Meryl Streep: The Craft of Acting
"So you would think the people who judge actors would at least familiarize themselves with the art form and its process."
MERYL STREEP: I really have a great respect for, and an understanding of, the craft of acting. So many people who write about the movies don’t understand either the process or the creation of the actor. They don’t know what it is. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I always wanted to get together a group of actors and talk about the process and write it all down and send it to all the major critics so they’d know what actors do. I don’t think they do know. They judge it, yet they don’t know what it is that they are looking at. Most of them—even the most sophisticated—are swept away by whether it’s a character they like or dislike. They confuse the dancer with the dance. With my work, they get stuck in the auto mechanics of it—the most obvious stuff, like what’s under the hood. They mention the accent or the hair—as if it’s something I’ve laid on that doesn’t have anything to do with the character. It’s very ingenuous, really. They’re like children who want to believe in Santa Claus. Some critics categorically refuse to believe that Santa Claus is their dad with a beard. That it really is that person, that Jack Nicholson is like Jack Nicholson. The news is that most of the great practitioners of the art of acting know exactly what they’re doing; even in the best, most successful moments, when they let go of the awareness of what they are doing, they still, somewhere deep inside their body, know what they’re doing. There is a craft.
WASSERSTEIN: Has somebody written about that craft?
STREEP: David Mamet, I guess, wrote a book, but I haven’t read it, of course. You know, when actors get Oscar nominations, they just kvell over the fact that they got nominated. That’s because actors vote for the acting nominees; the general membership votes for the winners. So winning may not be considered as informed an honor as a nomination. I don’t think people really understand that. There’s a lot of smirking when an actor makes that statement, but it’s the truth. Other actors do know what good acting is, just as writers know what good writing is. Acting has to reach everybody on some level—it’s a communication of feeling—but as far as judging the work is concerned, it is, I think, something that actors know about.
I was just trying to figure out what, as an actor, I’d do, because I’m not an analytical person. It’s the opposite of the way I am when I cook. I’m somebody who’s prepared meals for 20 years, pretty much the same stuff, and every time I have to trudge over to the “Joy of Cooking” for everything I should have memorized. Of course, I remember the descriptions: “Our best devil’s-food cake;” “We once saw this recipe feed 100 wedding guests—it took 30 eggs!” But I can’t for the life of me remember how to make it. I really envy people who can say, “What’s in the fridge?” and just put those elements together and concoct a feast. But that is how I act: I just see what’s there in me that I can apply to the task at hand and instinctually apply those elements. And I know the things that trigger good work, and I know that most of it happens on the set, on the stage, “in the moment,” as we used to say in acting class.
WASSERSTEIN: When it’s triggered by the director and the circumstance.
STREEP: Yeah, and I have a sense of shaping things, of where I want something to blossom and where I want it to be held in until then, where not to blow it all out until this point. That’s stuff that people who are just watching don’t want to know about. They want to believe in the character. They don’t want to see the geisha flossing, you know; they want to see her smile. Every actor I’ve ever met knows about the process and talks about it. So you would think the people who judge actors would at least familiarize themselves with the art form and its process. But you rarely if ever see it written about in reviews, in critiques, in specific language. Most critics stand in awe of that process. They’re afraid of it, and they don’t want to get into it and sound foolish.
From an interview between Meryl Streep and Wendy Wasserstein in Interview Magazine, December, 1988.
Photograph by Brigitte Lacombe


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