Sociopath’s Guide to Getting Ahead by P. Elliott

Author:P. Elliott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2018-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

People fake a lot of human interactions, but I feel like I fake them all, and I fake them very well. That’s my burden, I guess.

—Dexter, Dexter

Naturalness is an extension of expressive coherence, and people are very attentive to any breaks or hiccups in the routine. Being natural is unconscious and easy. Acting natural is quite difficult. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman suggests people are better equipped to sniff out a fraud than be a convincing actor, saying “the arts of piercing an individual’s effort at calculated unintentionality seem better developed than our capacity to manipulate our own behavior.” So this is a bind; you’re a total fraud required to perform—for an extended period of time—a believable character for people who are great at one thing: recognizing a fraud. So what are you supposed to do?

Actors have all sorts of tricks to create a convincing natural character. Michael Caine says, “While rehearsing something with a fellow actor, if a crew member can come up and recognize you’re rehearsing versus having a real conversation, then you aren’t doing it right.” Method actors tie themselves up in psychic knots following the Meisner technique to “live truthfully under given imaginary circumstances” or gain “complete emotional identification with a part.” Michael Chekhov students work in earnest to improve their proprioception and focus on “mind, body and a conscious awareness of the senses.” 8 But it doesn’t have to be this hard.

You can affect the look of an emotional state without feeling it at all. For example, James Franco keeps it simple. To invoke his famous enigmatic grin, he doesn’t think about a long-lost love or the meaning of the universe. He says, “Sometimes I’m imagining a fan blowing hot air on me. And sometimes I imagine it’s a blast of bus exhaust.”9 Johnny Depp keeps it complicated. A quote attributed to him online: “I try to stay in a constant state of confusion just because of the expression it leaves on my face.”10 It’s worth exploring what weird random thoughts can give you that “I’m a normal, nice-ish person” face, and use them. Because, as Marlon Brando well knew, “it is a simple fact that all of us use the techniques of acting to achieve whatever ends we seek…. Acting serves as the quintessential social lubricant and a device for protecting our interests and gaining advantage in every aspect of life.”11

Perry, one of the killers in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, used the mirror to help him create different expressions: “It was a changeling’s face, and mirror-guided experiments had taught him how to ring the changes, how to look now ominous, now impish, now soulful; a tilt of the head, a twist of the lips, and the corrupt gypsy became the gentle romantic.”12 Many actors use mirror work to perfect their characters’ expressions and gestures. Mirrors are everywhere. Practice and learn what your face looks like.

If your acting chops don’t seem up to the conversation at hand, do your best to get off stage.

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