Acting on stage is much the same as acting in life except that it's a little more expressive because your audience is further away. In order to get your facial expressions, emotions and voice heard by those people out there you have to project them further. This essentially means that you have to exaggerate everything to almost clownish proportions. You have to talk louder, your emotions have to be turned up to ten and your face and body have to uber-express.
Acting for the screen is actually a lot more like life than acting on stage is. The key here is not to turn your expressions etc. up but to make them uber-clear. Clarity is the key. To be able to do clarity you have to be in touch with your inner being. You can't expect to be able to give the camera your best anger-face until you know what your best anger-face looks like. And you can't just use a mirror as a prop to find your emotions. You have to actually experience them on the inside before you can express them convincingly on the outside.
Consequently, there's a lot of similarity between disciplines like mindfulness and meditation and the craft of acting. Both are routes to your inner being. And sure, they have different aims - one is to discover and the other is to express - but they are very compatible practices. It's no accident that the home of the mecca of movies in the west (Hollywood) is in one of the more deeply spiritual places in the US of A (Los Angeles). Those guys are riding the synergy wave.
Acting classes will obviously do more than take you on a deep inner journey, but all the rest is peripheral and can be encapsulated in the phrase 'look after yourself'. If you want to look good on screen then you need to moisturise, if you want your voice to last then you have to exercise your larynx and surrounding structures, and if you want to be loved then you have to stay young and beautiful because let's face it: everything after thirty is just charity.
So, yeah - hope you enjoyed it. Turn to the next chapters for more tips from someone (me) who knows nothing at all about most stuff. I might as well just be a small, green meditating frog living the dream on a kitchen window ledge. And that was your disclaimer. Laters.
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