Acting classes and training, and whether you need them

None of this advice is ours and the page says whose it is. Every point comes from a video indexed on Acting Craft, our free searchable library of acting advice on YouTube, and each links to the video it came from.

The honest answer is that working actors disagree

Asked directly whether professional training is necessary, the answers split. One panelist has no acting education at all beyond a runway coach and says if they want you, they want you. Others credit conservatory programs. Nobody in the group could point to one required path. Source.

Training is a toolbox, not a ticket. One graduate of a two year program puts it that way: school is not necessary but is useful the way tools are useful. The more tools in the box, the more ways you have to solve a problem when one turns up on set. Source.

Bad classes are an argument for choosing carefully, not for staying home. There are classes that waste money and a few close to a scam, and that is the whole reason this debate exists. A good one builds you up and a bad one can genuinely tear you down. Source.

What a class actually buys you

Confidence, which is the thing that shows. Without it you are in your head mid-scene, second guessing choices, and the insecurity reads to anybody watching. Class is where that gets built, and it carries past auditions into anything that needs you to stand up and be looked at. Source.

Somewhere to take the risk while nothing is riding on it. You are not being cast in the room, so push the scene further than you would in an audition. Try the accent. Find out what material actually suits you. That exploration is free in class and expensive everywhere else. Source.

Agility, not pages of backstory. What you want on set is to take a strange direction without freezing. Elaborate written character work does not buy that. Being regularly asked to do something unexpected in front of people does. Source.

Skill decays the way fitness does. Stop for six months and you cannot walk into a big audition at your peak, for the same reason you could not run a marathon off the couch. The work has to already be in you when the opportunity turns up, because there is no time to build it afterward. Source.

It keeps you an actor between jobs. A week or two with no set and no stage and the identity starts to wobble, which is corrosive in an industry built around long gaps. Having homework and a room to be in restores it, and the steadier headspace is not a side benefit. It is most of the job. Source.

And the people. Possibly more than the curriculum. A Juilliard graduate says the single most valuable part of the training was the colleagues. When you hit stretches where you cannot tell up from down, you have people who have known you long enough to see straight through you. Source.

Concretely, they are the ones who read for you at midnight. When your agent sends an eleven page audition at 7pm that is due at 9am, that support system is what class built. Everyone in the room wants the same thing and has skills you do not, so if you turn up open to making something rather than only to being taught, it is the cheapest place in the industry to meet people who will say yes. Source. Source.

Choosing a school

Decide what kind of actor you want to be, first. William Esper's point is that there is no single thing called an actor, so the question before every other one is what your own picture of good acting looks like. Everything after that, including where you spend two years and a great deal of money, is downstream of that answer. Source.

Classical and realistic training are different roads. If what you admire is British classical work, that points at one kind of school. If what you want is truthful realistic acting, that points at another. Neither is better, and picking before you have answered the question is how people end up trained for work they did not want. Source.

No school is neutral ground. There are as many opinions about what makes a good actor as there are places teaching it. Esper is explicit that his has a very particular view. Go looking for the one whose view matches yours rather than the one with the best reputation in the abstract. Source.

Look at who taught the person teaching you. American training is only a few links deep and the link is usually visible. Esper's own work comes out of seventeen years with Sanford Meisner. Source.

A shared root does not produce one method, and there is proof. Lee Strasberg, Sanford Meisner and Stella Adler were all founding members of the Group Theatre, alongside Harold Clurman and Elia Kazan, and they ended up teaching notably different things. The Group did not try to reproduce Stanislavski literally either. They took his actual impulse, which was to keep testing things. Source.

Pick a program that also teaches producing and editing. The argument is that being multi hyphenated, able to produce, pitch, write and edit your own work, is increasingly necessary. If you are choosing, choose one with electives in those rather than acting technique alone. Source.

If two years is not available, a six week intensive can genuinely sample the method. Built to be intense enough to show you what the long training does rather than serve as a taster. Expect stretches of having no idea what you are doing: students describe alternating between being lost and having something land, and that pattern is the training working rather than a sign you chose wrong. Source.

Check that every teacher pulls in the same direction. Movement, voice and acting should approach one idea from different angles. Where they do not, you leave holding three incompatible sets of instructions. And who else is in the room is a training input rather than decoration, because acting is what happens between people. A room mixed by background, culture and age gives you more to work against. Source.

Choosing a coach

Pick one the way you would pick a therapist. Casting director Marci Liroff's framing: the famous names are genuinely good and they are not the only ones. What matters is whether that particular person opens you up. If a class is not doing that, the answer is to leave and find one that does, not to persevere with a reputation. Source.

Pick one who will tell you it is not there yet. After more than ten years with the same coach, one actor says what keeps him coming back is honesty. Plenty of coaches say that was great and send it in when it is not. He also says whether the coach is a working actor matters less than whether they are insecure or jealous. Source.

The two things nearly everybody skips

Voice, and Larry Moss is blunt about it. American training neglects vocal production, which is why so many young actors sound like teenagers. British actors are taught to breathe and support tone from the beginning. A vocal production coach is not an optional extra to get to later. Source.

Said again, independently, by a working actor. Invest in real voice and speech training. Actors obsess over hair and look and forget how they sound. Source.

The body, which is the instrument the voice comes out of. The Alexander Technique is body work on the head, neck and back. If the body is out of line, nothing else functions as well as it could. It is about releasing tension rather than fixing posture: standard advice, shoulders back and down, chin up, actually creates tension. Source.

A worked example of what alignment changes. In a workshop scene calling for a dominant character, the first read came out hunched with the neck pushed forward and the authority did not land. After the alignment was corrected the same lines carried real authority and the voice was freer. The point is not raising your volume. Source.

Find a certified teacher, and take even a one day workshop. The American Society for the Alexander Technique lists certified teachers by zip code or city, which matters because uncertified ones are out there. It was a required course to graduate the two year Stella Adler program, and most actors have never heard of it. You cannot understand the difference by reading about it. Source.

Its inventor was an actor solving his own problem. F.M. Alexander lost his voice to laryngitis after stage performances, no doctor could help, so he worked on himself and traced it to tension in the neck, shoulders and back. He then taught the method for thirty five years. Source.

What to study, not only where

Fall in love with writers. When the work plateaus, Moss's diagnosis is usually that the actor never did. Study one playwright for six weeks, then another. The actors people queue up to see came out of theater and honor writers, and Streep did forty plays at Yale before New York. Source.

Great material teaches you things three pages cannot. A cold reading class is fine and television work is fine, but a diet of nothing else trains you to see life as three pages. Working on A Streetcar Named Desire or Death of a Salesman gives you a scale of human behavior that sides never will. Source.

Work toward your own blood, then deliberately against it. Stella Adler called it blood memory: you will have an affinity for the places your family came from, so study parts from there. Then do the opposite of whatever you just did. A comedy after a drama, a different accent, a register you assume you are bad at. Source.

Watch great physical actors with the sound off. Moss's specific exercise: watch Streep and Day-Lewis muted, because the physical behavior is what an audio experience hides from you. Then run it again with sound, for the accent, rhythm and tempo. Two passes, two different lessons. Source.

Build the character off the page as an exercise. One boilerplate drill: list where the character was born, their age, their favorite and least favorite wine, their favorite and least favorite book, all drawn from the script. Do it far enough in advance that on the day you are not thinking about lines or marks and it turns back into play. Source.

Treat it like the gym. Acting coach Leslie Kahn's line, quoted in that panel: if you consider yourself an actor, working or not, you should be acting every day. Source.

Commercials are a different training, and theater can hurt you

If you study one thing for commercial work, make it improv. A full time voiceover and commercial actor of almost six years took classes specific to those genres rather than a conservatory, and warns that theater training can work against you in a commercial room, where they want to believe the person was plucked off the street. Source.

"You are enough" was the lesson that stuck. One actor names a six week commercial class with a New York casting director as his most useful training. The students kept trying to do something to make the copy come alive. The takeaway was that your personality showing through is enough, and you do not have to add anything on top. Source.

Go in shaped, and lower the stakes on the room. Better to be completely off the mark with a fully formed character than to walk in and wing it, because if you have not decided who the character is you get found out the moment you speak. Treat the casting as a work session rather than a life event. You will almost always not get the role, so have fun with it. Source.

Everything above is attributed and none of it is ours. The people quoted disagree with each other about whether training is necessary at all, and that disagreement is left standing because both camps are working. If we have summarized somebody badly, tell us.