Enforced Method Acting - Television Tropes & Idioms

Method Acting: noun - An acting technique in which actors try to replicate the real-life emotional conditions under which the character operates, in an effort to create a life-like, realistic performance.

Enforced Method Acting: noun - An acting technique in which actors give a life-like, realistic performance because no one warned them what was going to happen...

So you're filming a horror movie, and you want to make sure that your main character acts properly scared when the madman with the chainsaw bursts through the door. You could hire a classically-trained Shakespearean actor, who went to drama school and knows all about the fine nuances of emotional presentation... or you could just tell the actor you're filming a quiet peaceful scene and have the chainsaw-wielding maniac burst in when they're not expecting it. The way they pee their pants in terror, well... you can't buy that kind of authentic performance.

Or perhaps you're filming a tragic tale of loss where a young child has to come to terms with the death of their mother. You could hire one of those precocious child actors and squirt onion juice in their eye to summon tears... or you could save on money and onions and just tell your child actor that you just shot their dog. You'll be laughing all the way to the Oscars.

Works best when the characters' personality is similar to that of their actor. After all, you wouldn't want your manly action hero to scream in terror when he first sees the zombies, do you?

Compare with Throw It In.

Examples:

Anime

Hideaki Anno, the eccentric director of Neon Genesis Evangelion, infamously told Megumi Ogata (the voice actress of Shinji Ikari) to literally strangle Yuko Miyamura (the voice of Asuka Langley Souryuu) during the recording of the scene where Shinji tries to strangle Asuka in End Of Evangelion. Allegedly the results were so realistic that Megumi Ogata had to profusely apologise to Yuko Miyamura in the aftermath.
In general, the directors of English dubs of anime seem to do this a lot to the actors, particularly when you consider that most anime is finished before the dub is even started on. If you do things like read interviews with the actors and watch extras on the discs pertaining to how the dub was recorded, you'll find all sorts of anecdotes such as Vic Mignogna (Edward Elric) actually crying in reaction to things that happened in the final episode of Fullmetal Alchemist, to Chris Patton (Fakir) in the audio commentaries in Princess Tutu wondering aloud "why I'm being such a bastard" to many, many actors not being told that a character dies until they record the scene in which it happens, even when it's their character.
Shinichi Watanabe reportedly required, during the recording of Excel Saga, that Menchi's voice actress crouch on all fours to address a microphone six inches off the floor, and that the "Excel Girls" actresses actually wear costumes based on those worn by their animated counterparts.

Film

A classic example is the scene in Alien where the chestbuster erupts from John Hurt's chest at dinner. The actors (apart from Hurt) had no idea what was about to happen; the scene had been explained to them, but they had not been told specifics. For example, Veronica Cartwright did not expect to be sprayed with blood. This is confirmed on the Collector's Edition release of the DVD.
- In the same film, director Ridley Scott placed a veiled cage with a German Shepard in front of Jones The Cat, and unveiled it when he shouted "action!!" Hence when The Alien rose up behind Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) like a phallic gargoyle, the menacing hissing of fear from the poor kitty cat was for real.
In Aliens, the early scene with the Colonial Marines coming out of hibernation was the last scene filmed. This was done to let the cast bond together through the filming, adding an extra sense of realism to the camaraderie and playful teasing of the scene.
The actors in The Blair Witch Project were given no more than a 35-page outline of the mythology behind the plot before shooting began. All lines were improvised, and nearly all the events in the film were unknown to the three actors beforehand, and were often on-camera surprises to them all. For example:
- In a scene where the main actors are sleeping in a tent at night, the tent suddenly shakes violently and they all get scared. This was unscripted and the director shook the tent; they were really scared.
- The crackling sounds in the woods heard through the film were made by the director and friends walking up to the camp's perimeter, breaking sticks, and then tossing them in various directions.
- To promote discord between actors, the directors deliberately gave them less food each day of shooting. (Allegedly, the producers told the actors, "Your safety is our concern. Your comfort is not.")
In The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe:
- Georgie Henley and Skandar Keynes, the actors playing Lucy and Edmund, had never seen the snowbound set until they walked onto it on camera. Their awe-struck reactions were authentic.
- Similarly, Georgie Henley (Lucy) had never seen James McAvoy in his Mr. Tumnus costume before shooting their scenes together.
- In a more subtle example, director Andrew Adamson shot the film in primarily chronological order. He did this in order to naturally create a sense of mature development from his young actors, which mirrored their real-life development.
In Far And Away, one scene has Nicole Kidman peeking under a bowl covering (nude) Tom Cruise's genitals. For the first few takes, she didn't look surprised enough, so director Ron Howard had Cruise take off his underwear without Kidman's knowledge.
In the movie M*A*S*H, to get Sally Kellerman (Hot Lips) not to drop to the ground too fast in anticipation of the shower tent flap opening, director Robert Altman had Gary Burghoff (Radar) standing with no pants just off-camera so she'd be distracted.
At the end of the movie Kes, the director (rather cruelly) told the young main actor that they'd killed the kestrel he'd been filming alongside in order to get a convincing performance out of him. In actual fact, they'd got another dead bird from a sanctuary before filming.
- And in the earlier scene where Billy gets caned, he was caned for real. Yikes.
The actor was aware, but what the hey: the iconic Japanese director Akira Kurosawa was a perfectionist, and expressions of fear are notoriously difficult to reproduce. In the climactic death scene of his film Throne Of Blood, the arrows that miss aren't props.
According to a long-standing but unconfirmed Hollywood legend (mentioned in Vito Russo's The Celluloid Closet), during the shooting of the 1959 remake of Ben Hur, scriptwriter Gore Vidal and director William Wyler convinced Stephen Boyd to play the role of Messala as if he and Judah (played by the ultra-straitlaced Charlton Heston) were estranged lovers, without informing Heston of this -- the "enforced" aspect was entirely on Heston's part.
In Dr. Lecter's speech to Agent Starling in The Silence Of The Lambs, about Starling being "not more than one generation from poor white trash," Anthony Hopkins briefly mimics Jodie Foster's accent. Reportedly, Hopkins had not done this in rehearsals, and Foster is visibly taken aback delivering her next line.
Star Wars: The shooting script for The Empire Strikes Back had Darth Vader declare, "No, Obi-Wan killed your father", and it was this line that David Prowse read while acting out the scene. Just before the cameras rolled, however, George Lucas whispered the real line into Mark Hamill's ear. This was probably less about Enforced Method Acting than about avoiding leaks of the real plot.
Child actor Jackie Cooper was goaded into crying for a scene by a director who threatened to shoot his dog. Cooper was so traumatized by the memory of that event that when he later wrote his autobiography, he entitled it, Please Don't Shoot My Dog.
- Sent up in an episode of Extras where the director (Ben Stiller) threatens to shoot the child actor's mother in the face to get him to cry in a film about the Balkans war. Andy Millman comments "...and the atrocities continue."
In Straw Dogs, to get the perfect "shocked reaction" from the villagers when the main character walked into the pub, the director had him walk in without any trousers on. It worked.
According to the commentary track on the DVD release of the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, none of the cast, child or adult, was allowed to see or even know about the "candy gardens" room until the filming -- the wonder and amazement on their faces at the moment the door opens is genuine.
- In the documentary on the same disc, Gene Wilder (Willy Wonka) admits he did not tell Peter Ostrum (Charlie) just how furious he would be when he declared Charlie had violated the contract and thus wouldn't win the lifetime supply of chocolate ("You get nothing! You lose! Good day sir!"). Since it was key that Charlie be shocked, Wilder didn't unleash the character's rage until the cameras rolled in order to get the most natural reaction possible.
Used in the second Pirates Of The Caribbean film, where all the characters were told that The Reveal at the end was that of Anamaria, a minor character from the first film. The looks of shock as Barbossa appears are genuine.
- Also done when Elizabeth kisses Jack near the end of the same film. Orlando Bloom (and the other actors in the scene) weren't told that that would happen, so Will's expression upon seeing the two kiss was genuine as well.
The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers, unintentionally: Aragorn and company come across the battlefield where the Riders of Rohan slaughtered the Uruk-Hai that had kidnapped Merry and Pippin, with the two hobbits apparently ending up as collateral damage. Enraged, Aragorn kicks an Uruk-Hai helmet, and collapses to the ground with an agonized cry. The sheer level of pain in that cry, and the realistic way in which he collapsed, were mostly due to him breaking a toe when kicking the helmet.
The documentary The Fear of God: The Making of The Exorcist revealed some of the shocking enforced method acting used by director Friedkin in The Exorcist. He refrigerated the room to make Max von Sydow and Jason Miller shiver convincingly. He assured the actresses that they would be treated gently when hooked up to wires, and then yanked them around so violently that he caused them minor (and not-so-minor) injuries. Firearms would be discharged between takes every once in a while to keep everyone jittery. Jason Miller (Father Karras) was not told that he was going to be sprayed in the face during the vomiting scene. And when the actor playing Father Dyer (William O'Malley, a real-life priest) wasn't getting the final scene, where he administers the last rites to Father Karras, just right, Friedkin took him aside, slapped him hard across the face, and then resumed shooting. In the documentary, O'Malley testifies that his shaking hands during that scene are due to fear of Friedkin.
In Transformers, one scene had Shia LaBeouf's character clinging to the side of a building while above him are the spinning blades of a helicopter with explosions all around him. As admitted by the actor, the fear he expresses is genuine as the copter was real.
- In the same movie, when Scorponok attacks the soldiers in the desert the actors were told to run and not to stop no matter what. That was because Scorponok's "tracks" were being made by detonating buried strands of primacord. So the panic in that scene is quite genuine.
- And when Sam's on the hood of a car, and Barricade slams it, demanding to know where the glasses are? One of the first pieces of movie-related video released to the Internet was a clip of that scene being filmed, complete with Shia LaBeouf screaming afterward that they didn't tell him the car was going to jump up.
The kids in The Goonies weren't allowed to see the pirate ship until the filming of the scene in which they see it for the first time.
In the scene within X-Men where Wolverine first confronts Magneto, the initial look of shock at Magnus' entrance was a result of Hugh Jackman's fear of the sparks that were flying all around him.
In E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, director Steven Spielberg didn't allow the child actors to see the E.T. puppet until their scenes were filmed. Thus, their screams are genuine. Additionally, the scenes were filmed chronologically, so that by the end, their tears during E.T.'s departure were part of a sincere sadness that the shooting was over.
- In the scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind where Cary Guffey's three-year old character is supposed to be reacting to (off-screen) aliens, Spielberg had two crew-members in a clown and gorilla suit appear suddenly and then remove their masks.
At the beginning of Apocalypse Now, the character of Willard is in his hotel room drunk. He smashes his hand through a mirror and doubles over in bloody agony. This was not a scripted scene. Martin Sheen, the actor playing Willard, really was drunk while filming and he really did spontaneously put his hand through a mirror in a fit of rage. (He also reportedly tried to attack the director, Francis Ford Coppola, but that part of the scene didn't make it on screen, for obvious reasons.)
- He tried to attack the director most likely because during the filming of the whole scene Coppola was telling Sheen he was a worthless actor and father to keep him crying. Sheen had his infamous heart attack right afterwards.
In a similar vein to the one above, Billy Bob Thornton admitted to being genuinely intoxicated during drunk scenes in Bad Santa.
The commentary track to Jurassic Park III, after describing the machines used in one scene added, "So when the actors look frightened, they're not acting."
How could we get this far without bringing up Die Hard? Alan Rickman was told that he was going to be let go on a count of three. They dropped him on "two," and the look of panic on his face is definitely not acted; one is not surprised to learn that he was extremely angry after that day's shooting was over.
There is a scene in Fight Club where Tyler and the narrator are drunk and hitting golf balls. Brad Pitt and Edward Norton both got drunk before filming (and the golf balls were aimed at the off-camera catering truck).
The terrified reaction of the cast to the crawlers in The Descent is real, because the appearance of the creatures had been kept hidden from the cast until that scene was shot.
In The Usual Suspects, Stephen Baldwin's reaction to having a cigarette flicked into his face is real. The cigarette was supposed to hit his chest.
During the filming of a basic training scene in the movie Stripes, director Ivan Reitman quietly told the actors to pull Warren Oates, who played their drill sergeant Sgt. Hulka, down into the mud with them - when they did so, Oates chipped a tooth. Oates subsequently berated Reitman in front of everyone, shouting "If you want to push me into the mud I'll get pushed into the mud, but don't pull that kind of shit again!" After that, Ivan Reitman has never attempted to use Enforced Method Acting in any of his films.
In Vera Drake, the director and the actress playing the title role managed to keep the character's big secret from the actors playing her family until the scene where they find out, to get genuine reactions out of them.
In The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Richard O'Brien didn't inform the actors that Eddie's corpse was under the tablecloth- their surprise is genuine.
In Boyz N The Hood, director John Singleton didn't tell the cast when shots would be fired, to ensure that the actors' reactions to the sound of gunfire would feel authentic.
In Garry Marshall's 1991 film Frankie and Johnny, Marshall wanted Al Pacino to show a genuine amount of surprise when opening a door at a key point in the movie. To get authentic emotion from Pacino, Marshall arranged for William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy (who were shooting Star Trek VI in the next studio) to make an appearance on the other side of the door just off camera in full costume as Kirk and Spock!
In American Beauty, Annette Benning is having a breakdown rant at the dinner table that Kevin Spacey is supposed to stop by dropping a plate of asparagus on the floor. After a few unsuccessful takes, he unexpectedly throws it at the wall, violently shattering a real glass plate. Benning and Thora Birch (playing their daughter) have genuine looks of shock.
In Monty Python's Life of Brian, the extras who play guards in the "Biggus Dickus" scene were told to stand stock still and look serious. You can see them genuinely straining not to laugh when Michael Palin (as Pilate) gets into his bit. Seriously, you try to watch the scene with a straight face.
In Star Trek: Nemesis, in the scene where Riker is fighting the Reman Dragon on a catwalk which suddenly collapses beneath them, Riker's panicked cry is for real because (all together now) they didn't tell the actor ahead of time.
Don't forget the German movie Das Boot! The scenes were filmed chronologically so the actors' beards would grow naturally, and they were forced to stay inside so that their skin would like like they'd been in a submarine for months.
Alfred Hitchcock was fond of this type of acting. For example, when he made the film version of Rebecca, the story called for Joan Fontaine (who played Mrs. DeWinter) to be nervous around the other actors. To acheive this, Hitchcock told her that no one else on set liked her.
Mel Brooks' movie example: In Dracula: Dead and Loving It, when Lucy Westenra is staked after becoming a vampire. "Harker" actor Steven Weber wasn't told the massive amount of stage blood that would come from the dummy. In the movie, he's clearly struggling not to laugh as he delivers his lines.
In the scene from the movie where David Helfgott (played by Geoffrey Rush) was jumping on a trampoline naked except for an open trenchcoat, Lynn Redgrave's shocked and amused reaction was genuine because at the last minute, Rush covered his privates with a bouquet of plastic flowers.
In Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, one stunt involved a motorcycle hitting an embankment, whereupon the stuntman was to flip over the handlebars and land on his back on padding in a standard stunt move. The stunt went wrong, the stuntman flipped head-over-heels two or three times, and wound up breaking both legs. The scene made it into the final film without reshooting, because it was that awesome.
When directing Shirley Temple, ruthless Western director John Ford needed her to cry. So he asked the stage manager to inform her that her dog had been killed by a car, right before flipping on the cameras. What is captured on film is one of the best moments of Miss Temple's career.
The movie Tropic Thunder seems to be playing with this trope as the plot involves the director directing a war movie dropping his five actors into an actual warzone riddled with hidden cameras in order to get a much better performance from the seemingly less than competent thespians (two of which are an action star wishing to get Oscar Bait material and a comedian who takes Refuge In Vulgarity).
John Woo reveals on the commentary track of Hard Boiled that, in the scene where Tequila outruns an explosion and leaps out a window holding a baby, Chow Yun-Fat was not given any warning before the pyrotechnic charges were set of behind him.
The scene where James Bond is in a pool with sharks in Thunderball was meant to be filmed with the sharks in a plexiglass tunnel. When it turned out not enough glass was available and there would be a hole in the tunnel, the filmmakers elected not to tell Sean Connery, as he was terrified of the sharks and they knew they would never be able to get him in the pool if he was aware of the problem. Hence the terrified look on his face when the shark comes after him, and then his practically doing a vertical leap out of the water.
When filming the pot-smoking scenes in Evil Dead, the actors really were high on marijuana, but Sam Raimi had to reshoot those scenes because the results were, to put it mildly, incomprehensible.
In Mary Poppins, the young actors playing Michael and Jane weren't told that it was Dick Van Dyke playing the elderly Mr. Dawes. In an interview included on the Mary Poppins DVD release, Karen Dotrice said that she didn't find out until seeing the credits of the finished movie in the theater.
- Also, in the scene where the children are to take their medicine, a bottle with several internal compartments is used to dispense several colors of elixir (an old stage magician's trick). The children were not informed of this, so when Jane (Karen Dotrice) shrieks in shock at the changing color, it's real.
In Far and Away, in one scene Tom Cruise is naked on a bed, covered only by a bowl you-know-where, which then-wife Nicole Kidman takes a peek under. There had been a washcloth discreetly covering the goodies for most of filming, and then someone got the bright idea to remove the washcloth...

Television

In the M*A*S*H (TV series) episode "Abyssinia, Henry," the final page of the script, in which Radar comes into the operating room and announces that Col. Blake's plane was shot down with no survivors, was handed out to the cast only immediately before the scene was shot.
In the Red Dwarf episode "D.N.A.", Lister (played by Craig Charles) is handed a photo of a man's genitals and reacts accordingly. During rehearsal, the photo was always something mundane, but when they actually shot the scene, Craig was given a photo of a guy's crotch without warning.
According to Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica podcasts, actor Edward James Olmos (who plays Commander/Admiral William Adama) is notorious for his Method acting. Forget all the unscripted lines (and kisses) he throws in. In the episode "33", where the crew suffers from sleep deprivation due to imminent Cylon attacks, Olmos apparently convinced most of the cast to forgo sleep to make the symptoms their characters would be experiencing more realistic. In "Act of Contrition", where Starbuck tells Commander Adama she's responsible for the death of his son, Zak, Olmos scared actress Katee Sackhoff (who plays Starbuck) into thinking he was actually going to hit her, which is why she puts her hands over her head as she walks out of his cabin. And in "Maelstrom", after Starbuck's apparent demise, Olmos smashed a model ship that was apparently rented from a museum. Fortunately, his Method acting makes for some damned good television.
- The model ship one was particularly famous - Olmos later stated he came up with the idea just before he did it in order to ramp up the emotion, and that he thought the ship was just a cheap prop instead of a museum-quality piece. Fortunately, the company had taken out insurance. At least they learned to take precautions...
  - The model ship incident was so famous that the show recently threw a Continuity Nod through the Fourth Wall at it: after some physical violence results in the ship breaking (planned, this time), Adama grouses that "that damn ship's broken again".
  - Arguably Olmos' approach is why he and Michael Hogan (Colonel Saul Tigh) are able to pull off moments like the infamous "paper shortage" belly laugh without distracting from the show.
During the pilot of Firefly, Mal and Jayne throw a body out the ship's airlock and rush back inside as the door closes with a fraction of an inch to spare. This isn't just feigned: Nathan Fillion and Adam Baldwin had no idea that Joss Whedon started closing the doors the moment they went out, to simulate how fast these characters had to act in their escape from the world (and, one presumes, as a sort of practical joke).
In 24, Kiefer Sutherland changed the line of the famous "Jack whispering to Nina" scene from Day 2 from its scripted one (a declaration that Jack would hunt Nina down) to a declaration of love for Sarah Clarke in order to get a shocked reaction from her.
The opening-night production of Macbeth in Slings And Arrows includes this as part of the plot; Slings And Arrows is a story about a theater company, and Geoffrey Tennant (the character who is the artistic director) is not above manipulating his performers to get results. In order to get the performance he wants out of his recalcitrant Macbeth, Geoffrey changes all the blocking at the last minute, inserts a small tree at a strategic location, and gives secret instructions to Macbeth's opponents in fight scenes.
In the Star Trek Deep Space Nine episode "Trials and Tribble-ations", when Sisko and Dax first walk onto the Enterprise and look around in wonder, that was really the first time the actors had seen the incredibly faithful recreation of the original set. It worked because the characters were supposed to be "fans", too.
In the episode "Waking Moments" of Star Trek Voyager, Tuvok dreams that he reports to the bridge naked. The people who are already there burst out laughing when they see him - and it's not acting. Apparently, Tim Russ (Tuvok's actor) attached really big fake genitals over his own, just to get the right reaction.
- This troper is not surprised at all, having heard about Russ' reputation among the Voyager cast. Go find the outtakes from "Worst Case Scenario" to see him being quite the Large Ham.
In the Babylon 5 episode "The Hour Of The Wolf", one of the reasons that actor Peter Jurasik (Londo) looks as he does when talking to the severed heads is that one of the heads was based on fellow actor Andreas Katsulas (G'Kar). They avoided telling him about it in advance.
Many of the tears in the Doctor Who episode "Doomsday" were genuine sadness at the cast knowing this was going to be Billie Piper's last scene or so they thought at the time. Also in "School Reunion" Sarah Jane and Rose laughing at the Doctor is actually because David Tennant scribbled on his own face and didn't tell Billie Piper or Elisabeth Sladen.
Arguably, this was often the case in Mork And Mindy. Much of Mork's dialogue and antics were ad-libbed by Robin Williams, and so Mindy's surprise and confusion were often genuine. Of course, this made it interesting in an "It's A Wonderful Life" episode where Mindy isn't supposed to react to the invisible Mork's antics, but Pam Dawber is visibly struggling to keep a straight face.

Western Animation

In The Incredibles, during the "Hundred Yard Dash" scene, Dash's voice actor was forced to run laps around the studio to sound appropriately winded for the scene.
The voice actor for Hercules in the Disney adaptation of his legend did pushups to achieve the same effect.

Real Life

Universal Studios theme park loves to do this to visitors. Unannounced surprises will jump out from behind every corner. In the Backdraft theme attraction, which uses real fire, guests are specifically asked to "act", and just when you think you're done, suddenly the bulkhead overhead falls down to narrowly miss you.
This troper was acting in a friend's student film, performing a fight scene, and accidentally landed a punch right in the mouth of the other actor. This resulted in the two best scenes of the movie, both the punch, and the later zoom in of the actor wiping real blood from his mouth.

Theater

In the original production of The Phantom Of The Opera, at one point the Phantom is underground, having kidnapped Christine. He loads her into the boat. On stage, the boat needs to be pushed out to the front, as though he was pushing it into the water. Not knowing that the boat was so heavy, it takes a lot out of the Phantom and he is severely out of breath. So the rendering of the next song, "slowly, gently, in anticipation" is so affected that the director decides to keep it like that.

Professional Wrestling

During the most recent WWE Draft, none of the draftees were told that they'd be switching shows until just seconds before the announcement was made. Most notably seen with the announcer switch between Smackdown and Raw... the looks of confusion and anger on Michael Cole and Jim Ross' faces as they switched chairs following the announcement of the change were completely real, and Jim Ross actually considered retiring the day after it happened.

Electric Boogaloo

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