Training for Greatness: Actors Harnessing the Power of Mindfulness Acting Through College and Beyond

In this article, you’ll unlock a stunning training technique that actors keep secret.

Since I’ve been training as a professional actor for over a decade, I have sampled nearly every impressive training technique available. Bringing mindfulness into the life of your performance rejuvenates your senses with the boldness that many seasoned actors crave.

Let’s dive into why actors should try this profound method.

The Benefits of Using Mindfulness When Acting

Why Should Actors Train to Be Mindful?

When we act on stage or for the camera, we embody the actual life of a character. It is your true self that brings life to the character, so it’s important to use what you already know and feel when you create a character.

We use mindfulness to connect with our core beings, and this allows us to ignite the character’s behaviors. When we commit to thrilling actions, we must be completely authentic in order to provide a jaw-dropping performance.

Benefits of Using This Method

  • Supercharge Your Creativity:

    Running out of creative juices is a problem that plagues seasoned acting professionals. Mindfulness is the formula that supercharges the creative powers within each of us.

    Mindfulness has helped me express my manifestation of characters without judging everything that my brain creates. I’m free to explore movements and gestures in a safe setting.
  • Connect With Other Actors:

    Although some performances are minimal ones that feature only one actor, many scenes contain parts for multiple people. Directors struggle to keep actors on task and connected to each other. If one actor in the production isn’t doing their job, the entire piece is at risk of crumbling.

    Through meditation and practicing mindfulness, I have learned more about myself, and this has helped me build a greater connection with other people.
  • Remain Present Throughout Performances:

    Keeping an audience in their seats and fascinated by a performance is a tall order. However, actors and crew members spend massive amounts of time in the rehearsal process. In order to stun audiences, actors must remain present throughout each authentic performance. Otherwise, the audience might start falling asleep.

    Being attentive and aware of each moment has allowed for me to foster an impenetrable connection to other actors during scene work.
  • Listen With Your Whole Self:

    Even if a character isn’t paying attention to the world around them, it’s the actor’s job to be aware of the space and other inhabitants. In order to put on an explosive performance, actors must reach out with their entire beings. Instead of listening with your two ears, you need to take the world in with all of your senses. Imagine you have more ways of gathering information to have a powerful internal life for the character.

    Mindfulness teaches us to connect with the stillness that surrounds us. When we listen (like we were able to as children), we are practicing avoiding judging everything that presents itself.

Annette Bening Gives A Strong Performance In Her Film ‘Hope Gap’

“Hope Gap” is a new film starring Annette Bening as an English woman going through a divorce after three decades of marriage. It is set in the small coastal town where she lives, and this is a very scenic location. Bening’s performance is very strong, and she has also gotten positive recognition from critics who point out that, although she is an American, she has been able to use a believable English accent to portray her character.

The end of a marriage

The film starts with Bening’s character and her husband at their seaside home. She grows nervous and apprehensive when her husband invites their grown son to join them, and she is expecting some kind of announcement from her husband. She is still blindsided, however, when he tells her that, after three decades of marriage, he is going to leave her for a younger woman. The viewer knows this is coming because we have seen the husband prepare his goodbye speech beforehand.

The husband says that the marriage has grown lifeless and that he is no longer in love. Bening’s character, for her part, blames him for the stale routine and essentially accuses him of being a bad husband. Afterwards, the husband follows through on his threat and departs.

The protagonist moves forward

Much of the film centers around how Bening’s character copes with divorce in the days after it. For the most part, she does pretty well, but it is a mixed reaction. She acquires a dog, for example, so that she won’t be alone, and this is a good sign, but she names him after her ex-husband, which indicates that she is dwelling too much on the past.

On the positive side, she starts to do volunteer work on a hotline for people who need to talk, and this helps her move forward. At one point, she makes the interesting observation that women who are divorced unexpectedly by their husbands go through much of the same grieving and anguish that widows do, but they aren’t view favorably by society. Again, Bening does a fantastic job of portraying a flawed but sympathetic woman who is coping with a landslide in her personal life.

Husband and son

The departed husband is not as major of a character as Bening’s character. He clearly doesn’t care as much about his marriage as Bening’s character, and when he has the opportunity to bail out, he does. If he regrets this, the viewer doesn’t see it. The son, on the other hand, is disturbed by how callous his father is, and he takes a good look at himself in order to determine if he is the same kind of man.

In conclusion, this is a story focusing on middle-class adults going through a time of crisis. There is nothing unusual about their story, yet the acting and screenwriting are so strong that the viewer is pulled in. Basically, it’s a film about real life and moving forward.