How do you teach children to become good actors? Judging from the many lousy juvenile performances we catch on the tube, so-called acting mentors and coaches are generally doing a deficient job, “infecting” their young students with wrong-headed notions.
As a result, most child actors concentrate on looking good, projecting porma and cuteness, playing to the cameras and peanut gallery, summoning up fake tears, and going for fan “appeal” and “kilig value.”
The good acting mentor doesn’t focus on all those distracting details and sidelights, but instead makes his young trainee understand where his character is coming from, what he deeply needs and wants, what he wants to “get” from the scene at hand, and genuinely feeling what his assigned character is going through emotionally.
So, why don’t they do all this, instead of filling their trainees’ little minds with unproductive fuss and bother? Because it’s more difficult to get through to young actors’ real heart of hearts than merely teaching them the cute and crowd-pleasing (but superficial) tricks of the trade.
On a TV talent tilt recently, another problem presented itself when a “famous” actress declared to her young trainees that they didn’t have to memorize the dialogue assigned to them word-for-word! It was enough, she said, for them to understand the gist of what they were saying, and a general paraphrase of their lines would do—!
We hope that the juvenile talents didn’t take the senior actress’ advice seriously! Actors need to scrupulously memorize the lines, as written.
Yes, lazy performers like the veteran star feel that they have the option of “paraphrasing” dialogue, but they shouldn’t be emulated by young actors, because disrespecting fellow artists like scriptwriters is not the way to get an acting career going!
The bottom line is, writers are hired because they know their craft better then actors, so they should be followed, and actors should instead focus on feelingly interpreting the lines they’ve written, not changing them in any way!