Have you noticed that that the thing you seek is always in the last place you look? Have you ever wondered why? The answer is simple: because once you’ve found it, you stop looking. Why waste any more time than you need to?
Imagine you’re looking for $1o that you know you left somewhere, and after five minutes of searching your apartment you find it. Do you continue turning your apartment upside down? Of course not, because you’ve already found what you were looking for. Surprise, surprise, it was in the last place you looked. But why stop at $10 when there may be $30, $50, or $100 lying around somewhere? And not just dollar bills and coins, but also a check from that gig last week, or casino chips you forgot to cash in at the end of your last trip to Vegas.
As actors, it’s far too common for us to predetermine what we think it is we’ll find, and then call off the search once we’ve found it. We pick up a scene, define immediately what it is we think we want (an emotion, an objective, or a general mood), and once we feel we’ve discovered it, we stop searching for anything else. This is why the rehearsal process for so many actors includes a little bit of genuine exploration and a
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