The Actor With Eyebrows: 7 Bad Habits of a Beginner Actor

Every casting session has one. The actor whose eyebrows are doing the scene. Up for surprise, down for anger, up and down for everything in between, while the eyes underneath them do nothing at all. Nobody remembers that actor’s name afterward. They remember the eyebrows. I know, because for a couple of years early on, I was that actor, and a casting director I respected told me so in front of a room.

Everybody picks up habits. Actors are no different, and the first year is when most of them arrive, because nerves need somewhere to go. Here are the seven I see most from the casting side of the table, what each one is really made of, and how to break it.

7 bad habits of a beginner actor

1. Sighing before the line
2. Acting with the forehead
3. The eyebrows
4. Blinking too much
5. Moving for no reason
6. Tense hands
7. One way of saying it

1) Sighing before the line

Breath is the life of the line. When you let out a gust of air right before you speak, usually out of nerves, you’ve just spent the energy the line needed, and what comes out is deflated. It’s audible, too, and by the third one the person behind the table is counting. Once in a while a sigh is the honest choice. Most of the time it is a leak. Notice where your breath goes in the second before you speak, and keep it.

2) Acting with the forehead

On camera, what you’re thinking has to come through your eyes. A lot of beginners believe, without ever deciding to, that it can be read in the wrinkles above them instead. The camera magnifies everything, so the smallest real thought in the eyes is bigger than any furrow. Almost always, a working forehead means the lines were memorized by feel instead of by thought, and the face is doing the job the thinking should have done.

3) The eyebrows

Raised means surprise. Furrowed means confusion or anger. Sometimes. The problem isn’t that eyebrows move; it’s that they’ve become a substitute for the thing they’re supposed to be a symptom of. If the character genuinely would, fine. If you’re reaching for them because you’re not sure the feeling is landing, that’s the habit talking. Have the thought and let the face do what it does.

4) Blinking too much

Are we back to the eyebrows? No, this time it’s the lashes. Fast blinking reads as nerves on stage and hides your eyes entirely on camera, which means it hides the two best things you’ve got. It’s almost always unconscious. The fix isn’t to stare; it’s to have something specific to look at and something specific to think, because a busy mind blinks less.

5) Moving for no reason

Stillness is powerful. Movement for its own sake is distracting, and it makes a character look weak or unsure when the writer meant nothing of the kind. Every move informs the character. If your character doesn’t pace, don’t pace. If they don’t fidget, don’t fidget. Earn the movement, and when you do move, mean it.

6) Tense hands

We hold tension in the jaw, the shoulders, the hips and the hands, and the hands are the one the audience sees first. Wringing them, clasping them, cracking a knuckle, picking at a thread on your shirt. Any of that during a commercial read and the read is over. The fix happens before you walk in: a few minutes of shaking out, breath, a jaw release. And once you’re in there, don’t hide the nerves. Use them. Nervous energy pointed at the scene partner is just called being alive.

7) One way of saying it

There are a dozen ways to deliver any line. Fall in love with one of them and you’re stuck the moment a director asks for something else, and directors always ask. Delivering it a little differently every time also gives your scene partner something fresh to react to and gives the editor options. The easiest way out of this trap is to memorize with no inflection at all, so the line has nothing baked in when the thought arrives. The best actors are directable.

Breaking them

Here’s the good news. Every one of these can be broken, and if you recognized yourself in one or two of them, you’re already ahead of the actor who has been doing all seven for a decade without knowing. The frustrating news is that it takes time and it takes someone watching, because you can’t see your own eyebrows. That is most of what a class is for.

Mine were the sigh, the forehead and the hands. It took a year of a coach saying “again” to lose them, and I still catch the sigh when I’m tired. You signed up for hard work the day you decided to do this. This is the part of it that’s actually in your control.