6 August 2026
I am continuing my short break from novelizing “Socks” today to spend a little time sharing my perspectives and advice on the art of acting.
I am no stranger to bad acting. The two genres I spend the most time watching – horror and porn – are two genres that are notorious for bad acting. All my life, I was baffled at how anyone could be such a terrible actor. It didn’t seem to me that acting was that difficult.
For a time, I thought maybe the reason acting came so naturally to me was because I had to act everyday in my life. I am a [generally non-violent] psychopath. Among other things, I do not experience ordinary emotional reactions. To survive professionally as an attorney, I had to learn to feign empathy and other human emotions. And although I don’t really think I was fooling any of my clients, I suspected that this effort was why acting came naturally to me.
It wasn’t until I started working with and training other actors that I realized that acting truly is a fairly simple skill.
Now – before everyone marches off into the comments to tell me how hard acting really is, please let me clarify. There are some truly talented actors out there. Patrick Stewart, Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman, Louise Fletcher, Anthony Hopkins, Patti Lupone, Morgan Freeman, just to name a few. When I say that “acting is easy”, I do not intend to undermine the legitimate talent of these actors. But there’s the shit actors you see in horror and porn on one end of the spectrum, there’s these iconic actors on the other end of the spectrum. In between those two extremes is “good, decent, passable acting”. And what I’m arguing is that the path from bad to passable is short indeed.
The problem is with how we teach acting. Or – at least – how some people teach acting.
I’ve worked with a lot of theatre directors who insist on the importance of their cast memorizing lines and cues. I think this is a terrible approach. First of all, actors are human beings. Human beings make mistakes. Few people can deliver a flawlessly recited performance night after night after night. Under the best of circumstances, there are going to be minor mistakes. And those mistakes ripple out into show-stopping blunders if the rest of the cast is so focused on their lines and cues that they are unable to adapt.
A better approach to learning a script is to learn the story. I believe that every director (or writer or whoever wants to be in charge of this particular exercise) should sit the cast down before the first read-through and tell them what the story is about (themes, lessons, conflicts, dilemmas, values, character arcs, etc.) and the large plot beats that structure the story. In other words – tell the damn story. Orally and condensed. If each actor was paying attention, each and every one of them should be able to hop up on stage and retell the story in their own words. Then all of the actors should be able to hop up on stage, as their characters, and roughly perform the story – all without ever having read the script. This develops comprehensive awareness of the story they are trying to share with the audience, rather than fragmented awareness of their own lines.
(Incidentally, this awareness of the substantive story helps out with emoting later on.)
Next, I make my actors do improv exercises – lots of improv exercises. And man, do they ever whine and bitch about that. “I can’t do improv! Wah! Wah!”
Yes, of course you can do improv. You do it every fucking day of your life.
Think about it. Do you go throughout your day-to-day life on a script? Maybe you’ll rehearse an important conversation that you’re expecting to have. Otherwise, our lives are wholly unscripted. We go about our lives with a lifetime’s worth of knowledge and experiences. We encounter people. We experience events. We observe. We react. All of that is improv. I walk into work. I see my coworker, Katie. I know from experience that Katie is a brunette. But today I observe that she is blonde. I compliment Katie on her new hairstyle. I observed. I reacted. Wholly unscripted.
Improv doesn’t necessarily mean comedy club improv. It doesn’t mean performing on “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” Though I do enjoy incorporating WLIIA? games into our improv exercises. Another exercise I enjoyed was putting two actors in a fictional car dealership – one was the salesman and one was a customer. The salesman absolutely had to make the sale, and the customer absolutely had to make the purchase, but I privately gave each actor some backstory and made it impossible for the two of them to reconcile and reach an agreement. I’ve had several “non-actors” try this exercise and their performances were astonishingly good.
It’s important that the cast understands the story, where they currently are in the story, and where they need to get to next. If your cast knows that, and if they’re listening and paying attention, they can work together to salvage a scene where someone flubs a line or misses a cue.
Then they can focus on delivering an actual performance instead of neurotically fretting over remembering their lines and cues. Which brings us to the next skill: emoting.
Having never sat through actual acting classes, I won’t pretend to be an expert on Lee Strasberg or Method Acting. Personally, I don’t find it terribly difficult to embody your character so you can experience their emotions. And I say that as an emotionally-retarded psychopath. I have to imagine normal actors can empathize with their characters far easier than I can. I also have to imagine (hope, really) that there’s more to Strasberg’s method than just embodying characters to understand emotions. Surely there’s more to it than that.
What I like to do with actors, on the subject of emotional awareness, is to explore the nuances of emotions. My favorite exercise is the “my dog is dead” exercise, in which I have actors talk about how their dog was run over by a car earlier that morning. Most actors understandably default to sadness or anger. But then we add in a little backstory that changes the emotion slightly. Such as “I wasn’t paying attention to the dog,” adding a layer of guilt to the sadness. Or “the person who killed my dog is me neighbor who I’ve had a long feud with,” adding a layer of suspicion or vengeance to the anger. Or “I lost my job and though I’m sad about my dog being dead, there’s a certain relief in that I have one less mouth to feed,” adding an uneasy relief to the sadness. All of these variations on a fundamental emotion can be expressed in very different ways and elevates an acting performance.
I’m also a fan of the Meisner Technique. Again – I’ve never been a formal student, so I won’t pretend to be an expert on it. But listening exercises are crucial both for improvisation but also for appropriate reactions between you and your acting partners. I frequently force actors to participate in intense listening exercises. The results include actors who are more aware of where they are in the chronology of a story, and actors who have more natural, less stilted reactions when their acting partners tee them up for their next line.
It is not the job of an actor to recite and regurgitate a script accurately. That’s what books on tape are for.
The writer is [usually] the original storyteller, and he disseminates his story through the medium of writing.
An actor is not merely the mouthpiece of the writer. The actor is a whole other storyteller, further disseminating the story in his own medium – the medium of acting.
I say this as a writer. I say this as a writer who picks the words he uses very carefully and deliberately. I would rather an actor misquote every single line in my script but still tell the correct story with the correct themes and the correct emotions than have an actor recite my script flawlessly, but so robotically as to inspire no one.
Yes, acting takes talent. And the odds of you being one of the few that becomes a rich and famous Hollywood star are extremely low. But decent acting is not unachievable. Do more than memorize your lines, understand the whole story you are sharing and your characters’ role within it. Understand your character, their hopes, their fears, their values, and understand how the plot of the story will affect their emotional state. Listen and react – as your character would.
Do these relatively simple things, and you will give an award-winning performance in your next porn appearance.
Socks 