Why It's Time to ACT for Actor Training

Actor training has changed. Sort of.

The days of glorifying suffering, romanticising trauma, and “breaking actors down” in the name of process have (mostly) passed. And rightly so.

But what’s taken their place?

A fear of discomfort? A patchwork of practices that don’t quite cohere? A culture more interested in pleasing the industry than in changing it?

We may have dismantled old models. But we now need to build something better.

Because in trying to survive, we’re trading our vision for strategy, and swapping our courage for caution.

And that’s not evolution. It’s simply inviting extinction.

ACT for Acting, and our new ACT for Actor Training initiative, represent a sincere attempt to meet these challenges, to grow in the face of adversity, and to create an idea of actor training that teachers and students can get behind.

Grounded in Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT), developed for the studio, and tested with students and professionals over the last five years, ACT for Actor Training centres on three simple questions:

• How do we train the actor as a person?

• How do we engage with character in ways that reflect contemporary psychology?

• How do we create performances that say something meaningful?

ACT 1: People

Training the actor without losing the person

Old narratives told us that great acting had to come at a cost.

Too often, those narratives were used to justify situations in which emotional exposure was prized without being honoured or respected; in which boundaries were blurred or violated; and in which “breakthroughs” were achieved by pushing beyond consent in the name of artistic truth.

That model has been widely challenged — and must be consigned to history.

But, in rejecting it, we risk building something too soft and too ambiguous. A culture where challenge is conflated with harm, and vulnerability is feared as much as it was once exploited.

Training for great acting does require discomfort — but not the kind that’s demanded, coerced, or performed for approval.

There’s a difference between choosing vulnerability and being pressured into revealing it.

What’s needed now is a framework for empowered challenge. A way to help actors navigate discomfort with clarity, intention, and consent — not avoidance or coercion.

Actors who are willing to strive towards their values.
Who feel the fear and choose to stay with it.
Who don’t flinch from the work — but know it cannot break them.

We also need a model that recognises difference — in how people think, feel, learn, and work.
That makes space for neurodivergence, for different cultural and personal perspectives, for people who don’t fit the mould and people who do not want to.
Because training should never flatten people into sameness.
It should meet them where they are — giving them structure to grow in, and space to grow as themselves.

This is what ACT offers.

Acceptance and Commitment Training is a model from contextual behavioural science that helps build psychological flexibility — the ability to stay present, open, and values-guided, even in the face of difficult thoughts and feelings.

It’s not therapy. It’s a toolkit. And it has the power to transform how we train and support actors — not just to perform, but to endure and grow.

ACT 2: Process

Working with character in ways that make psychological sense

Too much character work still rests on vague motivation, dated ideas of inner drives and conflicts, or half-digested psychoanalytic tropes — either passed down as ‘instinct’ or dressed up as timeless wisdom.

We ask actors to play complex people — and then give them tools that reduce those people to psychological clichés or binary objectives.

ACT for Actor Training invites a different approach.

We bring in tools like the ACT Matrix, systems theory, and parts work — not as academic distractions, but as ways of helping actors build coherent internal logic, emotional contradiction, and embodied presence.

This isn’t about using psychology to “diagnose” characters. It’s about helping actors play people who behave like people — with contradiction, avoidance, longing, collapse, and choice.

Not caricatures of 19th-century psychology. Not shorthand human beings built from old assumptions.

But people in full: textured and adaptive, layered and bound in context — no matter whether the text was written five hundred years ago or only completed last Thursday.

ACT 3: Performance

We need an argument for acting

We talk about acting all the time — how to do it. What “good” acting looks like. What techniques to use.

We praise performances for being moving, brilliant, raw. We teach students to hit beats, mine subtext, stay present.

But we don’t talk nearly enough about what acting is for.

Not just the play. Not just the character. Acting itself.

Why does acting matter — as something we practise, not just pursue? Why should we train for it, pour ourselves into it, devote years to getting better at it?

“Storytelling” isn’t enough of an answer. Neither is “truth” or “emotion” or “connection” — not without context.

Acting is interpretation in action. A live, embodied argument about how human beings behave — and what that behaviour means.

That’s why it matters. Not just because it entertains. But because it expresses meaning — meaning created by the actor’s choices, not just the writer’s words or the director’s concept.

In ACT for Actor Training, we don’t just train actors to deliver performances. We train them to make meaning — with intention, with clarity, with craft.

Because when actors know what they’re doing, the work lands. And when they don’t, no amount of technique will ever be enough to save it.

Final Thoughts

This work isn’t here to replace the rich traditions of acting. But it is here to challenge some of the assumptions that have gone unexamined for too long — and to offer something new and radical in their place.

Because actors need more than talent. More than tenacity. They need tools that work — for who they are, and who they’re playing, in the world they actually live in.