Whether you have spent years rehearsing your acceptance speech, or even if it’s something that has never crossed your mind, the SAG awards should be something you pay attention to every year.
As an actor it is an opportunity for you to see what the industry is responding to and identify the coming industry trends.
Leading up to the awards show, there will be more and more speculation about who the winners will be.
Some actors and projects that everyone thought were sure to win will go home empty handed, while some of the underdogs will go home as big winners.
Why the winners take home the awards and why others, who might be seemingly more deserving, will go home empty handed is something you should pay close attention to because it goes hand in hand with becoming a professional actor...
Nearly everyone will agree that the winners and the nominees are all very talented.
But there are also tons of actors, equally as talented, that will never get a nomination. Before we talk about what sets them apart, let's talk about what they have in common.
Actors that deliver powerful performances on set develop characters with multiple layers of complexity.
Most actors get caught up in the moment, and acting classes kind of stop with the surface level emotions and character choices because going beyond that gets complicated.
But, it doesn’t have to be...
Start by finding the secondary emotions and driving forces behind your character’s actions
That’s how you get an audience to feel as if they are watching something real unfold before their eyes. It’s how the audience becomes immersed in the story and feels like the character you are playing is a living, breathing entity instead of something that lives on screen.
You really take this to another level when you focus on the biggest part of human communication.
I’m talking about body language.
One of the biggest things that actors are concerned with when they plan their on screen action, is what to do with their hands.
When you build your character with body language in mind, that becomes a non issue.
Your body language should dictate the way your character speaks, not the other way around.
That’s not how most actors build their characters. They memorize their lines, plan out their points of inflection and then they think about what their characters will do with their body.
World class actors consider what is happening in the scene and before the scene. They plan their body movement from there and then go back and plan out the way their characters will speak the lines.
Doing it this way gives you much more flexibility.
For example, let’s say that you are performing a scene and your line is “I’m so happy to see you” as you run through a park.
The script would give you some context about why your character is running, who they are happy to see and why they are happy to see them.
If you were planning your character choices like most actors do, you would start by panting as you speak and try to catch your breath as you speak the words.
That’s an ok place to start, but compare that to the way a world class actor would do it.
Both would start similarly, with panting and shortness of breath. The world class actor would go further and think of the reasons behind the running, because that would dictate the body language.
For starters, how fast your character is running will play a big part. Are they sprinting or are they running at a brisk pace?
Those are two very different things and they will each play differently
.
You make your character choices based on the purpose behind the running, not the running itself. That’s where the layers come in.
There’s a difference between trying to escape versus running for fitness.
Both would cause the character to appear out of breath but each one to a different degree. The actor that plans the body language based on the secondary levels of emotion and character motivation will play the scene more naturally.
When I talk about this with other actors, they tend to think that planning like this will make for a rigid performance.
Planning doesn’t mean that you have to do your takes the same way every time. You can still change things up, but do it from the perspective of those secondary emotions.
Directors love an actor that can play the scene in different ways. That’s not to say you should go from one extreme to the other, but they love it when you give them some variety.
When you show up as a true professional on set, the experience of working with you makes it back to casting directors, because they want to know whether or not they are making the right choices in who to move through the casting process.
When directors like working with you, and you deliver great performances on set, CDs will absolutely love you for it and they too will look for projects that you are a fit for.
Even when they don’t have projects for you themselves, they will often recommend you to their colleagues when something you might be a fit for comes along.
That’s how you start to build a track record in the industry.
Winning an award can do the same, but on an entirely different level of course. Some award winning actors leverage their new reputation into more opportunities and even bigger projects.
Here’s how you can solidify your industry reputation without having to win an award.
There are many different things that go into building an acting career, and your industry reputation is one of the biggest ones.
Most actors spend nearly all of their time working on the creative side of the industry and leave everything else for their agent to handle.
There are some things that you just have to be responsible for yourself and your reputation is one of them.
We’ll talk more about the rest of that another time and build out a game plan for your career.
Get started on that for now and we’ll take the rest one step at a time.
Don’t forget to tune into the SAG awards and pay close attention to those that end up winning. You will see that they all have something in common. In one way or another they are all highly visible to the industry. Here’s how I can help with that.
I know that some of what we went over today goes against what you may have been told about making it in the industry.
If you have any questions about it or even if you just want to bounce ideas, don’t hesitate to get in touch. I’m happy to help however I can because I truly want to...
See you at the top,
Scott