Your First Acting Class: What Actually Happens, and Why the Fear Is Lying to You

Every week somebody sits in our parking lot for twenty minutes before their first class, watching the other students walk in, deciding. I know because I can see the lot from the desk, and because I did it myself the first time. The questions in that car are always the same. Am I good enough? What will people think? Am I too old for this? What if they tell me I have no talent? Why am I doing this?

Here’s the thing I’ve learned in twenty years of watching people get out of that car: the fear is real, and it is lying to you about what’s on the other side of the door. So let me tell you what’s actually on the other side.

What happens in your first acting class

Your phone goes in a box in the lobby. That’s first, and people are surprised by how much they like it. Then you’re on your feet within minutes, because nobody learns acting in a chair. There’s a warm up, there’s a game or an exercise that gets everyone laughing before anyone has time to be precious, and then there’s the work: a script in your hand, or a scene with no script, and a camera on you. Kids, teens and adults all run the same curriculum. Script one night, improv another. We don’t dumb it down for the kids, and we don’t dress it up for the adults.

Then comes the part beginners dread and veterans come back for: the note. You do the thing, and someone who knows tells you the truth about it. Not cruelly. Specifically. And then you go again.

Who is in the room with you

Not who you think. There are working actors in our adult classes, and next to them are nurses, salespeople, engineers, teachers and retirees, most of whom have never been on a stage and never intend to be. We have students who started in their seventies. We have students who are five. Mixed levels are the design, not an accident: the first-year student and the fifth-year student can be handed the same exercise and they will never get the same note, because everyone levels up from exactly where they are. Nobody is grading you against the person next to you.

And I’m a hawk about one thing: cliques do not form here. The night you walk in, you are as much a part of this room as the person who has been coming for six years, and everyone in it knows that’s the rule.

What we’re not going to give you

Here’s what most beginners think they want on night one: validation. Someone to say you’re good, someone to promise you’ll get an agent, someone to tell you the plan will work out. We’re not going to do that, and if that’s what you need, there are easier places to hear it. What you’ll get instead is a room full of people who care whether you get better, and a teacher who will tell you the truth so you can. It’s the trade every one of our students made, and I have yet to meet one who wanted the other deal back.

The fear, and what to do with it

The fear peaks in the parking lot and drops the second you’re doing something. That’s how fear works; it lives in the anticipation. So my advice in the book is still my advice: sign up and walk through the door before you have a chance to think. Don’t wait to feel ready. Nobody has ever felt ready. Get out of the car.

You may take one class and decide acting isn’t for you. That’s fine, and it’s more self-discovery than most people do in a year. Or you may find what a lot of our students found, which is that the thing they were afraid of turned into the best two hours of their week. Either way, you’ll know, and knowing beats sitting in the lot.