Watch people

Let’s start with the Words of Wisdom. We do a lot of things on autopilot. It’s the way our busy brains free up capacity for thinking and facing fresh challenges. Tasks we perform a lot become standardised routines: we don’t bother our conscious mind with them and we do them a similar way every time. This is known as habit.
The only thing wrong with this is that the way we do things becomes more and more stereotyped and that is one thing that, as an actor, we want to avoid. In our everyday lives the way we eat, drink, show agreement or disagreement, walk, smile, nod, kiss, hug, frown or hit a forehand drive is a matter of habit that has developed over many years: that’s the way we do things.
But the characters we play may need to have a different way of doing some of these things. We want to depict different people who may do things in a different way. In order to do this we need to expand our behavioural vocabulary, so we watch people and learn from them. Watch people in the street, in a pub, on a beach, on the bus, at Starbucks, in a shop, at a wedding, visiting in hospital, going to church, laughing, crying, working, playing. Watch people.