For many people, acting appears to be people talking while sometimes getting emotional—basically, they think it’s someone on screen or stage being themselves. Which is why so many people think they can do it. They say, “Acting is only hard because you have to memorize lines. If I could remember, I could be an actor, too.” They see Robert DeNiro in “Taxi Driver” and think, “I’m from New York and I can drive a car. I could do that.”
On the flipside, no one imagines they could just wake up one day and be a professional ballerina or opera singer or classical pianist. To the uninformed, what these professions require that acting seemingly doesn’t is years and years of intense training. Acting skills? Not a thing, they think.
But here’s the thing: Remarkable actors do go through intense training specifically so you can’t tell how hard they’re working, so you can’t see the years and years of training that got them to this point. There is a disguised virtuosity in the complex craft of acting that doesn’t show itself in skilled acting. The goal of great actors? To act so naturally—yes, acting naturally requires
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