I just got done shooting some social content through my production company. The content was golf lessons. And as my client and instructor was smoothly working through his lesson he said something that really stood out to me about the importance of simply letting go in the golf swing. Putting too much power in your swing through the hands will cause your golf swing to suffer nearly every time, it’s better to let go and let the turn in your body do the work.
This got me thinking about acting technique and where a lot of actors get stuck. They use the technique as a crutch by trying to jam all the work in their head, which then causes them to stay in their head and not in the moment. They’re not letting go, trusting that the work they’ve put in rehearsing will just be there for them.
Letting go has always been an essential part of how I work. I don’t want to be thinking about the substitution I used to build the emotional life of the scene, or the actions I plotted out in the margins to achieve my objectives. When the curtain opens or the camera rolls the only thing I want to be thinking about is the person in the scene with me, and what I need from them, that’s it. Anything else in my head that is from “the actor” is going to fuck with the character and the authenticity of the scene.
I’m not here to plug any particular technique, but the one that works best for me has about 12 steps, but the most important one, the final one, is…you guessed it, letting go. Those two words really unlocked something in the way I work, and I hope it helps other actors, golfers, chefs, etc. Whatever it is that you do, be cautious about being too in your head, because there’s a good chance that you’re sabotaging yourself.
Jared Boghosian 