Thought-Based Acting: Give Your Character a Thought Life

The National Science Foundation has put the number of thoughts a person has in a day at around fifty thousand. Some of them careful, most of them not, a lot of them about lunch. Thoughts run underneath every decision we make and they’re a large part of what makes us who we are. So here’s a question: if the job of acting is to be real, and your character is written to be a real person, shouldn’t your character have thoughts?

We call the answer thought-based acting, and it’s most of what we teach.

First, know the lines cold

Everything else depends on this. If you have to stop for even a second to find the next line, your character can’t think, because you’re thinking. The thought life only turns on once the words are so far down in you that they arrive on their own. That’s why we’re so unreasonable about memorization. It isn’t about getting the words right. It’s about freeing the mind up for the real work.

Then, mine the script

Go through the script and take everything it gives you about your character: what they say, what others say about them, what they do, where they are, what they want. Those are the facts. Then build outward from the facts into a backstory that explains them: the experiences that would produce this disposition, this way of talking, these habits, this choice in this moment. You’re not inventing for fun. You’re inventing whatever makes the facts true.

Then, think on their behalf

Once you know the person that well, you can start to think for them. Before every line, every move, ask: what thought would cause this person to say or do this, right now? Rehearse with that question every time, and something happens that surprises actors the first time it does: you start thinking in character without trying. The thoughts come up on their own, and the face follows.

Why this is the whole difference

Two reasons. The first is practical: it gives you something to do when you aren’t talking, which in most scenes is most of the time. The second is what the camera sees. The small, involuntary things, the flicker in the eyes, the hand that moves before the line, the breath that catches, are not things you can perform. They are things that happen to a person who is having a thought. Good actors say the lines well. Great actors are thinking, and the audience can tell the difference without knowing why. If you want to move people, that’s where it lives.