Traps, Escapes, and Fighting for Control

Hi There,

For me, September will always be “back to school”—or “real life,” as I used to think of it. But, in the world of episodic television, July is “back to school” with the start of network episodic season. And although the chaos of 2020 threw off a lot of television scheduling, it seems to be falling back into pre-COVID routines now.

The bulk of episodic season runs July-April. It’s directly preceded by upfronts and showcase season in May and June, and there’s usually a buzz of additional TV-related activity around this time of the year.

This month, I’m doing something a little different and passing along tips on auditioning effectively for television— based on some of the most common traps I’ve watched actors fall into (and may have fallen into myself).

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JC

It’s a simple question, and I’m glad they asked. It made me think back over auditions that I’ve watched (and auditions I’ve given), tearing down the elements that made them work or made them fall flat.

Here are the top four traps I’ve witnessed (and fallen into myself) and their fixes.

Trap 1: Showing the Problem

A common mistake in auditioning is to spot the issue the character is facing in the script and magnify it. For instance, if someone is shy and wants to approach an attractive stranger, an actor might play at being shy and awkward. Playing the problem is one dimensional—it’s the first choice most actors make and is often the least interesting.

The Fix: Solve the Problem

When you actively engage in solving the problem in the scene, you put the character in action and your focus on trying to affect your scene partner. The camera must capture something happening, and with your focus on solving the problem instead of showing it, it has something active to capture. If you’re a shy person approaching an attractive stranger, trying to overcome your shyness will bring the scene to life.

Trap 2: Playing an Emotion or Condition

Oh, those stage directions. The ones that insist you weep, like “the flood gates open and the character sobs like they’ve never sobbed before.” Or a well-intentioned parenthetical such as (in a rage). One glance at those directions and suddenly you’re playing the one note version of an angry person, with lots of volume and little connection to other actors and the needs of the scene.

The Fix: Hide the Emotion, Pursue the Need

Expressing emotion is not the sign of good acting.

Sure, you want to be connected to the character’s situation. But in most of our real lives, we’re hiding what we actually feel in order to get what we want. For example: when you walk into an important job interview, you don’t want anyone to know you’re secretly dying inside. You try to appear cool and collected because you’re not there to explore your nervous emotions, you’re there to engage with the employer and impress them.

An actor’s job is to understand the story, discover what the character is thinking or feeling, and translate that into behavior—into what they’re doing. Juxtaposing a character’s hidden desires with their outward actions builds dramatic tension.

And that’s what makes an audience emotional.

The Fix in Action: Breaking Down Stage Directions Into Behavior

Using the above example, let’s take apart the stage direction: “the flood gates open and the character sobs like they’ve never sobbed before.”

The phrase “flood gates” is an interesting clue. What is a “flood gate”? A safety gate designed to hold back torrents of water. It makes me think this person has been holding everything in, maybe holding everything together for everyone else. I bet there’s an area in each of our lives where this is true.

Exploring in this way moves us beyond the level of playing for results and steps into who this character might be outside of this scene.

If the flood gates are opening mid-scene, let’s look over the beginning – how does this character hide their vulnerability at the start? What are their defenses?

And most important: what do they want? What is the problem? And how are they trying to solve it? The clue will be in the moment before the stage direction of the “flood gates” opening.

Interpreting a piece of action in the script will help you to tell a more complete story. The emotion isn’t the goal—it’s just a result of a character in action.

Trap 3: Indicating That You’re Listening

Honestly, sometimes I’m not engaged in a conversation. When I’m not, there’s a lot of over-compensating, with some extra head nods and “mm-hmm,” because I want the person to think I’m listening. But I’m not really listening.

This overcompensation creeps into auditions all the time. Uta Hagen was quoted as saying to her students “don’t show me a point of view, have a point of view.”

If you feel the need to make faces to show you’re listening, even if the faces are subtle, you’re indicating and not truly engaged in the situation.

The Fix: Clarify Your POV and Understand What You Need to Hear

When we’re actively listening, we do so specifically, with intent. We’re listing in order to reply, to understand, to one-up… you get the idea.

We don’t just listen to a person’s words, we take in their body language, tone, and tempo, just to name a few.

Rarely do we hear all the words another person says. We hear and interpret their meaning.

When it comes to breaking down sides, don’t look for places in the script to “show” you’re listening so you can pull a face; clarify what you’re doing as you’re listening. Are you searching for understanding? Fighting to hold your tongue? Probing for a weakness in their argument? When you’re really listening you don’t have to “show it”. The true act of listening brings your body to life through thoughts about what the other person means.

Trap 4: Holding Onto Your Plan, No Matter What

If the audition doesn’t go as planned, but the camera captures you giving your pre-planned performance, it typically reads as wooden on playback. Whatever actually happens in the audition you must also allow to happen in the scene.

The Fix: Live the Experience.

It’s scary to drop the plan and play moment to moment, because anything can happen. It can go wrong.

But if you’re going in with your idea of the scene, that’s exactly what we’re getting – an idea. It’s not lived or connected. It’s a way of avoiding risk and maintaining the illusion of control. Risk is exciting. Control is rigid and boring.

You, the actor, know what’s coming next. But part of an actor’s skill is in forgetting that you know so that you can have a series of experiences, moment to moment, as though for the first time.

There are auditions I went into as an actor where it basically felt like I was giving a book report. Planned, precise, and likely boring to watch. Acting is a lot more like dancing then it is writing—have the discipline to learn the material and then trust your work and lean into your impulses. That’s what reads as confidence and presence on screen.

All Traps Have an Escape

Traps arise from a need to control the outcome, protect ourselves from risk, and get to the result we see in our minds eye. It’s like quicksand—fight it too hard and you get sucked under. It’s only in relaxing control and leaving ourselves vulnerable to failure (and not being “good”) that we can escape the trap and walk toward a great audition.

Some of my favorite resources for actors are books written for writers. Storytelling is the actor’s world. Actors are forever mining a script for clues about who a character really is and putting together an imaginary world—the same thing that writers do, but backward.

When you take the time to study how writers put together great scripts, you learn the signs and clues writers may leave for their readers.

In Will Storr’s The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better, he dives into how our brains crave story and what they respond to. The book breaks down famous scenes from films and is filled with insight into human behavior.

Some favorite takeaways:

• “Whatever the mode of storytelling, well-imagined characters always have theories about the minds of other characters and – because this is drama – those theories will often be wrong.”
• “Our errors about what others are thinking are a major cause of human drama. As we move through life, wrongly predicting what people are thinking and how they’ll react when we try to control them, we haplessly trigger feuds and fights and misunderstandings that fire devastating spirals of unexpected change into our social worlds.”
• “The influential post-war director Alexander Mackendrick writes, ‘I start by asking: What does A think B is thinking about A? It sounds complicated (and it is) but this is the very essence of giving some density to a character and, in turn, a scene.’”
• “When designing a character, it’s often useful to think of them in terms of their theory of control. How have they learned to control the world? When unexpected change strikes, what’s their automatic go-to tactic for wrestling with the chaos? What’s their default, flawed response? The answer…comes from that character’s core beliefs about reality, the precious and fiercely defended ideas around which they’ve formed their sense of self.”
• “All the principles of storytelling combine into the art of dialogue. Dialogue should be changeful, it should want something, it should drip with personality and point of view, and it should operate on the two story levels – both conscious and subconscious. It can give us clues about everything we need to know about the character: who they are, what they want, where they’re going, where they’ve been, their social background, their personality, their values, their sense of status, the tension between their true self and the false front they’re presenting, their relationships to other characters, the secret torments that will drive the narrative forwards.”

Purchase on Amazon:
http://jamiecarroll.me/science-of-storytelling-amz

Purchase on Barnes & Noble:
http://jamiecarroll.me/science-of-storytelling-bn

Purchase from an Independent Bookseller:
http://jamiecarroll.me/science-of-storytelling-indy

Or, check the stacks of your local Public Library.

Seeing her in action as she finds her way through scenes is eye-opening. As she says about her reluctance to let cameras catch this part of her work:

 “Process is clunky. Process looks like bad acting.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA-8POHKVq4&t=2s

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