The Mind of an Actor

See Neil talk about his Training Program for Actors HERE

The Mind of an Actor

I am an actor. I am an actor trainer. I am also a director.

I have appeared in American TV shows and Hollywood movies. I have trained actors for close to two decades. I have directed actors in over 90 episodes of television.

I have worked with the minds of actors and I, too, have the mind of an actor.

I have been asked many times, “Can anyone become an actor?” “Yes and no.”, is my paradoxical answer. The paradoxes of art are many. And acting is no exception.

An actor’s mind is a creative mind. To create, one must walk where no one has walked before. An actor brings into being a character that’s never been seen before. That’s what creating is all about.

It is my theory that an actor must rejuvenate their creative mind to an extremely high level. I say rejuvenate because, as children, we all had our creative minds in full swing. We used them continuously until we were “taught” that it was really a bad thing and we shouldn’t be doing it anymore.

All of us have been “schooled.” This is a very dangerous activity for an unwitting actor-to-be. Schooling has it’s place but schooling is a destructive activity in many ways to the unsuspecting creative mind of an actor. By “schooled” I mean to say, disciplined to obey authority or suffer the consequences of some painful gesture – whether it be physical pain like that of being hit with a measuring stick or ruler, or whether it be some sort of embarrassing pain like being humiliated in front of your peers, or whether it be the pain of a loss of a privilege or an object one possesses.

We are all taught to sit still, to be quiet and to listen. It takes several years to accomplish this because, naturally, we listen to ourselves, not an authority. If we want to pinch our fellow classmate, we do it. If we want to talk loudly to our neighbour, we do it. If we feel like jumping on a desk, we do it. At least in our early years until we are “taught” differently.

Listening to our natural impulses or instincts and then physically following through with them isn’t always what the teacher wants and, so, in order to avoid the pains offered for disobeying, we learn to obey. We learn, in effect, to not listen to ourselves and to only listen to the teacher or the policeman or our parents. At some point, we may even believe that following instincts and impulses and our imaginations completely equals pain. Slowly, day by day, year by year, listening to ourselves becomes far less important than listening to the authorities. The creative mind, or the mind that generates those impulses, instincts and imaginations, gets used less and less and, in some of us, goes completely dormant.

The intellect begins to take over. It gets rewarded for behaving and following prescribed patterns and rules. It gets told it’s smart and is rewarded as being “good.”

We are trained to build up our intellect and suppress our creativity. In fact, we start to believe we are our intellects yet it is only a part of our mind we use. It is not us at all.

The intellectual part of our minds becomes overused and is given far more importance than our creative minds. “Smart” is associated with intellectual capacity while creativity is associated with “misbehaving.”

But this is quite the opposite of what is required of an actor’s mind. An actor’s mind must be a strong creative mind. The intellectual aspect has it’s place in acting but it is greatly overshadowed by the creative mind.

What I have discovered is that the creative mind, that part of the mind that is creative, is far more intelligent than the intellectual part. The creative mind has the incredible capacity to bring into existence something new and never seen or experienced before. While the intellectual mind regurgitates facts and figures and obeys commands.

The intellectual part of the mind does not have the capacity to grasp an intelligence greater than it such as the creative mind is. It is in comparison to the mind of an insect understanding the mind of a human. The capacity is simply not there.

When an actor realizes or understands just how intelligent the creative part of their mind is they then learn how to keep the intellectual part of their mind at bay. They learn to have it ‘step aside’ and observe just how incredibly powerful their creative minds are.

An actor has a well developed and free creative mind that they have used to discover and create characters with. It is not trapped by the ever-obedient intellectual part of their mind. That is not to say that their intellects are turned off or gotten rid of or some other related idea. But it is to say that the actor has learned where and when to use the intellect and where and when and how to unleash their creative minds.

It takes courage to free one’s creative mind from the do’s and don’t’s we have been so heavily trained into. And this is what is at the heart of every actor, courage. Audiences instinctively recognize that quality in actors. It is their courage that becomes an ideal to live up to.

Rejuvenating that creativity is what helps an actor to “become” someone they aren’t and never will be.

The mind of an actor is their creative mind. This is the place of imagination, of instinct and impulse, of courage and the willingness to have the freedom to fail or make a fool of themselves. My hat goes off to the mind of the actor for, without them, this would be a very dull and boring world indeed.