The Best Actor in the Vase of Meiyu

Chapter 375 Introduction to Acting
Performance, an art with a long history, can be traced back hundreds or even thousands of years. After a long period of precipitation, it has developed to what it is today.

Generally speaking, people’s understanding of acting is to present a state and a role through movements, expressions, language and other means. This has also been people’s common understanding of acting for a long time, and then formed the traditional academic performance method——

Also called expressionism.

The so-called expressionism is actually very intuitive. "Expression" refers to body language, facial expressions, line skills, etc. Actors need to accurately understand emotions, characters, and plots, and then convey the state through precise control and accurate methods. presented.

There are no shortcuts to this type of performance, and it completely tests solid basic skills. This is a true portrayal of "one minute on stage and ten years off stage". Every actor must go through systematic study, lengthy training and professional training. From body posture to grooming, everything must be carved.

Each actor has a different level of performance and a different degree of practice in basic skills. The performance and the charm left by the performance are completely different, and the real material is clear at a glance.

It is precisely because of this that in classic plays in London's West End and Broadway, the audience needs to know the actors and casts in advance before going to watch the work. The viewing effect presented by different lineups may be hugely different. Really experienced professional audiences will often choose specific actors. Cast to enjoy.

Even the same lineup may have different effects on different dates based on different performance conditions.

Therefore, some people may be curious why professional audiences continue to watch the same play, even though they have seen it countless times, they still come into the theater again and again. This is the reason.

In addition to expressionism, in the past half century, another performance method has risen strongly and has even gradually become the mainstream of the industry, which is experiential acting.

The so-called experiential style, in short, means that the actor completely brings into the character's current situation, lives in the character's state, brings his own understanding according to the character's situation, and then expresses the character's emotional state.

There are many reasons for the rise of this kind of acting. Part of it is the comprehensive popularity of the film and television industry. There are more and more grassroots actors from non-traditional colleges. They have not received professional training or polished their basic skills. It is difficult for them to use skills or methods to perform. To show emotions and states, experiential acting was born.

The most famous example in film history is Robert De Niro's performance in "Taxi Driver". In order to experience the real life of a taxi driver and the background of the original script creation, he actually worked as three actors in New York. In Taxi Driver, I truly felt the confusion and madness of the male protagonist.

This is a typical experiential acting skill.

The highest state of this kind of performance is "You can't live without going crazy", completely ignoring the boundary between reality and illusion, and reaching a state of selflessness.

Under the experiential acting style, a new branch has emerged, the method acting style.

Overall, the experiential school and the method school are essentially the same, requiring actors to bring into the role and experience the character's experiences and emotions to complete the performance; but the difference is that the experiential school requires the actor to follow the character's emotions 100%, while the method school Allow actors to replace emotional objects.

To give a simple example, an actor plays a role that requires him to fall in love with a man in a movie.

For the experiential type, the actor is required to truly find a shining point in the character and then fall in love with him.

The method school allows the actor to use alternative methods to imagine the character as a woman and fall in love with him.

For the audience, the difference may not be noticeable, but for the actors and the opposite actors, the temperature of true feelings is different.

Slowly, method acting became more and more popular around the world, so much so that experiential acting took a back seat.

The reason is simple and intuitive. Experience-based acting requires being truly realistic. If an actor plays a serial killer, he can't really commit a crime, right?
Naturally, method acting, which allows the replacement of emotional objects, has come to the fore, especially in Hollywood, where it is becoming more and more widely respected.

Generally speaking, advocates of the experiential/method school believe that the characters’ lives are full of strange things, and no one can truly feel their emotions. Unless they have experienced it themselves, all the imagination on paper will be suspended in the air. And with your own imagination.

Of course, the most important thing is to make the entire entertainment industry more people-friendly and popular.

With the rise of social network platforms, there are more and more grassroots artists, and after the rise of short videos, the pace of traffic is getting faster and faster. Artists no longer have time to go to the academy to calm down and slowly hone their basic skills. They have no acting skills to speak of. Traffic artists have fully occupied the screen. In this context, actors who are willing to study the experiential/method style are already rare.

In the contemporary film industry, Europe admires expressionism, and they firmly believe that actors need threshold, even twenty years later; the United States advocates method, and the film industry represented by Hollywood has achieved countless grassroots star dreams, and non-professionals , no historical background, opportunities open to everyone.

Anson belongs to the latter.

In fact, Anson has been hovering at the doorstep of Method acting until now.

The three characters of "Friends", "Princess Diaries" and "Spider-Man" are all different, but the same thing is that Anson extracted some of his own characteristics, amplified them, made them concrete, and visualized them, and finally evolved into three characters; From styling to knowledge, get into the role and truly feel the role.

However, it's just a little fuss. After all, the three works themselves are not that serious.

The same goes for the "cat-and-mouse game."

Although it is not that serious and is still mainly light-hearted, the role of Frank Abagnale Jr. gave Anson a platform to explore.

To some extent, Frank Jr.’s experience overlaps with Anson’s. Anson can understand Frank’s feelings, so he now needs to mobilize his memory, project his emotions and image on Frank, and finally create a A completely new image.

Whether he is an experiential person or a method person, for Anson, it seems that this is the first time he has really touched the door of the acting world——

I haven't pushed it open yet, but I can really feel the solid texture of the door in my palm.

This made Anson a little excited.

Once, he hoped that he would never think of those dark and painful memories again and just bury them in the past.

But now, he found that it didn't matter even if the memory was awakened, because he was already strong enough to face it calmly.

It is precisely because of this that after joining the crew of "Cat and Mouse Game", the first truly difficult scene was not facing Tom Hanks, but facing Christopher Walken——

The actor who plays Frank Abagnale Sr.

(End of this chapter)