions. Two of my actors are currently working on the opening scene from Waiting for Godot. Estragon's intention in this scene is "to unboot". He is focused on getting his boot off and taking care of his aching feet throughout the whole scene. When the actor fully plays that intention while reacting to Vladimir's babblings, the scene works.

Intentions can be revealed . . . your character knows what s/he wants and goes after it. Or they can be concealed . A concealed intention is one that your character knows but keeps hidden from others. A great example is the Kevin Spacey character in The Usual Suspects , who concealed his real identity to manipulate everyone for crooks to cops and to ultimately get off the hook at the end of the movie. Or one that your character isn't aware of themselves but is obvious to the audience and/or the other characters. The Linus character in Sabrina, who fell in love but didn't admit it to himself until the end of the movie, is a great example of this type of concealed intention. When I was acting, I used to choose atleast one revealed and one concealed intention for every scene. If concealed intentions aren't obvious in the script, make them up. Playing opposing intentions makes for a very complex portrayal. Intentions are also the framework upon which to hang your adjustments.

If the intention is what you want, the adjustment is how you do it. Adjustments help determine the choice of experiences an actor makes. For example, one of my actors is working on a monologue where he describes why he became a murderer. He was great in the scene, but felt something was missing. Then he nailed it. He was in the middle of the monologue in class one day and blurted out, "he wouldn't kill a kitten!" He then began to play the scene as if he had just accidentally killed a kitten. Since he has had years of Method training with me, he was able to recreate the horror of feeling a dead kitten in his hands while he was telling us how he loved to crush bugs and kill people. It made for a textured, unique portrayal.

Choosing adjustments is one of the really creative parts of acting exploration. Specific decisions that the actor makes about the scene can create a richer experience for the audience. There are many kinds of adjustments. A few which actors use all the time include personalizing, physical adjustments, and "as if".

Pretending that your scene partner is someone you know and have strong feelings about, an adjustment called personalizing, can more specifically define your acting reality. Marilyn Monroe put Shelley Winters' face over the faces of Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in Some Like it Hot to deepen her relationship to them as friends and as women. You can also take personalizing one step further by substituting a very different person physically and emotionally than the one called for in the script. For example, wouldn't it be a very different type of scene if you were supposed to be talking to your girlfriend but took the adjustment that you were talking to your mother instead? Personalizing is one type of adjustment.

Another is the physical adjustment, or the activities you use that define the life of your character. When I played Mrs. Webb in Our Town, the actor playing my husband and I realized that we had very few moments on stage to create our marriage relationship. So we decided upon little physical rituals, like my snatching cigars disapprovingly out of his breast pocket and then reluctantly returning them to him when he extended his hand, to define our relationship. It worked for us, and the review in the Los Angeles Times said that I OWNED my part. Ownership came, I felt, through these little bits of ritual business that I created as adjustments for my character, whose life of cleaning, cooking, and caring for her family was made up of a string of tiny rituals repeated over and over.

A third type of adjustment is the "as if". In a documentary I saw on HBO about the making of the movie, The Rainmaker, the set acting coach gave Matt Damon the adjustment that he should play the scene where he had his first day in court "as if" he were an expectant father. And Lee Strasberg often told us the story of telling an actress playing Salome to treat the bloody head of John the Baptist "as if" it were a playful puppy. Lee's "as if" adjustment created a very different, horrifying scene for both the actress and the audience. These "as if" adjustments . . . doing the action as if you were in a certain situation or pretending to be a certain person . . . help you make strong choices and stimulate your acting imagination. Obviously, my actor who was playing a murderer had never had that experience. But this type of adjustment can help the actor act "as if" he were a murderer. And other types of adjustments, such as holding a dead kitten that he has just killed in his hands, can further stimulate his creativity and inner reality.

Once you've done preliminary exploration, you're ready to choose ways to more closely link to the character . . . through acting exercises and other experiences. I call these experiences the Second-E.

First-E Exercises

1. What is the spine (theme), or major intention, of the play? For example, according to Lanford Wilson, the theme of Hot l Baltimore is "to cope with the hotel's demise". How does your character and what s/he wants from life fit into the fabric and the theme of the play and move the action forward?
2. Jot down your first reactions to the text on cards, paper, a journal or in the margins of the script or allow yourself to experience the text in whatever way is comfortable for you.
3. Find out about your character by writing down what the character says about themselves, what others say about the character, and what is inferred about the character in the text and stage directions. Write a life history of your character.
4. Break the text into beats, or what I call "thought units". Beats are changes in thought and/or topic throughout each scene. A beat change demands a distinct thought change and possibly a change in intention. You can find a wonderful explanation of beats and how break them down in Margie Haber's Book, How to Get the Part without Falling Apart.
5. Write down the intention of the character for each beat. Intentions may stay the same throughout the scene or change with each beat depending upon the nature of the character. Intentions may also be revealed . . . talked about or overtly manifested by your character, or concealed . . . some your character wants that only s/he knows about. Be specific.

6. Create thoughts for your character for each line. I like to take a pad and divide the page in half. On the left side, I put the line. And on the right side I put the made-up thought for the line. Creating the thought helps you ultimately be more spontaneous and moment-to-moment. And has the side-benefit of helping you learn lines easily.
7. Decide upon the adjustments you want to make in the scene. Before you decide on adjustments, you might want to answer these questions about each beat:

a. What am I feeling?
b. What am I doing?
c. What is my relationship to other people in the scene?
d. How do I feel about these people?
e. How does what I want, my intention, affect all of the above?

The Second-E—Experience
Acting is ultimately a creative process. And acting approximates life. Intensified life. With the Second- E, you find creative experiences that take you deeper into the intensified life of your character. Second-E work entails actually experiencing adjustments such as physicalizations, as-ifs and personalizations through improvisation, sensory work, physical and vocal exercises and other acting techniques. For example, if you chose writing the history of your character as a First-E exploration, a Second-E experience might be to improvise the character's life from birth until the moment the character enters the scene. Second-E work is physical, emotional . . . even spiritual.

Second-E work draws from all that technique training we all labored through to become better actors. Second-E work is an extension of adjustments you've chosen. You decide, as my actor who was playing the murderer did, that you're going to take the adjustment that you'd kill anything and anybody, but you wouldn't kill a kitten. And then you accidentally kill a kitten. How can you directly experience that?

Directly experiencing adjustments is your acting preparation. All acting techniques teach some sort of preparation. But Method sensory exercises were the best ways for me to deeply experience my own adjustments. And then reproduce them. I often tell my students the story of the day I had to do a very emotional scene while shooting my first sitcom pilot. A light actually fell from the ceiling, the sound boom died and another had to be brought in, a set piece fell down and had to be replaced. It took us almost eight hours before we got the master shot of this crucial scene. If I hadn't been able to reproduce my preparation from Take 1 all the way to Take 46, I couldn't have maintained my focus and acting quality. I remember that the director kept saying to me throughout this ordeal, "It isn't you!" And it wasn't! My preparation helped me to express consistently and professionally that whole day.

Let me tell you in detail what I did that day. It might give you some insight into the way Method works. In the scene, my daughter and I were talking about my history with her father, who had divorced me. She barely knew him and wondered why he stayed away. Obviously, the scene called for lots of different emotions. So I chose four sensories to create my emotional state; some I started the scene with and others I began later in the scene for added emotional intensity. First, I chose an overall of heat, which always makes it difficult for me to talk and makes me a bit claustrophobic at the same time. Then I chose an affective memory . . . an exercise that recreates a traumatic experience in your life sensorially . . . to relive the feeling of loss that it was my intention to portray in the scene. I began with those two sensories. Later on, when I was doing a monologue describing the happy times I had with my husband, I chose to recreate the sensory experience of stroking the hair of a long-ago lover. The hair became a personal object . . . an object that elicits an emotional response . . . that had the effect of allowing nostalgic, happy memories to be present for me. And I had to cry even later in the scene. So I chose another personal object, a medallion that I feel in my hand instantly and makes me cry seconds later.

Yes, I know . . . this is a comedy, right? Thank goodness most comedy doesn't need this heavy inner preparation. But this scene demanded it. And, as an actor, I had to create what the scene demands. Of course, I also did outer work—work on line rhythms for laughs and work on my relationship to the little girl who was playing my daughter. Fortunately, we had bonded immediately the first day on the set so we didn't have alot of relationship preparation to do. I think all acting is composed of this inner and outer work. And using lucky accidents like the instant rapport I had with this little girl.

You may be thinking . . . how can I do this? It sounds great! Well, it is. But doing the type of intense, multi-layered work I did that difficult day takes time to learn. The purpose of Method . . . or any training . . . is to unlock the door to expression. With Method you connect with personal memories possibly all the way to a cellular level. This takes lots of trial and error. And lots of trust. And . . . most of all . . . lots of time. But if you take the six months to a year that it takes to learn the basics of Method and then a similar amount of time to learn to use Method as one of your tools for acting expression, I guarantee that you can pick and choose from your entire palette of acting colors to create rich, shimmering textures in your work. I once had a student who had studied Method for ten years with a colleague and old friend of mine, Lilia Goldoni. The sensories she had at her beck and call filled an entire index card file. Her acting was astounding! And she only studied with me a short time because she got an acting job and has been acting professionally ever since.

You may be also thinking . . . where did I find the time to do all that work on that sitcom scene? Well, I gotta tell you that it took lots of time. I spent many sleepless nights obsessed with figuring this scene out. I don't think that good actors are ever satisfied with their preparation. They never feel that they do enough. That drives them to do as much work as they can do on a role. But the more you do, the more economical your preparation becomes. The good news is that Anthony Hopkins once said in an interview that he now does 30% of the preparation work he used to do. The bad news is that if you're not continually driven to do this type of intense work on your character and your role then you'd better not be an actor.

It's almost impossible to tap into your acting expression without continually working on your craft in a way that works for you. I'm not saying that you have to do Method work. But I am saying that you have to do some kind of training. Something that opens the door to emotion and expression for you in a unique way. When I was at the Actor's Studio in the 1970's, I saw some of the now-great icons of the cinema do some not-so-hot scenes. Even they had to find a way to work that worked for them and work hard at it. Here's some Second-E exercises that may help you do this too. The volume of exercises I have for Second-E work could literally fill volumes. So here are just a few:

Second-E Exercises

1. Begin on the floor. Improvise growing up your character from birth to the moment you enter the scene. Go physically and mentally through the birth process, the first day of school, first love, graduation from high school, etc. Take atleast an hour to do this. Don't anticipate. Allow yourself to experience all the sensations of this growth process. Experience the character's growth until just the moment before you enter the scene. When you end the exercise, take a few minutes to come out of the experience. Don't forget to jot down your impressions in your acting journal, index cards, or paper.
2. Improvise the scene with your scene partner using the premise of the scene plus the work you've done on your character. You might also want to use the who, where and what's happening structure taught by Viola Spolin in Improvisation for the Theater. Another great resource for improvising scenes is Larry Silverberg's The Meisner Approach series.
3. Find out about your character by experiencing them physically. Use the physical impulses you discovered when you first read the script. Change your walk—walk the way you think they might walk. Change your voice—a different timbre or way of speaking. Develop physical rituals and activities of daily living for your character that are different from your own. Dress your character in appropriate clothing and use props to stimulate your imagination. You can also use Method work to create character. Years ago, when I was working at the Lee Strasberg Institute, Martin Landau and Barbara Bain visited and talked to students. He told us that character is easy. And he's famous for his finely-drawn characters. He said, "If you're doing an old man, you do a pain sensory here and a pain sensory there . . . no problem!" I never realized until that moment that you can also create physicality for your character from doing Method work. I've since used prior experience with localized pain and stiffness to change my physical orientation. Creating a character that moves like an animal is also a great way to change orientation.
4. If you do Method work, you can plug your arsenal of sensory exercises into a scene to create greater physical and emotional reality reality for yourself. Use the emotional impulses you discovered when you first read the script. I also like to go through the script and map out what sensories I'm doing where right after I do my First-E work so that sensory work can be integral in the development of the scene. You can always get rid of a sensory that isn't working the way you want and substitute another. I also like to use sensories that give great emotional colors to the material. For example, in my big crying scene in Our Town I used an emotional memory from when I was a child. It reduced a very rigid, cold woman to childish babbling. If you're interested in doing Method work, do yourself a favor and study with a coach for at least a year. Method work is like yoga or ballet. You can't learn it well without the constant correction and feedback of a good coach.
5. One of the greatest criticisms of cold reads is that actors don't create place before they begin to read. So I invite you to experience a place that you know very well sensorially. Close your eyes and slowly feel all the surfaces, smell the smells, hear the sounds. Then try to recreate the place in another room. See if your senses can remember at least one element of it. Build up a repertoire of places so that you can pick and choose for your next audition and next scene.
6. Build up a host of stock characters that you might portray to bring life to your next audition and next scene. I did this with one of my actors who mostly plays cops, hoods, and an occasional Hispanic father. He now has a small recurring role on General Hospital AND a much larger one on an upcoming TV series. Breathe life into your stock character, and other characters you're working on, by asking yourself the following questions and creating Second-E experiences for them:

a. How do I walk?
b. How do I talk?
c. What are my mannerisms?
d. What emotionally hangs me up/what do I feel intense emotions about?
e. How do I manifest what I want out of life by the way I behave?

The Third E—Empty
When you have your goal in mind and you do the psychic and physical work of experiencing it, a strange thing happens. You become more focused and, as a result, begin to work from a deeper state of consciousness. You might also call this inspiration. Actors find inspiration by going to physical, emotional and spiritual limits. As Jerzy Grotowski said in Towards a Poor Theater, an actor is "a person who, through his art, climbs upon the stake and performs an act of self-sacrifice".

What might happen in this mystical process is that we empty ourselves of many of the things that connect us to our pedestrian selves. We block out the noises without—traffic, loud music, piledrivers, lawn mowers—and the noises within—that committee of chattering voices in our heads—and find a deeper place inside to be one with our magnificent, authentic selves.

I just love the story in the beginning of Stanislavski's Building a Character. Tortsov, the teacher, gave his students an assignment to create a character. They could do or use anything to make the character real for themselves. Kostya, one of Tortsov's students, prepared, costumed, made up, and sat before the mirror in his dressing room frustrated at his inability to fully inhabit the character he was trying to create. On impulse, he smeared his makeup all over his face. And instantly became the character. I read this years ago but have never forgotten it. Kostya did all the preparation and then allowed it to carry him to other realms where the expression of the character eventually took place.

I have seen the same process of preparation causing a shift in consciousness time and time again in my acting classes. I once had a student who literally jumped out of her chair when someone in the class began to release tension through sound. She later shared with me that she had grown up in a home where people constantly screamed at each other and, as a result, she found yelling almost unbearable. After a month of relaxation and sense memory, however, she didn't hear the sound anymore. And she went on to become a really good actress.

Mystics have been doing the same thing for thousands of years through many forms of meditation. But actors have a more difficult task in that they have to stay in that emptied state while walking, talking, and hitting their marks. It takes mystics years to attain Nirvana. Since our task is more difficult, doesn't it make sense that the REAL secret to incredible acting is perhaps a form of trance? Grotowski talks a lot about trance in his book as a vehicle for giving yourself to your audience. The greatest actors seem to put themselves into a profound trance-like state of openness or awareness combined with the fearlessness of being in the moment.

That's why training is so important. Grotowski also said that "creativity is . . . boundless sincerity, yet disciplined". Only by training ourselves to get rid of all that extraneous stuff that clutters and rules our lives can we finally get to creative expression.

The Fourth-E—Energize
When you attain this emptier, deeper state an energy shift takes place. You don't seem as weighted down by the world anymore. And you've broken down some of the barriers that hold you back from being an expressive actor. And you notice an intensity flowing through you into your acting that's very different from what you experience in everyday life.

This Fourth-E is the result of the first two. And the child of the emptied, trance-like state. You can't force it. It's the result of training in the right way and allowing your talent to blossom at its own pace. The actor who played the murderer who I talked about earlier had great difficulty allowing this type of creative energy to flow through him. He literally felt pins and needles in his arms from dammed-up energy when he did sensory exercises. When the dam finally broke, all types of emotions came spilling out. Along with them came the right flow of energy for him to fully express his craft.

I've sailed for many years. There's that place where you're heading perfectly into the wind, where the sails are set just right, and sailing is effortless. We used to call it "in the groove". When all the preparation from the first two "E"s of this process shifts your energy, you're acting "in the groove".

It's difficult to explain, but easy to spot. Those actors who never strike a wrong note in their acting are instinctively "in the groove". You can be too with this "Five-E" process.

The Fifth E—Expression
This is what you want . . . that elusive connection with the life of the character or the theatrical piece. Expression in any art uplifts and transforms not only the people who do it but the people who experience it. I don't know about you, but that's what I'm in it for!

When I saw The Hours, I understood why Nicole Kidman won the Academy Award. She actually lived and lived in the part. I not only believed that she was the character, but that she lived in the character's environment. She was able to portray the ultimate expression of the character to the audience. As a friend of mine who's a top voice-over artist and currently the voice of a national ad campaign always says, "she nailed it"!

You can't intellectualize this quality of performance. It may start in the mind but it ends up in the expression of the heart and the unique energy of the actor.

You have them. Those actors you idolize because their acting is always wonderful in some way. Or those you admire because they take Herculean emotional and physical acting chances. Wouldn't you like to be one of them? The "Five E's" can help you in that process.

© Jill Place 2005