Jennifer McCabe has been teaching acting and directing in various capacities for almost 25 years. After getting her Master’s through the MFA program at the Actors Studio, she first worked with Enact, a not-for-profit arts-in-education company which goes into at-risk schools and detention centers throughout New York City, using theatre games as drama therapy for conflict resolution and behavior modification. She started an acting class at the YMCA in Hoboken, gathering a small local following. After appearing as a lead in the independent film The Pack, the film’s director Alyssa R. Bennett brought her on as faculty at Stonestreet Studios, the official onscreen acting school for students at NYU Tisch drama. McCabe teaches on-camera acting techniques, and also supervises and directs the students’ film projects.

Jennifer McCabe; photo: Lev Gorn

Currently, McCabe teaches at Stonestreet, as well as at the UGFTV NYU Film program, teaching Rehearsal Techniques and Performance Strategies for student directors, helping them understand how to collaborate with actors. McCabe is also an Assistant Professor at Lehman College, in the Department of Music, Multimedia, Theatre & Dance.

Her private studio, Jennifer McCabe Studios, offers private acting classes in NYC as well as retreats and workshops at her studio in the Hudson Valley.

Alongside all of this, McCabe has also had a busy career as an actress, originating roles on off-Broadway, working regionally as well as on network and cable television and in film. McCabe’s knowledge and approach in her teaching is not theoretical.

McCabe in “Blindspot”. NBC series; 2016

Over the years, McCabe has developed a series of exercises which are not just revelatory in concept but also practical in application. In her experience as a teacher, she witnessed young actors baffled at how to transition from stage training to on-camera acting. She witnessed self-consciousness in preparation and process, students second-guessing their choices, students with a lack of freedom in their work. Self-consciousness and a lack of freedom is death to creativity!

McCabe’s concepts and exercises are specific to her as a teacher, developed by her through painstaking work and study and observation to address different challenges actors face. There’s “Jump Then Justify®” (it’s now a registered trademark), and “The Detective”, and “The Tightrope” and more (I quoted McCabe on her “Sunbeams” exercise in my essay about Kristen Stewart). She is working on a book where she elaborates on these (and many other) ideas and exercises, expressing her specific “stamp” as a teacher on the eclectic study of acting.

Recently, I sat down with McCabe to interview her about her work. This is just the tip of the iceberg with her approach, but I thought it would be really interesting for people to learn more about what she does, the exercises she has created, and why.

Photo: Alex Schaefer

Sheila O’Malley: You’ve been acting and teaching for the majority of your life. Your parents were actors. Were you inspired by them to go into it, or was it just the air you breathed, and so it’s a natural progression for you?

Jennifer McCabe: Probably the latter. I think it’s an example of experiential learning. Experiential learning is unconscious. Knowledge seeps into your skin, you don’t really know that you have the perspective that you have, and yet you are still able to apply it.

SOM: In my work as a film critic, I have found a lot of misunderstanding about the director-actor relationship, and what collaboration even means or looks like. You teach the film students at NYU collaboration techniques, so I wonder what collaboration means to you, and how do you translate that to the students?

JM: True collaboration means: if you have red, and if I have blue, we create purple. It’s pretty straightforward. The result of the collaboration came out of each of us contributing our own part, and the result never existed prior to that. Collaboration is not me conceding to you, or you dealing with my ideas and begrudgingly following through. That’s not collaboration. Collaboration is: We are creating something that never existed before. What you see onscreen when you pay your 15 bucks and you eat your popcorn would never have existed without the collaborative process between the actors and the directors.

SOM: Even directors who are not known for being actors’ directors, all of them say 90% of the job is casting well, and then just mainly leaving the actors alone to do what they do.

JM: I tell my students that when they try to guide actors in a scene, it can be something small. Go and whisper to an actor about his scene partner, “She owes you 50 bucks.” Whatever it is. It can ignite the scene. That’s the director’s job. They tweak. They finalize tone. They support an actor.

SOM: What are some of the things you noticed when working with young students that made you develop all of these different exercises and workshops we’re going to be talking about?

JM: My observation was that the NYU drama student spent the majority of their time second-guessing themselves, second-guessing their choices. When you enter a rigorous conservatory program like that at such a young age, it is mostly about seeking approval from a teacher. So that when the students come to advanced training at Stonestreet, many of them second-guess every choice they make, and they have almost no sense of agency or autonomy in their own work. Who are you as an actor, but even more so, who are you as a person? Their confusion makes sense. They’re young! They’re 20, 21 years old when they get to Stonestreet. Their relationship to acting is, “Am I doing the right thing for the teacher?”

McCabe teaching a scene class

SOM: Do they feel like they can’t make mistakes?

JM: Not only do they feel like they can’t make mistakes, but most of them also don’t have a relationship to process.

What I mean by process is: You and I grew up where you start somewhere and maybe 10 years later you have a little result from that 10-year process. There’s a process you must undergo in order to gain the result that you are seeking. But these kids have no concept of it as a process.

The whole other part of it is: who am I as a human being? Can I enjoy myself in this process of what I’ve chosen to do with my life?

The Lehman students are different from the NYU students. Many of the Lehman students have full-time jobs and families, there are a lot of different cultures and backgrounds. There’s also less technique, because they haven’t come up through a conservatory program like the NYU students have.

Work ethic is the main thing that unifies people who are studying acting, regardless of their background. How hard do you want to work, what’s your relationship to your own process, and – very important – are you having any fun? Process should be fun. If those things aren’t in place, then your demise is imminent. You’re not going to last.

You have to understand what you love about it and you have to be willing to do the work.

Jennifer McCabe, directing “Since Feeling Is First” with DP Steven Gladstone. Produced by Stonestreet Studios (2010).

Justification

SOM: I really want to hear about this workshop you’ve developed called Jump Then Justify, but first: Can you talk about the concept of “justification” for actors, for those who might not understand? There’s justification in blocking, like, “If I leave the room, I have to have a reason for leaving.” But what are the less obvious forms of justification?

JM: Let’s say, for example, you get a script and there’s a line, and it’s all caps, with exclamation points, “I AM SO ANGRY!!!” Chances are the actor will feel an obligation to scream the line, since it’s capped with exclamation points and also the line SAYS “I am so angry.” Of course we want to oblige. Now, if you’re Al Pacino, you’ll eat a donut and say it with a smile on your face.

SOM: He would probably scream it though.

JM: You’re right. Robert De Niro would be the smiling donut-eater. But if you scream the line just because the script says you have to, then what an audience could potentially see is that the line isn’t coming from an authentic place. An audience may think, “Why is that person screaming? They don’t seem upset. The person who spoke to them didn’t seem to evoke that response.” This is the “pinch and the ouch” of Sanford Meisner’s work. You don’t say “ouch” if you haven’t been “pinched.” And how loud you “ouch” is dependent on how hard or soft you’ve been “pinched”.

If you want to honor the script and scream the line – which I recommend – although you don’t always have to – then you have to justify where that loud scream is coming from. Is it coming from what’s happening internally for the character and they’ve held off expressing it until that moment? Or did something the other character say to them really piss them off?

Justification means that the way you say a line has to be believable for YOU. Of course, “fake it til you make it” can work too. Lee Strasberg said that. There are moments where you maybe don’t believe what you’re doing but an audience believes it – that’s legitimate, and it’s part of what it means to be an actor.

But 99% of the time, an actor has to make sure that everything they say and everything they do – why I cross to the kitchen and grab the Cheerios at that specific moment – has to be justified.

Jump Then Justify®

SOM: So how did the “Jump Then Justify” workshop come about, and what is it designed to address?

JM: When I was acting in high school and college – before my serious training in grad school – I felt free as a bird. I was totally self-expressed onstage. Every moment I had felt justified. I was tapping into everything that had come before, all of my experiential learning, and it was being expressed through my acting.

The reason Jump Then Justify came up was that I wasn’t seeing this kind of freedom with the students at NYU. I teach an on-camera acting class at Stonestreet, and by the time they get to me, they have already had two and a half years of training, Sanford Meisner Repetition exercises, Sense Memory, other techniques. They’re coming in to my class and doing prepared scenes for the camera, and after we shoot the scene, we talk about it and what I was finding was, I’d say to them, “Did you do anything to prepare for the scene?” And the answers were always very general. In other words, they were totally shut down, or they were making weak choices, or they were second-guessing the choices they did make. There was a total lack of confidence and lack of a sense of ownership over their own process as an actor. Through no fault of their own, by the way.

JM: One of the main differences between preparing for a scene for stage and preparing a scene for screen, is there’s very little rehearsal for screen acting. The rehearsal for a play is the opportunity for an actor to form the character and create beats and feel the music of the piece. For screen, that happens alone at home in front of a mirror and you’re making all your continuity choices – that translates as “blocking,” by the way – all of those get established and determined before you set foot on set. It’s a very solitary process.

SOM: Susan Sarandon said stage acting is like sex, and screen acting is like masturbation.

JM: That’s great! Michael Caine said, “Plays are performed. Movies are made.” So you have to have a full sense of autonomy as an actor when you set foot on set. You have to be able to take care of yourself 100%. The rehearsal process for stage is the whole reason that people do theatre, quite frankly. Yeah, it’s great having a live audience, but the rehearsal process is what’s really glorious.

So the NYU students were accustomed to having time to work, to having a discovery process under the guidance of a teacher, who helped them formulate their performance, and the choices they made in the scene. But in the real world, you’ve gotta come with all of your choices already made, and the justification for every single one of your choices. Your script analysis has to be on point.

Jennifer McCabe directing “Chemistry Project”. Produced by Stonestreet Studios (2009)

Freud’s Theory of Primary Process and Secondary Process Thinking

JM: And so I became obsessed with why the NYU actors were second-guessing themselves and experiencing, as a result, a lack of freedom of expression.

I came across Freud’s theory of primary process and secondary process thinking in Richard Hornby’s book The End Of Acting. It fascinated me, so I started to do more research into it.

Primary process thinking originates from a primary place: instinct, impulse, going with your gut, the Id. Secondary process thinking is logic, reason, analysis.

I wondered how this might apply to creating characters. Typically what actors do is they’ll read the script, they’ll analyze the script, break down beats – all of which you’re supposed to do – but when they create characters as a result of all this work, they are creating characters from secondary process thinking. It’s all from analysis of the text.

What I wanted to explore was: what about creating a fully realized character in just five minutes using only primary process thinking, your imagination, going with your gut, impulse. This is the “Jump” part of the exercise. I have a pile of photographs on a table, photographs of people – regular people, not celebrities – taken from magazines or books or whatever. Each student picks a photograph, looks at it, and then they have to get up and “be” the character for an on-camera interview, where I speak to “the character” and ask them questions. And what happens is the character is developed instantly, through the actor’s imagination but also the actor’s unconscious, which is what I am most interested in. Experiencing the unconscious creation of a character is primary process thinking.

And then after you do that, everything gets justified. The Jump is primary process. The Justify is secondary process: everything gets justified, every choice you make, but since the character came from your unconscious, it’s already justified. You’ve created a character, who has authentic responses coming out of a primary process place.

The most important component I have discovered in developing this workshop is that they must do the primary process part first. If you do secondary process first, and then move to primary, it doesn’t work.

So what happens is, they look at the photograph of a person for five minutes, and then get up to do the interview, and they have to answer my questions in character, and it’s unbelievable the stuff that happens. It’s total transformation. I ask “What are your hobbies?” and out comes the answer. There’s no hesitation, no second-guessing! I’ll ask: “What do you like to eat?” And the “character” will say, “WELL! I DEFinitely don’t like SPAGHETTI, let me tell you that right NOW” and there’s a lot of bigness of behavior, there’s confidence and aliveness, they’re unpredictable, spontaneous, there’s weeping, there’s anger, it’s incredible to watch! I do this exercise on camera, not just because you get to see them up close but also because it helps create the illusion that it is a real interview. The students thrive in this exercise.

SOM: It reminds me a little bit of all of the “couple interviews” in When Harry Met Sally.

JM: That’s it exactly. And there are a couple of different ways I’ve applied it. Actors can use it for auditions. When an actor gets a breakdown for an audition, they’ll get 3 or 4 sentences that describe the character, and they’ll also get a set of sides, and/or if it’s a film they’ll get the script. The first thing the actor does is scour the sides for their role and they start trying to memorize the lines right away, and if they have the script, they’ll read it over and over. This is all good.

Instead, though, what I have explored with my students is: don’t read the sides first. Just look at the character breakdown, the 4 or 5 sentences that describe the character: “Down-and-out mom, grew up in the outskirts of Chicago, addicted to meth” – whatever. Go on Google images, look in magazines, find a person that you think looks like this, a person you have in your head after reading those sentences. And then stare at this picture. And then go around your home doing some physical activity as this character. Wash the dishes as this character. Only after that’s done do you go to the text.

In doing this, you have created a character that no one has created before. Whatever you do will be not typical. It will not be a stock character. It will be unique to you, AND you have ownership over your own process. It’s a beautiful way to create a character. The freedom I get to witness as a teacher is fantastic, and best of all, they’re having FUN! It’s not enough to just interpret text and say the lines. There’s a whole other world at work here.

McCabe in “The Joke’s On Them”, written/directed by Gary O. Bennett; stills by Gary O. Bennett (2019)

SOM: In that zone you describe, the zone the students reach during “Jump Then Justify,” it’s almost like they really can’t do anything wrong.

JM: You cannot do anything wrong during this exercise. That’s exactly it. Nothing. And once you have a visceral experience of that, especially as a young actor with a lot of self-doubt, you don’t forget it. That experience is now in you. It’s become experiential learning for you. This is also what directors need from actors, and what casting directors need to see in an audition: actors who are confident enough in their process to be like: “I’ve made this choice, it might be wrong, but every single choice is mine, and every moment is justified.” If you present only red, they can work with that, they can counter with: “Love all that red, now just give me only blue.” Or “give me less red.” If you go in there and give them all the colors of the rainbow, it’s too much, it’s too general.

McCabe filming/directing “Pleasure Princess”

The Channels

SOM: Can you talk about the differences between stage acting and screen acting, and how you help actors who might be stage-trained to transition to the different medium? You’ve developed some exercises to deal with this.

JM: One of my jobs is to teach them techniques for screen and how to take what they’ve already learned doing plays and re-calibrate it for the screen. One of the images I have used is this idea of Channels.

For stage, the actor has a lot of different Channels through which they can communicate. Blocking is a Channel in which to express the character, the objective, the conflict: they can cross down center, they can cross up left. They can express status – dominance, submission – through blocking. Another Channel is gesturing. Raising your arm up to your head to express exhaustion or overwhelm, pointing at someone, turning around quickly, putting your hands on your hips in musical theatre! Skipping onto stage. All a channel for an actor to communicate. The Voice. Lots of prosody and variance, lots of ups and downs. And then facial expressions! A big expression to reach the person in the 120th row, is another Channel, another opportunity to express.

For screen, the actor really only has one channel, essentially. In reality, they have more than one channel, but when they’re learning this medium, when they’re just starting out, it literally looks like they’re the Tin Man up there, because they have the camera on them, and they freeze up. So it helps them to focus on one Channel.

For the most part, cinema is about the face and the eyes.

Norma Shearer, “A Free Soul” (1931)

JM: When I work with actors on how to re-calibrate for the screen, I use the example of a body of water with all of these little channels coming into it. If you cut off the channels, leaving only one – the face and the eyes – the pressure increases. The emotional life doesn’t disappear from the channels you cut off – in fact, it’s more, because it’s all being forced into one place.

Our job as actors is to figure out how to craft that, how to use that. Otherwise, actors would just be having catharsis all over the screen and that’s not what we go to the movies to see. We go to the movies so we can have the catharsis, and the actor crafts the performance so that we get to have that catharsis. I mean, actors have moments of catharsis, but for the most part – what leads up to the catharsis has to be highly calibrated by the actor.

This leads to what I call The Detective.

The Detective

JM: The main difference between a stage audience and a screen audience is that the screen audience needs to be a detective when they’re watching something. They need to put on the fedora and grab the curvy pipe and the spiral notebook and they need to investigate what they’re watching. Now, it’s passive investigation, but it’s what keeps them engaged and keeps them from changing the channel or checking their phone. You get invested in trying to figure out what is happening onscreen.

When an actor does a scene, and his eyes are dry, but you in the audience are sobbing – that means the actor is doing something right. He’s giving you the opportunity to have your own experience of the performance. He’s not telling you how to feel. He’s not forcing you to feel a specific thing. That is the goal.

One of the most challenging aspects for an actor who’s come from stage is: if you think of John Patrick Shanley, he writes heart-on-your-sleeve characters who are also deeply damaged and traumatized. We have to be able to honor the musicality of his writing and the rhythm and tempo of his characters, as well as their big-ness, and we have to have that read in a 300-seat house. Therefore that requires us to express it like Cher expresses “Snap out of it!” in Moonstruck. Your acting has to be that on point, you have to act the line as it’s written – in Shanley, it’s all in the language, the emotion is all in the line.

Cher, “Moonstruck” (1987)

JM: And this is most of theatre, because the venue – with the fourth wall – means that you’re on a proscenium, we’re watching you, and therefore you must show us something.

But for screen, you’re being invited into something you’re not really supposed to be involved in, you’re witnessing something private. An actor is trained for stage to honor the venue, and be respectful of the fact that “The play’s the thing”. For screen, “the play is NOT the thing.” I mean, it is, but it isn’t. It’s the moment-to-moment subtextual inner monologue that is “the thing” onscreen, the vulnerability of a human in front of me whom I am witnessing having an experience.

SOM: How does an actor allow the audience to be a detective?

JM: Don’t help the audience. This is one of the things I noticed in the Netflix series Unbelievable. I love Toni Colette, but the difference between her performance and Merritt Wever’s performance is kind of what I am talking about.

Merritt Wever, “Unbelievable” (2019)

JM: Wever did not help the audience, and her performance is incredible because of it. Colette had moments where she helped the audience. Even with something as small as an eyeroll, you’re helping an audience, you’re helping them to understand what your state of mind is. Don’t. Just have the state of mind.

The audience wants to be the detective, and so let them. By showing them, by indicating, we are taking that opportunity away from them, we’re not allowing them to make up their own minds about what’s happening in the moment.

A connected idea to all of this is what I call The Pollock.

The Pollock

JM: Our responsibility as an actor is that everything you do and say is justified. That is your first responsibility. And then you have a responsibility to communicate it.

The communication is like Jackson Pollock flinging the paint onto the canvas. What ends up on the canvas, there’s nothing he can do about that. He’s only responsible for the origination of whatever conjured the movement of his arm – intellectual, emotional, physical, mental. Whatever ends up on the canvas – shapes, textures – the viewer takes care of the rest.

Hans Namuth, Jackson Pollock at work in 1950. Photo: ©1991 Hans Namuth Estate Courtesy Center for Creative Photography, the University of Arizona.

JM: This process is the crafting part of it. You’re fully responsible for the moment you’re crafting. What I mean by crafting is very specific, as in: I decide I am going to look up after the line, as opposed to looking up before the line. That’s a moment you choose to craft because it will tell the story slightly differently. We are fully responsible for our crafting. However, once it’s done, it’s not our responsibility. Leave room for the audience to be a Detective.

This is all connected to my Tightrope theory. The Tightrope is about an actor’s experience of what is or is not a “good take.”

The Tightrope

JM: One of the problems I was coming up against with young actors on-camera is that because they’ve come from stage training, they’re accustomed to a rehearsal process, and so when they are asked to hit their mark, say their lines, keep the continuity, make sure they’re listening, all with lights in their face, and crew members around them, their judgment of what it means to “land a take” is when all of those things are in place, and they don’t screw up. What’s the goal of a tightrope walker, would you say?

SOM: Don’t fall.

JM: In order to what?

SOM: So I get across the wire.

JM: That’s the goal. If you equate that process to a “take” in film, then my students think: “I didn’t fuck up a line, I hit my mark, I was listening and responding, and therefore it was a good take.” NOT TRUE.

Now there are exceptions, because when you’re doing a Law & Order, and you have to say a line, open a door, and hand someone a file, it’s specific and there’s not room for exploration. But – and I can say this, because I am an actor and I have experienced it – there is room for this whole other world of acting for camera.

McCabe on “Law & Order: SVU” (2011)

JM: Here’s how it goes: We roll camera, we slate, we have speed, we have action. And the actor starts walking across the tightrope of the “take”. They say their lines, they take their jacket off – but then they stop listening, because they have mental tension, and then they forget their line, and then they miss their mark – and so they have fallen off the tightrope.

And here’s my thing: That’s actually the goal, right there. The camera’s still on you (unless you say “Can we start again?” and then you’ve ruined the take. Don’t ever do that.) But it’s what you do with the moment when you’re off the tightrope that IS acting. It’s not only acting, actually, it’s the human condition. It’s vulnerable. You’re in between two worlds. You’re in the given circumstances – “given” meaning the factual circumstances: I’m an actor in front of a camera, I’m on a set, I’m on location – and also the imaginary circumstances – I am this character in this fictional world. When you fall off the tightrope, you are in the two worlds simultaneously, which is a fascinating place for a human being to be.

And my thing is: That’s the gig.

It’s what you choose to do in that moment when you fall off the tightrope – your grace under pressure – that matters.

McCabe directing “Since Feeling Is First” Produced by Stonestreet Studios (2010)

JM: There are things you can do: you can breathe, you can focus on the givens – “I’m aware of my sneakers, I’m aware of the sound of traffic”, whatever – or you can engage in a physical activity which reduces tension and gets you focused on something other than the fact that you’ve fallen off the tightrope.

If you were to keep the camera rolling – and you can trust that they will, because they don’t want to cut – then you get to have ownership over the moment when you’re off the tightrope.

And then you get back on the tightrope, and you hit your mark, and so you go back and forth and back and forth between these two worlds. I find it very freeing for actors who feel locked in the on-camera process, having come from stage, where they are allowed to move around, or stop a scene during rehearsal and try it again. You can’t try it again while camera’s rolling. You have to keep going. It’s your job to learn about your instrument so that you get to say how the rest of the take goes. You are not a victim to the take.

This is what training is about. You have to be in complete control of your instrument as an actor, and this takes a ton of training. If you can have full freedom and ownership over the moments when you are “off” the tightrope … that IS on-camera acting.

McCabe on “The Americans” (2015)

SOM: Do the students take to it?

JM: No. It continues to be a really big challenge for them. Honestly, I think it gets easier as you get older, because ultimately it is about an understanding of the self. You need technique and training, but once you have a sense of autonomy as a self, once you’re not afraid of being seen, it does get easier. Being seen by the camera is being seen by the audience. Being seen is very vulnerable. Most students of acting hide behind the character, because that’s what they did when they did Guys and Dolls in high school – but that doesn’t translate for screen. At all. Even a Jerry Lewis or a John Ritter or a Peter Sellers or a Charlie Chaplin … they do “big” work, but their performances are not Guys and Dolls in high school. They are all willing to be seen by the audience, which means they are all vulnerable.

Jerry Lewis, “Artists and Models” (1955)

Peter Sellers, “The Pink Panther” (1963)

John Ritter, “Hero at Large” (1980)

Charlie Chaplin, “The Gold Rush” (1925)

JM: If you’re not willing to be vulnerable, if you’re not willing to be seen, then you will do very general work, very safe work.

And this makes me think of The Revenant. It’s been on my mind and it’s connected to this.

I watched The Revenant here in this room, and I was so scared by the bear attack scene that my dog brushed up against me and I screamed, because I thought it was a bear. I love horror films, but The Revenant is not a horror movie, so I was trying to figure out why I couldn’t shake that scene. It stayed with me for days.

JM: I did a little research about how the scene was done. There was a crane pulling him around, and there was a computer-generated bear, but here’s the deal: the REAL gig is that Leonardo DiCaprio acted like he was being attacked by a bear. You could have all the computer generation in the world, you could have the best crane pulling him around, you could have a real bear! – but if you don’t have an actor willing to act as if – AS IF – Stanislavsky’s “as if”! – they are being attacked by a bear, then you do not have a bear attack scene. And no one can do that but the actor.

And it is fake, DiCaprio knows it’s fake, but when he’s DOING it, it’s real. And that, to me, is one of the ultimate sacrifices. This is the true generosity of the good actor. Because the kind of terror he had to experience, the depth he was willing to go to … this is vulnerability. You have to be willing to go there. You have to be willing to be seen, like DiCaprio was willing to be seen.

Leonardo DiCaprio, “The Revenant” (2015)

JM: This is what you have to pay attention to when you watch a movie as a film critic. You gotta pay attention to that aspect of it. You have to address it. He didn’t just “make it believable.” What was he willing to do, what was he willing to experience in order to “make that believable”?

SOM: Montgomery Clift said once to a friend something like “The hard thing is that my body doesn’t know I’m acting. My body thinks it’s real.” Or I think about Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice: she said she did not prepare for the “choice scene”. She didn’t even look at the script, or learn the lines. Just thinking about the scene, it was there for her. Of course she’s talented. But there are other things in play. Imagination. Empathy.

JM: When we are children, we play make-believe games in the sandbox, and we completely believe what we are doing. Empathy is a skill. You can be born with a level of it, but you can also develop it. Actors should have it, and they should have it well developed.

For my lecture on “Jump Then Justify,” I talk about the power of the imagination, and trusting in your own imagination, and how when I was a child, I would create these games, and “be” these characters, and I had no doubt about what the characters could and couldn’t do. I mean look at The Lord of the Rings. That whole world was created out of one man’s imagination and we believe it all.

The Pod

SOM: I am really interested in how concentration is different for an actor onstage, as opposed to on camera. Or maybe it’s not different at all.

JM: There’s something I talk about that I call The Pod. The Pod essentially addresses another aspect of the re-calibrating an actor has to do when moving from stage to screen, and it has to do with what we would call bigness, although I don’t like to use the words “big” and “small” because onscreen acting has nothing to do with big or small.

In my lecture about the Pod, I say: When you walk into a Starbucks, you notice groups of people talking. There are two girlfriends, looking at their phones and texting. There are two co-workers staring at the same laptop. Maybe there’s a couple in the middle of an argument, staring down into their cups. I call these – Pods.

Let’s say you have two actors acting in a scene at a diner. You are on location at a real diner, there are background actors, there’s a waitress, all the crew on the other side of the camera … your job as an actor is to draw a dotted line around the booth, creating a little Pod, and instead of acting for a 400-seat house, instead you are existing at the diner with this person across the booth and it’s incredibly intimate.

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, “Before Sunrise” (1995)

The Pod is almost like Viewpoints work, mainly with the concept of Kinesthetic Response, which is: your sense of your self in space, your reaction to space, your sense of proprioception. Kinesthetic response is like: this space between us right here, what is my response to it? Who am I in this space?

So the Pod is another way for actors to re-calibrate. The Pod affects the performance. When I’m having a moment in my real life, I don’t feel an obligation to “comment” on my state of mind. I just have the state of mind. Those two people sitting at the Starbucks, they don’t think anyone’s watching them. But when you observe them, you can see how subtle and yet also how eloquent behavior can be. There’s that saying: If you think it, we will see it.

McCabe directing “Since Feeling Is First” with DP Steven Gladstone. Produced by Stonestreet Studios. Photo by Rob Bennett for The New York Times (2010)

The Sunbeams

JM: One of the things I also noticed that happens for a lot of actors who are transitioning from stage to screen is that they don’t understand that they need to develop a relationship WITH the camera, not TO the camera. I use the example: “I have a very interesting relationship to my mother” versus “I have a very interesting relationship with my mother.” When you hear those two things, what do you feel?

SOM: Relationship TO my mother means it’s about how you’re negotiating the relationship, separately from your mother. Relationship WITH my mother – it’s shared between you and your mother.

JM: Right. And so often beginning students have a relationship TO the camera. And their relationship TO the camera is: they experience it as an unfriendly thing with teeth coming out to get them, they experience the camera as heavy judgment, heavy criticism.

So instead I have them imagine there’s a sunbeam coming out of the camera lens. It’s this beautiful sunbeam, and wherever your face is in relation to the lens, is where the beam hits your face. Chin, left cheek, forehead, neck, and they begin to experience the sunbeams, and also what the sunbeams allow for.

When you view it in action, it’s quite beautiful. The actor totally transforms and opens up. The actor lets the camera in, and when you let the camera in, it means you are letting yourself be seen. They’re letting themselves be seen, and they’re experiencing a more positive relationship WITH the camera.

If you look at some of the great actors, they know exactly what to do with their face, depending on where the camera is. They are in relationship WITH the camera.

Joan Crawford, “Mildred Pierce” (1945)

Robert De Niro, “Goodfellas” (1990)

Gena Rowlands, “Faces” (1968)

JM: If you have a relationship WITH the camera, it’s symbiotic, it’s shared, through the length of any given take.

The Sunbeams exercise starts the process of allowing young actors to explore that feeling, because if the camera is always jagged teeth, and it’s always scrutiny and negativity – then you can’t get anywhere with your relationship WITH it.

The Fight

SOM: I know you work a lot with students on what you call “The Fight,” which deals with fight scenes. What does it mean to fight?

JM: One of the things I love to work on with actors who are coming from stage to screen – although I believe it can be worked on even if you’ve never worked onstage before – is how to fight. When writers write fight scenes, the fights are usually very overt, and they’re very volatile, verbal, loud.

JM: What I have noticed in my life is that when I have arguments with people – I’m actually afraid of fighting so I tend to do an activity while I’m fighting, like washing dishes. Or, let’s say, there’s a couple on a couch, and she’s watching TV and he’s sucking on a beer and he’s turning the channel and she says, “Honey, can we talk about what we were talking about the other day?” And he gets aloof, and she gets passive-aggressive, and it takes them a while to even get to what they want to say. This is real life, as opposed to having the conflict right there, out in the open.

But so often you see fight scenes, and there’s no passive aggressiveness in the characters, there’s no House Of Cards arguing, and it’s boring. I mention that TV show because if you notice how Frank and Claire Underwood argue… The power struggle is so subtle that at any given moment, one or the other is in the lead, and they keep passing each other, neck and neck to the finish line. And they are smiling at each other the entire time.

Robin Wright and Kevin Spacey, “House of Cards”

JM: People fight in so many different ways. You can fight lovingly, humorously, reluctantly. You can be in the middle of a fight and be afraid of having the fight at the same time.

Younger people have an idea of what I’m talking about but at this point in their lives they’re less responsible for their own communications – or maybe it’s that they just know their preferences less well – therefore their fight negotiating skills aren’t developed yet.

In general, fight scenes are often poorly written. I love Shonda Rhimes, but the fight scenes are always bam-bam-bam, it’s the style now. I work with the students to try to combat that, to try to allow for more reality in fights.

Physical Activity and Behavior

SOM: Physical activity has come up quite a bit in this interview, and it’s not surprising, since it’s such a huge part of acting. It’s a great training tool – Meisner has exercises based almost solely on doing physical activities – but could you talk a little bit about physical activity and how important it is, and also how you use it with your students?

JM: By definition a physical activity is a daily task that typically has a beginning, a middle and an end. A physical activity is not behavior, which I’ll talk about in a second.

Physical activity is like: washing dishes, putting makeup on, cleaning out your wallet, erasing text messages, reading, baking cookies, etc. A physical activity requires a level of concentration and focus from you. If you’re going to write something, you have to really write it. You can’t just write scribbles. Watch the cast of Grey’s Anatomy. They are writing real signatures, they are writing “.29 calories” or whatever – it’s very annoying when actors fake physical activity. Physical activity helps ground an actor in the reality of the imaginary circumstances.

I talked about this a little bit when I talked about the Tightrope. Physical activity 100% reduces tension. Physical activity allows the actor to focus on something other than “how is the scene going right now? Am I screwing up? What’s my next line?”

If you look at sports, athletes go through years of training and development, training, training, training, and then once they’re in the game – if they think too much about the process, they will fail. So they have to train and train and train, and then NOT think. They just have to trust in all their training, and hit the ball. “You can’t think and hit at the same time.” Yogi Berra or Bucky Harris said that.

The same is true for actors. When you think, you experience mental tension, and this is when you screw up. So if you screw up, don’t say “I screwed up,” just keep going, and maybe start doing a physical activity.

Having good concentration is a skill you must build. You must build your concentration. Concentration means you are focused on the moment, and you are responding to what you are getting from the other actors, and you are being impacted by what you are getting, and you are honoring the text, and justifying everything you have created.

The moments when you fall out of concentration – you go up on a line, you have a moment where you’re pushing, or you feel like you’re indicating – a physical activity can get you back on track and allows you to focus on something other than the stress of not remembering the line. Physical activity relaxes the body.

Al Pacino and Jonathan Pryce, “Glengarry Glen Ross” (1992)

JM: You can actually see Al Pacino doing relaxation in the middle of scenes. He’s so fluid with it, it’s so much a part of his process. In Glengarry Glen Ross, he reaches across the table for a drink, and it makes sense for the character and the moment, but I can see him addressing his tension IN an activity.

The other thing physical activity does is it helps you tell the story. How you do the activity illuminates the inner life of the character.

It’s also interesting when the activity gets thwarted. If I’m painting my nails, and you say something and I stop what I’m doing and look up – it helps the audience understand the storytelling you’re looking to achieve. The stopping of the activity helps illuminate the inner life of the character and helps the audience know that what I’m hearing could be important.

These are very tangible things an actor can rely on when doing an activity. It also creates a sense of realism. I mean imagine what Grey’s Anatomy would look like without physical activity. All you’d see would be actors pretending to be doctors just standing around talking.

Sandra Oh and Ellen Pompeo, “Grey’s Anatomy”

SOM: Continuing on in this vein: let’s clear up any confusion around the term Behavior. What do you mean when you say “behavior” and how do you help actors understand it and use it?

JM: Behavior is something like twiddling your hair, or wiggling a pen in your hand, or how you do a task, let’s say washing the dishes angrily, or bouncing your leg because you’re nervous. This is behavior and it’s not anything you can facilitate as a director, and if you try to facilitate it, you will produce some of the worst acting you have ever seen in your life. So don’t do it. Ever. Don’t direct behavior. Leave an actor alone.

But for actors, it’s very useful to know how to use behavior, how to understand behavior.

If I were flirting with you actively – and consciously – it would look a certain way. But if I was flirting with you unconsciously, if I was flirting with you and not meaning to flirt with you, if I was attracted to you but trying not to show it, my behavior would look different than conscious overt flirtation.

Behavior is conscious and unconscious. This is key.

An example I really love of a great moment of behavior, which seems conscious and unconscious, simultaneously, but also tells the whole story of the moment and the character: In Lincoln, Tommy Lee Jones has a moment at the end, where he’s sitting there, and he’s holding his cane with the duck bill on the end of it. The duck bill is facing away from him, and then he turns the cane around so the duck bill is now facing him. And they peacefully lock eyes. There’s no means to an end in a moment of behavior like this, it’s not a conscious attempt to “have a moment.” But it is a piece of behavior that comes out of an actor fully immersed in the character and what the character needs and wants and can’t get or can get. And it’s unconscious.

Tommy Lee Jones, “Lincoln” (2012)

JM: We don’t always know what we need in life, we don’t always know why we do what we do. And neither do fictional characters. But the behavior comes out anyway.

The “Jump Then Justify” exercise is great for behavior, because the students have no time to “work on” behavior, or pick gestures ahead of time, or decide how the character talks and moves. They have five minutes, and the behavior that comes out when they are interviewed is totally unconscious.

It’s so exciting to watch because it’s exciting for them. It’s exciting for them when they watch the interview afterwards, and they see themselves behaving as this character. They get to have a whole new relationship with their acting, and more freedom and more fun around that relationship. It’s why I do what I do.