The Madness of the Method

Does acting need to be grueling to be good?

- By Jordan Kisner. Illustration by Daniele Castellano

Which of the stories do I start with here? There was the time when I was 16 and the teacher of my preprofessional acting workshop decided that I needed to be more physically unselfconscious, that my technique wasn’t loose enough. He made me pretend to have a seizure on the floor while the dozen or so other student actors watched, and wouldn’t let me stop convulsing until he said so. I flopped around, my face burning brighter and brighter red while he shouted at me to go harder, to really commit to the seizure, for an endless three minutes.

Or maybe the time when I was 20 and a teacher at one of NYU’s conservatory acting schools had the tallest, strongest boy in my class hold me tight to his chest and not let go. The idea was to get me truly distraught, because my character was upset. “Get away from him,” she told me. “Don’t let her go,” she told him. I tried to escape, shoving, kicking, pulling, heaving, going slack, struggling uselessly and furiously until— surprising myself—I burst into wracking sobs. “Good,” she said. “Now start the scene.” The boy let me go and I stumbled through it, unable to stop crying. The performance was deemed a breakthrough, if a little “uncontrolled” on my part.