Behavior tells the truth. The line may not.

If he or she says I love you, but he/she never looks you in the eye while you’re doin’ the do, or worse yet, never seems to want sex much at all, he/she may still love you. He/she’s just not hot for you. Whether he/she is getting it somewhere else is anybody’s guess, but if the lack of heat doesn’t matter to you either, then you’ll hear his/her “I love you” as the truth, and you’ll be right. If you want or expect arousal and passion to be an ongoing part of love, you’ll hear the I love you as a lie, and you’ll be right.

So, also, with actors, if you watch the great film performances, behavior tells the story. The dialogue rides on the behavior, not the other way around. The line will never and should never tell you how to behave. The line only tells you what the person says. Think about life for a moment, fuck the script. How often in life do you say exactly what you think, feel, mean, and intend?

See what I mean? Behavior is the Coin of the Realm.

Watch the way Gregory Peck holds his daughter on the porch swing in To Kill A Mockingbird. The behavior is tender, protective, sad, defiant, calm, and full of a great need of comfort for himself, as well as providing comfort for her. Heath Ledger’s performance in Brokeback Mountain is a really interesting counterpoint to Gregory Peck’s, in that they are both playing good, honest, moral, and basically inexpressive men. But Peck is playing a man with self-awareness, perhaps typically quiet and calm for men of that generation. (Watch George Clooney in any interview he’s ever given. It’s the same quiet, cool, restrained behavior. Some kinds of male and female style rules for behavior never change.) Heath Ledger is playing a man who doesn’t express feeling in BB, but he is also playing a man victimized by the world in which he lives, a man filled with loss and rage, and his entire life becomes about suppressing the rage. Watch him in the scene where he pummels the man making lewd comments at the 4^th of July picnic, and also in the scene where he gets pummeled by the man he punches who’s driving a truck. In both cases, the “character” seems to have a clear and surprising moment of acceptance of the anger he has become accustomed to repressing before he unleashes it. And mixed with that anger is a desire to feel physical pain and also a relief at the momentary opportunity to lose himself in emotion. (In the picnic scene his wife is aware of the rage about to be unleashed almost before he is.) Ledger’s dialogue is often mumbled, muffled, lacking in volume and consonants, but it’s not a weakness in the performance. We hear everything he says that we need to hear. His body tells the story, not what he says, and we may strain to understand a mumble that no one in the guy’s life was ever intended to hear either.

On her 52nd birthday, just minutes after lying about how it’s only her 50^th to the family doctor (who has rudely and clumsily called her on the lie in front of two other men who want to date her, but to whom she’s not in the least attracted), watch the way Shirley MacLaine climbs the 4 or 5 stairs leading to her next-door neighbor Jack Nicholson’s front porch having made the decision as a result of this humiliation a few minutes earlier, to ask him out for lunch, in Terms of Endearment. This is a man who does attract her, enormously, and her behavior is exhilarated, frightened, decisive, playful, aggressive, sad, sensual, whimsical.

These descriptions contradict each other. Human behavior is filled with contradictions when it’s fully true and fully alive. And an actor’s behavior must be fully alive even when the “character” is less than expressive. Gregory Peck is playing a man of great restraint and more than a little repression in TKAM. This is not a guy who ever wears his feelings on his sleeve, but we can see every nuance of every thought and need and want and feeling in his body.

There’s a brilliant comic sequence in All About Eve (among many others) where Bette Davis as Margo Channing, aged 40, is in a combative fit of aggressive jealousy over the attentions of her very young protégé, Eve, mid-twenties, played (effectively if not always honestly) by Ann Baxter, towards Bette’s younger, aged 32, lover, Bill Sampson, played (sometimes charmingly but mostly with hideous actorish self-consciousness) by Gary Merrill. They’re in the living room of her swank NYC apartment, waiting for guests to arrive for a welcome-home party she’s giving in his honor, and she has, in mid-fight, a sudden urge for a chocolate bon-bon. She lifts the lid off the candy dish, chooses a chocolate, picks it up, looks at it, then wisely for the moment, changes her mind after a quick but instinctive assessment of the possible outcomes, puts the lid back on, and walks away. After a few more heated exchanges with her lover, she returns to the candy dish, lifts the lid off again, considers again, puts the lid back on, fights with him some more, then urgently returns again, succumbs to temptation, lifts the lid, plucks a chocolate from the little pile on the dish, and pops it into her mouth. All the while involved in a bout of very active listening (to his harsh recriminations that she’s a paranoid, insecure female), her reaction to what she is eating is a mixture of self-directed anger, satisfaction, and surprise bordering on alarm that it’s chewy instead of creamy. She instantly considers spitting it out, then relents, effort-fully chews some more, and proceeds to a regretful, eye-popping swallow that’s a perfectly balanced comic mixture of horror and relief.

Clearly the actress has made a lot of very specific decisions about how she’s going to play this series of moments, this little flight of absurd chocolate-driven compensatory sexual behaviors, but it works precisely because you can’t see her working it. She is absolutely at the effect of, (read: in response to), first, her lover, whom she (falsely) suspects of wanting Eve, and then, unwittingly, the elasticity of the caramel inside the chocolate. It’s a miniature acting class in The Reality of Doing, Staying in the Moment, and the Art of Comedy.

As the overwhelming majority of acting classes are worthless at best, and destructive to your talent and the potential freedom of your acting instrument (you) at worst, I suggest joining Netflix and watching the greats. You can learn more about acting in two hours of watching Spencer Tracy or Helen Mirren than you can in months of a lousy class. (And they’re always designed to make you feel good, or to make you feel like shit if that’s your particular actor neurosis. I wish I had a buck for every student I ever had who asked me to abuse him or her. I’d have about 50 bucks!)

Does behavior ever lie? Sure, though not nearly as often as the line does. But, when behavior is a lie, there’s always an element of self-manipulation in it, so, as in poker, there is also a “tell”, a bit of behavior that tells the truth, which is that the behavior is a lie. When we know it’s a lie, either in life OR in art, then suddenly the lie can illuminate the truth in a new and powerful way, because then we can also see what is being withheld or repressed, and that fear-driven mechanism is the key to what lies at the very bottom of the well, what is absolutely core to that person’s character. The “tell” might be a slight strain in the neck or jaw, a too-casual or too-stiff stance, a holding of the shoulders, a tapping of the foot or shaking of the knee, depending on the distortion of the truthful response of the particular perpetrator (read: particular liar).

Of course the whole thing gets much trickier when the lie is self-directed. When one sees one’s own character in one way, (and now I mean character as the combination of qualities in a person that makes them different from others, not as a fictional person an actor may portray), but it really is something quite different, the behavior can become a veritable cornucopia of assorted self-delusional smoke and mirrors. Invariably, some simple (or mind-bendingly complex) truth is being scrupulously avoided.  Consider the male and female stereotypes: Bart sees himself as strong, manly, and a Man of Few Words: The classic Speak-softly-and-carry-a-big-stick Type. Betty sees herself as empathetic, loving, supportive, and kind: The classic non-aggressive, empathetic female. In reality he’s repressed, inexpressive, indecisive, and badly hen-pecked. She’s actually judgmental, prudish, jealous, competitive, and much hornier than anyone would suspect.

Bart and Betty have a picture in their minds of who they are, but somehow they have morphed that picture into a self-image that is almost wholly out of adjustment to reality. How can they be so wrong, so totally out of adjustment to the truth of who they are?  You’re kidding, right? We all know our Barts and Bettys, (and their many variations). The behavior they exhibit, layered with false intentions and shrouded in a self-deceptive mist of self-produced anesthesia, is mostly unconsciously designed to fool the world (and themselves) into believing in the myth they’ve created, which can make the final gymnastics competition at the Olympics look like an afternoon nap.

What’s my bottom-line beef with deception, both self and outwardly directed? Well, in life it ruins relationships (which is none of my business really, unless they’re my own), but onstage it destroys great (and good) plays.

And I take that very personally. Which is my particular neurosis.

When your own character is a lie, how can you possibly play someone else without spraying your own lies all over the person you’re pretending to be? One layer of well-intentioned pretense (for the play) is quite enough, and difficult enough to handle anyway, but when you add another unintended layer of evasions and/or misrepresentations, the thing becomes so distorted it’s absolutely unwatchable.  The two great goals of actor training should be self-awareness, and the freedom to respond and express fully, freely and spontaneously. Talent takes care of your ability to believe in an imaginary circumstance.

Go to the theatre sometime with the same expectation for the acting with which you go to a great film. And make sure to bring a big box of Kleenex, because it will seriously break your heart if you have any love for the institution. The theatre is dead, and tragically, right at the moment when it could provide the kind of courage and truth in art we can get nowhere else. As much as I completely enjoy fast-forwarding to the good bits from The Bachelorette, it’s not ever going to fill my deep, deep, empty Uncle Vanya hole.