What makes bad acting

Welcoming new talent! Kids, teens, and young adults. Click Here to get started! Actors that passionately express themselves in front of their audience are considered good actors. With continued practice, these actors usually grow to be talented as they gain more experience. Great actors are amazing speakers and fluent when speaking with others. Poor actors take the script, rehearse their lines and focus on sounding their lines word for word, adding no type of personal expressiveness to their speech.

In order for an actor to be believable, they have to convince their audience by showing, not by saying. If an actor is afraid to be vulnerable on stage or on screen, they are bad. A good actor will not be afraid to be embarrassed. For instance, actors who refuse to be in nude or kissing scenes will not really heighten their acting capabilities- not that these equate to good acting, but being comfortable and really selling the character will unlock great acting potential.

Actors who hold back are bad at their jobs. Others trip over them. Discomfort with their bodies. Actors can be of any physical type. There are great skinny actors, great fat actors, great tall actors, great short actors, great beautiful actors and great ugly actors. But however they look, they need to own it and know how to work it. See John Goodman.

Untrained voices. Humans have a huge vocal range, but most people don't use theirs. Since an actor's main tool is speech, he must know how to, in Shakespeare's words, "Speak the speech Over-trained voices.

On the other hand, you can go too far, training your voice into something that sounds unnatural and actorly, as William Shatner did when he was younger. And thank goodness Vincent Price mostly worked on schlocky horror films.

Good actors spend a lot of time thinking about motivation, movement, ways to say lines The point of preparation is to make your mind as ready as possible to be unleashed. But if you don't unleash it, nothing surprising or dangerous can happen. Bad actors don't understand that planning is the groundwork for inspiration.

They stick to the plan, no matter what happens. This is yet another way to escape from vulnerability. Bad actors don't listen. They deliver a line, pause for the other actor to speak, and then deliver their next line. When they're not "on," they're off. Listening is equally important. Notice how often, in a film, the shot is the listener, not the speaker. Notice how often, when you see live theatre, your eye is drawn to the actor receiving information. You can't easily fake listening. You have to really do it.

It's dangerous, because if you listen, and the actor you're listening to speaks in a way he's never spoken before, you may have to stray from your plan when you respond.

See point 8. Bad actors don't warm up. This only applies to the stage, but it's crucial. When actors don't spend ten minutes or however long they need vocally and physically warming up, they are not ready to start when the show starts.

And then what happens is that the first ten minutes become the warmup. Have you ever seen a play that was good -- but it didn't really click until ten or twenty minutes in?

That's often because the cast didn't warm up before. Instead, they did it on your time and on your dime.