“…if your spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, …sit up cheerfully and …act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there…So, to feel brave, use all of our will to that end, and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear.”

—William James.

There used to be a big split between the English method for acting and the American method. In the US, we adhered to Stanislavski’s method where we work from the “inside-out,” meaning we create a vivid inner life and history for the character and want to feel what the character feels authentically. In the old British school—think John Gielgud, Maggie Smith, and Laurence Olivier—actors worked from the “outside-in,” starting with a fake nose or limp to create a character.

There’s a great story about Dustin Hoffman, trained in the US, and Olivier, the master of English theater, when they worked together on the film, Marathon Man. Hoffman, in order to get ready for a particularly brutal scene where the character had not slept for days…did not sleep for days! Olivier thought this was ridiculous and said simply…Read on.