The First 48

As an actor you will find that a lot of the time you have to find something to do with yourself, especially if you don’t have a ‘real’ job. I watch way too much tv, but it kills the boredom I experience a lot of the time. What it can also do is teach you something. I prefer reality type programming…no, not survivor or artificially created situations that they really should call ‘contrived tv’,…
but ‘ride along’ types of shows where they follow along with real people living their normal lives. This is where you can see how to really act! It’s hard to know how you might react in a given situation and reality shows can give you hints as to how a human reacts to incredible situations, whether they are encountering it for the first time, or whether it is part of their daily grind. I am obsessed with The First 48 at the moment because it is like Law and Order in real life. You also quickly realize that acting is not really ‘seeking the truth’ as many acting teachers will tell you. Acting requires a heightening of the truth to make it sufficiently entertaining. If you see the detectives on the first 48 look at a body, it’s like they are looking at a piece of wood, no emotion at all, a complete detachment from human tragedy. Now of course that is probably a necessity of the job, as it is with the medical examiner who describes a bullet entering a skull as though she were giving you directions to the 7/11.

What is interesting to note for actors as well as writers is that truth is both stranger than fiction and also more boring. Writing has to believable and often reality is unbelievable. When someone tells you that a story you just told them should be a movie, it means that it is a story that is both entertaining, easy to follow and makes sense. Life does not usually make sense. What we find incredible in life, the coincidences are not that incredible at all. When you consider all the events that are taking place all around the world amongst six billion people, strange things are going to happen, but they happen so infrequently that we forget about the last time something like that happened and it seems freakish, when things happen more or less according to their probability. Someone has to win the lottery, but if it is you, it seems pretty incredible.

So as an actor, you have to imagine what would make a scene more entertaining and nothing is more entertaining than experiencing emotions. Try to have an opinion and express it as often as possible. In short…CARE! Care about everything. Boredom is not very entertaining to watch. Don’t overdo it, but find a way to care about what is happening in your scenes.

So…the lesson is…watch scripted TV to see how great acting looks simply like living and watch reality TV to see how you need to raise the stakes and care or you risk not looking like a human, even though in reality, this is how we may appear when doing our jobs.

(You may be thinking, “this is starting to sound complicated”, and sadly I can’t argue with you; it is complicated and requires a lot of work to be really competent)