Acting for the Camera - FBI Approved!

In the early days of casting my projects included police procedural and crime films. For these projects we often used real law enforcement personnel as consultants and sometimes as extras on set, instead of real actors. Casting ‘real people’ instead of actors has gained considerable momentum over the last decade or so. In my projects, directors would sometimes give real law enforcement officers a line or two of dialogue thereby promoting them from extra to actor.

For one particular project the director requested casting sessions for uniformed officers. We put the word out, they came to the studio, I captured their audition on camera. The best moments were when an officer would say things like, “with respects ma’am we really wouldn’t say that”, or “We’d only do that in a high-risk situation. Handing out parking tickets isn’t considered high risk in the real world of law enforcement… Ma’am”, always said with a straight face.

On a number of occasions officers expressed an interest in attending my acting classes, after their time on set. I was surprised but mostly curious. In class they rarely spoke about themselves or what they did for a living, instead they focussed on the process. They were often the most avid students, incredibly observant and extremely respectful.

Acting classes can be emotionally gruelling. The best of them will demand a level of self-exploration and vulnerability that is in keeping with the art of acting itself. Invariably the deeper the exploration into the self, the more vulnerable the actor becomes as she peers rather obliquely into the shadowy corners of her soul. It is not easy work. It is often uncomfortable, nerve-wracking even.

One day a person with administrative ties to the very upper echelons of law enforcement (let’s call them BJ) asked if they could talk to me about my classes which they had been attending for about six months.

BJ explained that the acting classes had an overwhelmingly positive impact on them. They felt very strongly indeed that other people in law enforcement needed to experience the process of learning to act for the camera. Accordingly they invited me to create on-camera acting classes for their colleagues!

Utterly audacious? Yes.

Bewildering? Perhaps more so.

They spoke about the incredible sense of uplift, possibility and positivity that they experienced after each acting class. They shared the grief and seemingly insurmountable difficulties within their family. They alluded to the work challenges that daily peaked their stress levels, often leaving them feeling helpless, ‘fried’ sometimes seething with rage or anger.

Coming to an acting class and embodying fictitious good or bad guys with distinct narrative arcs, was not only cathartic, but profoundly humanising to them, and their emotions were often close to the surface in class. They felt empowered by learning how to be on-camera and humbled by a process and a craft that made them feel like a better person.

They were impressed with the way that connection is fostered in order to support all manner of relational dynamics; and they seemed astonished by the felt experience of listening deeply rather than simply reacting to what they heard. (I often refer to the seminal teachings of Marshall Rosenberg in my practice; Non-violent Communication: A Language of Life) They described the strange, uncomfortable yes, yet bearable sensation of actually feeling emotions move through them.

Being given permission to allow the emotions to flow unimpeded was foreign to them. I often said to their, resistant-to-emotional-flow nature, “let us deal with the consequence of (appropriately) expressed emotions later; for now…simply connect with them. Let them be. Let them show up as they will, like a weather front the emotions will move across the surface of the body, they tend not to hang around for long”.

BJ was not the best actor in the class but they were one of the most committed to the process of acting; and they vehemently believed that the process how learning to act for the camera would support trainees and established personnel in law enforcement alike.

I listened, utterly non-plussed. All of this surprised me.

At about the same time, a detective with no connection to BJ requested private acting lessons. They came to their private sessions, during their lunch hour, in a patrol car! Once a week, every week, for five years. I watched their life transform irrevocably in that time. And there were others, each one feeling oddly fulfilled, perhaps healed in someway by the process of learning to act for the camera.

After 6 months of BJ asking me how the ‘acting for cops’ class was coming along, I decided to give it a go, all the while only half convinced any of this was viable.

I asked myself 2 questions.

1. What is it that my law enforcement ‘actors’ seem to enjoy about my classes; what are they actually getting from the actor-realm? How is it enhancing or transforming them.

2. How does an actor engage themselves if they are to be present and grounded under the most challenging of performance circumstances (eg: how does one effectively participate in an intimacy scene with an entire film crew in the same space, mere centimeters away for the intimate action?)

I pondered for months …

… nothing.

And then one day as I was listening to a news story about a policeman who fatally shot an assailant, I paused … and then the intuitive knowing streamed from my unconscious to my conscious mind. Space expanded as though in slow motion, and the reticular activating system in my brain stem finally began responding to my primary question - how?

Rather than thinking about the context of the actor, I considered the contexts of law enforcement agencies, as BJ had shared with me.

In my acting classes of the time, still only 2-3 years into casting for tv and film, I was teaching actors the importance of slowing down, listening, focussing on the ‘beats’ (for vital non-verbal cues), harnessing the power of the breath and finding connection between their own personal, emotional experiences and those of the character. The importance of authentic emotional connection is par for the course in all acting work as is being available to and for one’s scene partner.

Actors often obsess about memorising lines and will do so at the expense of the incredibly important non-verbal cues in the script. Ignoring those cues renders the work proficient yes, but somehow … uninhabited. We are not simply portraying talking heads and mindless bodies, but human beings, nuanced and complex. Don’t act-be, is my perennial note to actors.

And what is this being?

It is a sublime state of presence and groundedness. When harnessed it permeates the actor completely such that they experience flow-state. Flow-state opens up the actor to the possibility of shifting gears from problem solving to solution-driving; a small but critical distinction, linguistically and neurologically.

In being, creative productivity feels alive from moment-to-moment; focus and clarity of mind are optimum, wellbeing is a stable-base line. It is a buzz unto itself; a natural high that allows the actor to move through space with ease. When being, ease eclipses effort whatever the scale or magnitude of the performance moment.

From a somatic and polyvagel perspective breathing is the nascent step towards being. Breath takes our autonomic nervous system from flight/flight to a place of ease, or rest/digest. This downward-shift in the body brings about chemical and physiological responses that help us to, as it were, return to ourselves. We become healthily ‘conscious’ of our self (selves).

From breathing with the group - or the family - as I say in studio, we co-regulate. Positive, healthy co-regulation supports the ability to self-regulate. This in turn helps the actor to interrupt the noise that is fear, dread, anxiety. As these shifts continue the actor, like the consummate organism that she is, starts to gently unfurl; and in doing so becomes available to the work and the present moment.

The present is where the power is.

In response to these subtle somatic shifts, the actor begins to experience more cues of safety as cues of threat evaporate; their internal locus of control (power from within themselves) re-orients itself around this gentle, mindful breathing.

Thus breathing, being and connecting (BBC) became the three emotional pillars around which I created a series of classes for law enforcement back in 2010-2012. Life circumstances were such that we did not test run the course with a group of officers as we had hoped; but I did continue the research.

I began to practice somatic experiencing for actors in my classes and during casting sessions, around 2014, when I became the executive casting director for Sy Fys Z nation. For five seasons Z nation was filmed entirely in Washington State so the demand for skilled, local actors was at an all time high.

As time went on I saw that if I could support my actors to simply breathe, where they were used to holding the breath and indeed their bodies; if I could coach them into being gently present, so that they could connect and authentically portray the character; then I could augment their audition process every time and without fail.

The efficacy of breathing, being and connecting created such an immediate shift in the actor’s bodies and minds that I began to view it as the cornerstone of teaching and coaching screen actors. And so I called the studio and the practice The Actors Way because the process speaks to the actor’s best practices for creative and somatic well-being and empowerment.

PSoA