The Stunt Course Cure
How Two Days of Stunt Training Silenced My Overthinking and Elevated My Acting
Here’s a problem that happens to actors: You’re on a set, surrounded by lights, a camera, a crew, and a director who is intently focused on you. The director says, “Action!” and you go, “Uhh…”
No, your line isn’t “Uhh…” What happened is that being surrounded by all that stuff, and a crew who is waiting on you, and a director who you would like to impress with your acting has made you incredibly self-conscious, and instead of being in the moment and brilliantly emoting your performance, you freeze and mess up. If you’re lucky, you stumble through it, but since the camera captures the truth, the audience sees a stressed-out actor stumbling through their performance.
The secret to getting through this situation is to live in the moment and, as our friends at Nike say, “Just do it.” That’s pretty good advice for acting and life in general. You must let go of your worries and anxieties in a high-pressure situation and just do it… but yeah, right, that’s easier said than done.
Recently, I took a film stuntman course. (These days, we should say “stunt performer,” but let’s be honest, “stuntman” sounds… way cool.) First, I need to say that stunts are dangerous. Never, under any circumstances, do stunts. If you decide to take a course and learn how to do stunts, take a course offered by a professional stunt performer school and taught by experienced stunt professionals. You must sign a waiver because TV & film stunts can result in injury or death. You have been warned.
In spite of the risk, I wanted to take a stunt course so I could do stunt fights, which come up from time to time in roles. My character may need to throw a punch (or take one), or maybe the script calls for a barroom brawl and my character is caught in the middle of it, or my father is bent on conquering the galaxy and the only way to stop him is for me to duel him with my lightsaber. We’ve all seen movies.
In this course, I was paired with a really fine actor, given my lines, and matched with a stunt coordinator who would work with us on choreographing the fight so the action looked good on camera (and was safe for us to perform). Then, our team rehearsed the fight scene. At the end of the second day of the course, we performed our scene and caught it on camera.
Shooting the fight went like this: the other actor and I were on our marks, the cameras were set and ready. I had the first line. We heard, “Action!” and… what happened? With all the usual pressure of performing a scene plus fight choreography, did I freeze and go, “Uhh..?” No. I nailed my line and then we performed the entire fight in a single take. There were more takes after this to get close-ups and different angles on the fight. My fellow actor and I banged out take after take and rarely missed a beat.
Given that lines can be hard to remember and the fight choreography was complicated, how is that possible? To put it simply, the two days of training and rehearsal made us so well-prepared that when action was called, we were able to let go of our anxiety, be in the moment, and get into the flow of performance. Performing the choreographed action of the fight scene occupied our attention enough that we forgot about all the unnecessary things that could typically distract us (like our coursemates watching and the camera filming us.)
Essentially, being so involved in the action of the moment enabled us to switch off our overthinking brains. This made the task of hitting our marks, remembering our lines, and performing our actions in a dynamic fight situation feel natural. Doing the scene and repeating it take after take seemed effortless. (Although it felt effortless in the moment, I discovered that I was bruised and sore the next day!)
However, my learning from this experience raises a couple of questions: Is there a lesson in this that I can apply when I’m acting in a scene without anyone throwing punches at me? And can I apply this to other life situations when I would benefit from switching off my overthinking brain?
The trick is that while doing the stunt fight, I became highly focused on my actions. Maintaining focus necessitated switching off my overthinking brain. The intensity got me to switch off automatically. That reveals a great way to switch off overthinking in general. The key is to get really involved in your action.
In acting, where you are saying dialog with another character, you are still playing actions. In most cases, your actions will be expressed through words, you should be playing those actions so intensely that your conscious brain doesn’t get the chance to think about what you’re doing. So yes, actors should be playing all of their actions intensely enough that they are able to switch off. When an audience sees an actor doing this their reaction will be, “Woah, that is good acting.”
Outside of acting, in all the other activities we do in life, it too is also possible to lose yourself in the action. When you succeed at doing this, you usually achieve a better result. It’s like when you’re trying to score a basket in basketball and your conscious mind is thinking, “I really need to score this basket!”… chances are you will miss. But if you become intensely caught up in the action of throwing the ball to the point that you’re not consciously thinking about it, the odds that you make that basket go way up.
So even though the stunt course was a wonderful example for me to experience the benefit of getting lost in the action and switching off my brain, you don’t need to take a course like that to benefit from this. You just really need to get into the action of what you are doing. The action could be acting, dancing, basketball, public speaking, you name it. Practice your actions and get them down pat so you can do them without having to think about them. Then you can perform them without thinking and you might even be able to make them look easy.
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