How do actors learn to sob on cue?
Oprahs acting coach, a soap star, a clown-class graduate, and others explain.
Weep Week
No,yourecrying.
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Since those glory (?)
Inspired by all of this fraught history, I decided to attempt to teach myself how to stage cry.
My journey began with a simple question: Howdothey all do it, these professional emotion-fakers?
Is it mostly learned technique, like Method or Meisner?
Do they imagine their loved ones dying in elaborate detail, take after take?
Are certain tricks like menthol sticks or getting pigeons thrown at your head looked down upon?
Is it psychologically advisable to do any of this on a regular basis?
.Day 1: What Is Crying?
My sense would be that its healthy, she says.
We lean toward avoiding and numbing and not connecting to our emotions.
And knowing how to do that and practicing that is healthy.
At the end of our session, I ask Adams if she thinks she can guide me into crying.
Within five seconds, Im crying.
Do you want to be the Lance Armstrong of theater?!
I ask Gordon if the tear-stick stigma she sends up inTheater Campis reflective of her own experience.
Behind the scenes, though, she confirms that the actors are using if and when they need to.
It doesnt make you any less of an actor.
And then you think about it getting worse and worse and worse and then you die.
And its like,Oh my God, thats not going to make me cry.
When we get off FaceTime, I listen to Ronstadt over and over but dont cry.
I called my mother, and I said, Okay, she hates me, she moans.
And my mother said, Let her call me and tell me she hates you.
Then it’s possible for you to come home.
Otherwise you cannot come home.
So I said, I dont have a mother.
I dont have an acting teacher.
Then I sat on that stage for a good 45 minutes.
Hagen got up, and she went, Bravo.
Because I gave you the scholarship to come here, you thought you had to entertain me.
You dont have to entertain me.
I am struck silent by the profundity of this lesson, one I will probably never learn.
When it comes to crying, she is a purist no tear sticks; real pain only.
She believes the greater the actor, the better the tear and cites Kidman and Binoche several times.
Im trying to think if theres anybody else they can rely on to cry.
I worked with Forest Whitaker, who said, Youre not going to get me to cry.
And I thought,Okay.
But I knew I could get him to cry.
(She did.)
And that did it.
When I got back to the hotel, she called me and she was just sobbing.
I said, Okay.
I never even thought of that, she says, looking thrilled.
Do you have something?
It has to be very painful, she says, looking serious.
I tell her I do; its the same thing I thought about with Adams.
She slowly draws it out of me: What day was it?
What was I wearing?
What was the temperature?
A few minutes go by.
I am not crying at all.
I can feel how American I am being.
I feel like Im you and youre Uta Hagen and I want to impress you, I say.
She bursts out laughing.
Youre working the wrong way, kiddo, she says.
Ill tell you what Hagen would say: full of shit.
She had no patience whatsoever.
We get on Zoom the next morning.
He is a little less intimidating than his mom, more openly jubilant, and sneakier.
Where are they from?
How did they get here?
Whats that coffee mug was it passed down from their grandmother?
To actors, these things sound very different, but to me they all sound exactly the same.
Susan and I dont use it, he says.
Its like, I gotta go learn to drive a garbage truck to be a garbage-truck driver.
No, you dont.
You dont have to kill somebody to know how to play a killer.
Somewhere in the distance, Jared Leto howls.
Now that I know every single thing about acting, we move on to my personal challenge.
The minute I saw you, I went,How did Susan not get her?
Ford says, laughing.
And then I went,Oh, she went to a memory instead of just talking to you.
There was something about the therapist that was opening you up.
But 48 hours later, Rachels different, he says.
It feels amazing when you really feel it, but thats not what its about.
Its about the audience feeling it.
And then youre kind of stuck.
Because then youre searching around and youre killing off everybody in your life.
You kind of become a junkie, in that sense, losing veins.
I dont, he says.
I just do it.
Its all about faking it and then I start to feel it.
You keep making it bigger and bigger.
I remember in me, something something just clicked.
Crying and laughing, theres often a very thin membrane between those two things.
I walk around my apartment laughing loudly until I start to really freak myself out and feel lightheaded.
It is often a sign of bad writing and bad acting if thats what youre thinking about.
.Day 6: Evil Twins
Deidre Hall has been onDays of Our Livesfornearly 50 years.
Andrea was not an actress.
She taught special education, Hall says.
And nobody told her crying was hard, so she just did it.
You wont be able to do it, Hall says.
Andrea was blase, as all evil twins are: She said, No.
I can do it.
I said, Yeah, okay.
I havent done it for 20 years myself.
How hard could it be?
Because thats what twins are like.
I said, Yeah, I think you’re able to.
I dont think the tear is the prize.
I think the audiences tears are the prize, she says.
If you cry, that releases tension.
But if you dont and youre on the verge, the audience will release the tension for you.
pressing white shirts and watching a soap opera.
you’re free to do your voice, but your body doesnt always respond.
That night, my tear stick finally arrives from Siberia, as the shipping cost indicates.
I rub it all around my eyes and wait.
I rub it into my corneas.
It casually burns, like a stiff Siberian breeze, but doesnt produce a single tear.
Ur broken, Gordon says.
But drama is when the audience cries.
So inBeach Rats,Harris Dickinson has an intense panic attack but doesnt actually cry.
Hittman says she helped him externalize the distress by telling him to do push-ups and run around the block.
(This ultimately did bring her to genuine tears.)
A few hours later, I hop on the phone with Sophie Nelisse.
He was like, I will not do that.
I was like, Listen, Im telling you this is what I need.
just just be like, You suck.
I was begging him.
Then he felt so bad, Nelisse says.
I was like, No, we got what we needed.
He is openly troubled but obliges.
Youre a fraud and a bad writer, he says over and over.
Unfortunately, all we can do is laugh hysterically.
But its important to note that Street doesnt believe in asking people to call upon traumas to feel sadness.
I agree with her conceptually, but I simply must cry.
And the tears would come maybe from having theTitanicmaterial deeply grounded in your own psyche.
Whats interesting to me is that the audience cannot tell the difference.
My stage manager and director have been like, I could tell it was really you crying.
But no one else can tell.
At every other show, the crying was athletic, not emotional.
To me, it proves the point that acting is not an emotional exercise at all.
Its a physical one, she says.
And its like, Actually, no.
Its not like Im really reflecting on the horrors of the world to get me to cry.
Its kind of a job.
So what helps her do her job?
Sometimes I cry too soon.
Im like,Oh, no.
Its still a mystery to me.
There are certainly no guarantees.
I actually dont know how to make anyone else do it.
She pauses to chew something, then apologizes for chewing.
I ask how she feels about tear sticks.
Sure, go for it, she says.
Acting is not a moral exercise.
If you give a good show, you give a good show.
I think only a psychopath would be like, It doesnt count if theyre not real tears.
What are you talking about?
I think about Joe Black and ironing grandmas.
So Sydney just took me aside and put his arms around me and that was all I needed …
I completely broke down.
Unfortunately, the director Sydney Pollack has been dead for nearly two decades.
Like a psychopath, I touch my face to ensure the tears are real.
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