Think of an acting performance that made you feel something. Perhaps you were moved to tears by Richard Burton’s performance in Under Milk Wood (1971), or moved to tears of laughter by Dick Van Dyke’s cockney accent in Mary Poppins (1964). In theory, simply knowing what separates good acting from bad should enable you to deliver great performances every time. In practice, it’s a bit more complicated.
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There’s more to defining good and bad acting than meets the eye. What makes a good actor in a commedia dell’arte play is different from what makes a good actor in a Hollywood blockbuster film. What made for good acting in America before the early 20th century is also different from what is considered good acting now. The kind of acting required for a particular performance depends on the script, setting, production value, director’s intent, and many other things. If you’re giving a classical Brechtian performance, for example, believability may not be as important as the ability to make people think about the situation your character is in.
Believability, however, has become the hallmark of good acting in the modern West. Let’s take a look at why, and what exactly believability means.
How to Act Convincingly Since Konstantin Stanislavsky’s method took over Western acting in the early 20th century, good acting has meant performances that create a believable character. Stanislavsky’s method – and subsequent techniques based on it – sought to enable actors to fully absorb the character they were playing, often feeling their character’s emotions and expressing the character’s feelings and desires in naturalistic ways. What makes a great actor, according to the method, is the ability to draw the audience into believing they are seeing real life, and the difference between the actor and the character should seem to disappear.
The Q score
People have tried to quantify exactly what makes good acting good, which has resulted in some strange and technical formulas. In the early 1960s, for example, a company called Marketing Evaluations came up with the Q score. It was a measure of how many people had heard of a certain celebrity, combined with how many of those people considered that celebrity one of their favourites. The Q score is not a direct measure of the quality of acting, but, according to the system, good acting is marketable and profitable acting, so, for certain Hollywood executives at least, Q score correlates with great performances.
Biomechanics
Another attempt to quantify good acting came from Russian theatre actor and theorist Vsevolod Meyerhold. “The art of the actor consists in organising his material,” Meyerhold said. “That is, in his capacity to utilise correctly his body’s means of expression.”
Meyerhold devised a formula: N = A1 + A2. Put simply, A1 is the actor and A2 is the character they are playing. N is the emotional response the actor wishes to create in the audience. Good acting would be the successful combination of A1 and A2 to create N.
“The actor must train his material (the body) so that it is capable of executing instantaneously those tasks that are dictated externally by the actor, the director,” Meyerhold said in his introductory lecture on the formula in 1922. “By correctly resolving the nature of his state physically, the actor reaches the point where he experiences the excitation that communicates itself to the spectator and induces him to share in the actor's performance – what we used to call ‘gripping’ the spectator. It is this excitation that is the very essence of the actor’s art.”
Unfortunately, neither the Q score nor Meyerhold’s formula seem to relate much to what we generally appreciate as good acting.
Awards
Awards are another measure that may quantify – or at least highlight – good acting. Katherine Hepburn holds the record for the most Academy Awards, with four Best Actress wins from 12 nominations. Few will dismiss Hepburn’s acting capabilities, but most of us can recall some great performances that have been overlooked for awards. Take Toni Collette’s chilling turn in Hereditary (2018), for instance, or Whoopi Goldberg’s powerful portrayal of Celie in The Color Purple (1985), which missed out on an Oscar many believe it deserved. Not only is it a reminder that awards can’t be used to define what makes acting good or bad, but also that their judging panels don’t necessarily reflect the people’s choice.
Impact on the audience
Is audience reaction a reliable marker of a great performance? When Brendan Fraser received a six-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival for his performance in The Whale (2022), for which he won the Best Actor Oscar, it was undoubtedly recognition of his acting having a profound effect on the audience. Tom Cruise’s performance in the 1986 film Top Gun moved audiences to such patriotism that the US Navy set up recruiting stands outside cinemas. Impact on the viewer does seem to be an important part of what qualifies acting as good or bad.
A good actor has to be believable, according to current Western tastes. Acting that is believable, however, can also be thoroughly boring. For it to count as good acting, it also needs to move people. It needs to have impact as well as authenticity.
Here are some tips for how an actor can achieve that balance.
Emotional truth
Authentic, emotional truth in acting requires an actor to invest in the role rather than merely recite their lines or perform detachedly. The acting coach Sanford Meisner – a Stanislavsky disciple – famously said that “acting is behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances,” and that theory is at the heart of the Western definition of good acting. Lady Gaga’s emotional immersion in her character was so deep that she told British Vogue she had trouble returning to her normal life after playing Patrizia Reggiani in House of Gucci (2021).
Physicality and body language
It takes an actor fully inhabiting a character physically for their performance to be believable and moving. Great vocal technique without physical expression is not enough. Keanu Reeves’ performance in Much Ado About Nothing (1993) seems stiff and forced because his mannerisms are not in tune with the words his character speaks. He is acting in his head, not with his body.
Contrast that with Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance in My Left Foot (1989). To play a character with cerebral palsy, he learned to type and paint with his feet, and insisted on being pushed around set in a wheelchair. It was even reported that he had assistants spoon-feed him during breaks in filming. His performance was rewarded with an Oscar and heaps of praise.
Voice and delivery
Emotional conviction and physicality will get you only so far. An actor’s voice is another part of the puzzle, important for conveying meaning and intention on top of the character’s lines. It was through Andy Serkis’ voice as much as his hunched, pitiful movements that Gollum came to life in the Lord of the Rings movies (2001–2003), which highlights how voice and delivery must be aligned with character to create a believable performance.
In short: bad acting misses the mark on the above qualifiers for good acting. Several factors quickly spoil an audience’s belief in a character, however, which can be considered the hallmark of bad acting.
- Overacting: Making emotions, gestures, or vocal expressions bigger than is natural for the character in the context of the scene is a quick way to turn off your audience.
- Bad accents: If an accent is unbelievable, no amount of good acting in other ways will make up for it.
- Mumbling or speaking without conviction: You can go too far into character and method. Mumblecore films arguably turn this style of acting into an art form, but it won’t count as a great performance if it’s so quiet and internalised that the audience can’t hear or understand it. Something similar can be said for actors who say their lines without the confidence needed to make them land.
Good acting can seem elusive and hard to define, but by studying technique, understanding character, and practising physicality, vocal delivery, and emotional truth, you can deliver a performance an audience will believe and that moves them greatly.