How to not not switch off
Daniel Craig's relationship to grapefruit.
Let’s talk about breakfast acting.
Today, there are, as far as I can see, two poles that define theory of acting.
The first, older, pulls character only from text. This is No thought required, just say the lines and go where you’re told acting. We are marionettes; personal experience is unnecessary because all of the character work is done for you by the metre, the choice of words, the punctuation. We give breath to commas.
The other is inside-out acting. The frequently-derided ‘What’s my motivation?’ school which asks what those commas tell us about our character’s thoughts. I have met more than one actor who refers obliquely to this work as: ‘I’m the kind of person who wants to know what my character’s had for breakfast.’
Breakfast acting.
Breakfast acting feels luxurious. Breakfast acting is luxurious. You can, in theory, go as deep as you like into a character’s psyche but if an audition comes in tonight for you to be seen tomorrow and you spend an hour and a half pleading with your printer to work, how long do you realistically have left to think about Cheerios?
Inevitably, we prioritise. We need to. We have to figure out how to get the most character bang for our temporal buck. To know what is the most broad strokes, helpful thing to work out about our character.
That’s why the same themes - family drama and so on - tend to come up a lot. I suspect Daniel Craig spent more time thinking about Bond’s relationship with his parents than he did Bond’s relationship with grapefruit.
One thing we might do while changing the ink cartridge for the fourth time is shine a light on ourselves and ask: “Why do we do… anything?”
Boring Yourself
The very first thing I do every day is drink a glass of water. After this, the kettle goes on and I balletically fling a teabag into a mug. Once I’ve drunk my first tea, I have a second. Now ready to start my day, I make the coffee.
If something prevents me from seeing through this ritual of decreasingly healthy hydration, my focus will switch to solving the issue. Nothing gets me outside bright and early, the dew settling on my shining eyelashes, like a fridge with no milk.
In Stanislavski terms, my objective is to resolve the obstacle of no milk and my super-objective is to drink things.
That is what me on autopilot in the mornings looks like. I am content with this situation. I do not aspire for it to change. If I were written, I would not have a character motivation to cut down my caffeine intake.
This is Boring Felix.
However, the existence of Boring Felix implies the possibility of Not Boring Felix. What would it take to bring him to the breakfast table?
Not much.
If my doctor told me I had to start making changes, that my water, tea, tea, coffee combination was cutting down my life expectancy one day at a time, I would become Not Boring Felix.
Not Boring Felix makes for much better stories because he has conflicting motivations: on the one hand I must change my morning ritual to extend my life. On the other hand, I don’t want to. This conflict would create drama and that drama would escalate and all of a sudden we’re in the story of How Felix Committed Arson on a Bottle of Tropicana.
Boring Work
Now, if you’re reading that script and it begins, Pixar-like, with a vision of me, every morning, enjoying my water, tea, tea, coffee, until one day my GP urgently rings my doorbell clutching a folder marked POISON DRINKS, you’ll be able to piece together why we later get a scene where I consult a scientist on the smoke point of oranges.
But stories don’t always give the whole context. Often, they’re straight in with the action. If the story begins:
INT. TESCO, DAY
FELIX
Hello, I’d like a bottle of juice, and matches.
… then you’d have to do some work to figure out that I have been affected by the change to my routine.
If the story is being told by Christopher Nolan, you might get a bit more context, Hans Zimmer stirring over sumptuous shots of the kettle. If the story is a 30 second advert highlighting the non-flammability of juice bottles, context will be thinner on the ground.
If all you read about is Not Boring Felix (and we assume you haven’t read the top of this article) then it is up to you to figure out what Boring Felix looks like. What is his neutral space?
Finding that neutral space helps us answer the Why? as we go through the rest of the script. Why does Felix hum softly as he leaves the shop, his eyes oddly unfocused? We may have an idea that his objective is to see it all burn but that’s a strange enough desire that we have cause to delve further and hopefully discover because he can’t be on autopilot anymore, the place he felt safe.
Punching Up
And from this, we can conclude that all anybody wants is to be well fed in a warm home, sitting on a sofa and looking at the wall, right?
Well. No. Obviously. Neutral is not quite so easy. Our heads are little computers constantly launching and shutting down different programmes - our wants and needs coming into conflict with present and past hang-ups, boredom, other people... Perhaps you have carved out a space where you can go to be perfectly content doing nothing - the proverbial rocking chair on the porch at sunset. But it’s certainly not my experience. Even if everything is sorted, I will fidget, check my phone, turn on the telly, threaten some fruit with a lighter… it is rare for us to be totally content.
And you and I are real people. Real people are famously too dull to put on telly. Even when they do put them on telly, they have to edit around them to find the stories. Real people are nothing like people in text.
Let’s look at some text.
We open with Mr Punch, off, squeaking the tune. It’s a puppet show with a lot of direct address. From this, I am concluding that Mr Punch is aware that he has an audience.
If that is the case, can we guess anything about his neutral? His autopilot? What is the basic nothing in which he feels totally at ease? You’d need to read the whole script to get a good idea but, for brevity, let’s try to figure it out based on what we have.
Show starts
Punch [off] I must do something
Punch [off] I will sing this tune
Punch sings a tune
Punch enters
Punch continues the song,
now with lyrics
about himself
and how great he is.
I don’t know about you, but I am going to say that one characteristic of Mr Punch is vanity. In a text stripped of context, he chooses to sing about how great he is. If we use that as a starting point and work backwards, we can perhaps guess that he is insecure. Maybe he needs validation from others, that he can’t get it from himself. And not just validation but lots of it.
Here’s an image, then, that might both offer it and fit in with the current circumstances: Mr Punch standing in front of the audience doing nothing while they applaud. And applaud and applaud and applaud. Non-stop delight at his existence. Then, and only then, does he feel secure enough. His autopilot is adulation.
Maybe.
Are there other options? As many as you like. Is it grounded? Not in the slightest. Does it fit with this kind of show? I think so.
If his objective is an autopilot of adulation, his obstacle is that that’s just not realistic. After all, his audience are expecting a show; they’re not clapping machines. Not only a show but a show in which there will be other characters from his life who can come in with their own opinions about him and that’s going to be a whole new set of obstacles. Now we have a reason for the song: Mr Punch wants to get the audience on his side in what is likely to become a combative hour of his life. The more applause he gets, the more he feels… not joy necessarily but normal.
And then the song ends. And only now does he call for Judy. Why does he want Judy? Possibly because his nose hurts. Is he expecting her to make him feel better? Let’s look ahead.
Obvs.
Mr Punch will feel safe when a thousand people hold him aloft and shout: ‘WE LOVE PUNCH. WE LOVE PUNCH.” and even then, that will only last as long as he believes them.
Judging Judy
Without the ability to directly ask the writer, it is part of our work to figure out what normal is to our character.
I think it is key to remember that this is a space in which your judgement and your taste now move in to full. Your idea of what is normal for Mr Punch, Judy, the crocodile, the police officer, the dog or whoever is going to differ from mine.
Figuring out your character’s neutral is not about getting the right answer, it’s a structure to find any answer at all - or at least one that makes a certain amount sense - when we are not explicitly told it by the writer. One that’s as personal to you as water, tea, tea, coffee, lunch, next cup of tea, optional mid-afternoon tea, final cup of tea, dinner, herbal tea, sleep.