What Is an Actor’s Purpose? Growth, Discovery and Mastery

I wrote the first version of this in 2017, the week I watched two actors in Larry Moss’s class perform a scene from A Shot in the Dark and realized I could not have done it. The role needs a French accent. I didn’t have one. I was the teacher in the room, and I was the one who’d been caught short. That’s the right place to start a piece about purpose, because purpose is the thing that tells you what to do next when you find out you’re not ready.

What is an actor’s purpose?

Not the paycheck, not the review, not the reel. An actor’s purpose is to get better, and to choose every piece of work by whether it will make them better. I define it with three words and have for twenty years: growth, discovery, mastery. Pick material past your current skill, keep making discoveries in it until it’s retired, and treat the craft as a lifelong practice with no finish line. Actors who keep getting better with every project are the ones with lasting careers. The rest have a good year.

What does an actor actually do?

Since a lot of people arrive at this page asking that: an actor listens, on purpose, in front of other people, and lets what they hear change them, out loud, in the character’s circumstances instead of their own. That’s the whole job. The auditions, the memorizing, the marketing, the agents, all of it exists to buy the actor a few minutes of that. Which is why the purpose can’t be the money. Money is what the work pays; it is not what the work is.

1. Growth

“When you stop growing you start dying,” William S. Burroughs said, and he was not talking about actors, and it applies. We have to eat and pay the bills, so we do commercials and live gigs out of necessity, and that’s fine. But the bills should never be your purpose for working. I don’t even count a commercial as actor work; it’s something fun the work has allowed me to do. When you choose a class, a student film or a play to audition for, look for something beyond your current skill. Then do the work to play it well while keeping your attention on your own growth, and set aside the vanity of how you look on film or what the reviewer thought.

2. Discovery

Whether you’re working a scene in class, putting up a full-length play or starring in a film, the work is never done. Great actors keep discovering things about the character and about what the writer meant until the piece is retired. Retired, not finished: you move on because you must, but you’re never done with it. There is no such thing as perfection and it should not be the goal, because aiming at something that doesn’t exist is a long, fruitless road. Commit to one new discovery a day until you’re forced to move on to something else.

3. Mastery

Mastery is patient, dedicated effort without attachment to immediate results. I talk about it constantly because it’s fundamental to becoming great at anything. An actor who has chosen material to challenge themselves will have to dig into the craft to get past whatever obstacle is in the way, and that digging is the career.

It applies to the teacher too. I don’t believe I keep the right to ask students to put themselves on the line unless I do it myself, so I read plays and acting books as often as I can, I look for new exercises to bring into the room, and I act. That French accent is where it caught me. The man in that scene was really good, and I knew I wasn’t in a place to take the role on. The comedy demands the accent. The play demands it. Will I put the play up? Maybe. If I do, the purpose won’t be the reviews. It’ll be to find out what I can discover, how far I can grow, and how much closer it takes me to mastery of the thing I teach.

Why this matters if you never act again

Growth, discovery and mastery are not acting words. They are the words for a career in anything, and the reason we train doctors, lawyers, sales professionals and everyone in between in the same room as the actors is that the room teaches them the same way. Happiness lives in the progress. Pick the harder thing, keep finding what’s in it, and stay on the path without needing the result today. That’s an actor’s purpose, and it’s a person’s.