How Acting Can Help us Discover and Embody our Most Authentic Selves

Sir Lawrence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman, playing a Nazi torturer and his victim in The Marathon Man (1976)

What a horrific image! And, the larger story the movie tells is just as bad! But, behind the scenes things were pretty messed up too. Indeed, they tell the story of how Dustin Hoffman — a Method actor of the highest caliber — struggled during filming to keep his psyche from flying apart. Seeing his distress, Sir Lawrence Olivier — an actor trained in the classical British school — said to him, “Why, my boy! Why not just act!” Dustin Hoffman lived his character’s pain. Olivier merely appeared to inflict it!

What I learned from studying acting from both schools is this: The best actors tap what’s true about themselves to serve the needs of the moment and they let other truths remain unexpressed. In addition, they use how they appear to reinforce those truths. That means being true to oneself, while honoring the playwright’s words and the director’s blocking; the choices of the other actors and the audience’s needs, as well. This, then, begs an age-old question: What is the true nature of the self and how can we embody it in our ‘real’ lives?

More than a decade ago, I was waiting at the New York Academy of Sciences for the great neurophysiologist V. S. Ramachandran to present his wonderful work. In his presentation, he explained how humans must both think and feel at the same time in order to be fully rational. Surprising, no? (That’ll be a topic for a subsequent post.) As we waited, one of the other attendees chimed in, saying, “But, of course we know there is no such thing as the ‘Self.’” At the time, my jaw dropped at this deeply counterintuitive statement. 

What I subsequently discovered is that there is no particular part of the brain from which our sense of self arises. In effect, we use a whole network of brain structures to think, while using a whole network of somatosensory structures in our bodies to feel. That combination of thinking and feeling creates our sense of self, and our sense of what's true. Hence, Being and Believing are intrinsically creative acts. Good actors manage that well; and so can the rest of us in the roles we play. 

Over the ages, notable thinkers from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet — and many others — have criticized actors, noting that they lie for a living! And, given how well some of them do it, who can blame them? It’s a particularly good question in today’s world when trust has fallen across the board. But, my experience of lying for a living tells me that we’re all co-creating ourselves with others around us. The trick is to do that in a win-win way.

Easy to say, hard to do! My best advice is to practice one conversation at a time in order to build our conversational muscles. And, to be fully present and open and aware and game to bring the best outcomes of a given moment to life for each of us, on stage and in real life.