How do professional actors mimic happiness so well?

July 12, 2024 12:19 PM

A confident poise can be also easily faked. However, the face seems to be a totally different kettle of fish. Most people can spot a fake smile a million miles away. How do professional actors mimic emotions like happiness so well without their face betraying them?

I know that Amy Cuddy in her book Presence wrote about about adopting a good poise and good body language can help you project an air of confidence. This would seem like the easy part.

How does ones face mimic an emotional like happiness when they actually might not be a happy state. And most people can easily spot a forced smile. So, how do professional actors mimic emotional states like happiness so well, even though they might be performing at an important audition or be internally under a lot of stress from their director?

Any book or other resources on this topic would be great!

posted by jacobean to Human Relations (18 answers total)

Best answer: Most of the actors I've talked with use memories to help drive their initial reactions and pull up that authentic muscle memory version of an emotion. Then with lots of study, practice and reflection can make that second nature.

It also helps that most of the performers I know are "always on", at least in public, so they're constantly practicing that maksing.
posted by drewbage1847 at 12:24 PM on July 12 [3 favorites]

Acting isn't about reciting lines (unless you're acting for David Mamet, and fuck that guy), it's about putting yourself in the situation called for by the script and reacting authentically with the genuine emotion. Professional acting can be extremely draining because your body doesn't know that the emotions you're feeling are generated on demand. Especially on set where there are multiple takes, a good director will allow times for actors to "come down" off an emotional high or low, and reset their physical state for the beginning of the next take. The better the actor, the more they commit to the performance.
posted by seanmpuckett at 12:38 PM on July 12 [10 favorites]

Acting is not BEING it is DOING - it's very action/task oriented. So actors might be smiling to encourage, to welcome, to shore up someone else - so long as you've done the work of mentally creating the world and circumstances where that task needs to be accomplished - voila.

You can't just BE angry at the drop of a hat (try it!). But you probably could chastise a child who just deliberately took your favourite vase or whatever and dropped it on purpose - you could likely DO that effectively, even if the event is fictional.

Acting is not about making emotions, it's about real actions under imaginary circumstances.

Acting Power by Robert Cohen is a good read.
posted by stray at 12:40 PM on July 12 [7 favorites]

There are a lot of different schools of thought on this: Stanislavski Technique, Uta Hagen Technique, Meisner Technique, Method Acting, Mamet Technique. Actors will often study multiple techniques throughout their arts education.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 12:44 PM on July 12 [4 favorites]

I'm not a professional actor (or an unprofessional one), but I've been told by people during periods of intense stress that I'm "so happy" and "always in a good mood". I think the key to this is compartmentalization. Faking it doesn't work. I'm not pretending to be happy - that would look obviously fake. I'm dredging up all of the genuine happiness I can muster and trying to hold on to it alongside the unpleasantness.

I wish I had a better description of how it feels, because this is a fascinating question. It definitely doesn't feel like "I'm unhappy but I'm pretending to be happy", though. That would wear me out in five minutes. It's more like "All of these awful things are going on and I can barely stand it. But! There's this one thing I'm really looking forward to, or this one funny thing I'm noticing in my environment, or this one person I really like..."

I think it's also something that I learned by operant conditioning, essentially. I'm a very private person and find it uncomfortable when people ask me what's wrong, if I'm ok... I'm also pretty abrasive and it's easy for me to get into arguments, and I feed off other people's emotions. If I can start the happy cycle first, then people react well to me, and I can build off of that.

You might find Impro by Keith Johnstone interesting.
posted by wheatlets at 1:59 PM on July 12 [5 favorites]

The little bit of community theater acting I’ve done - I am actually feeling the feeling. So I’m immersed in the moment of the scene and the emotions flow from there.

The job of the actor is then to understand the script and the character (and the character’s “motivation”, sorry to be cliché) so that the emotional response required is indeed genuine or at least has a seed of realness from which to play from.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 2:17 PM on July 12 [1 favorite]

Most people can spot a fake smile a million miles away.
Okay, but how do you know when someone is faking a smile and you can't tell?
posted by bluedaisy at 2:48 PM on July 12 [9 favorites]

Best answer: I studied acting in college. It's not just "faking it" and adopting a pose that projects a given emotion - often actors are trying to put themselves into a headspace where the emotion is genuinely happening.

There's a number of ways to get into that headspace - the technique I learned called for studying a scene in seriously intense psychological detail ("hmm, okay, my character is happy here, but exactly what kind of happy?"), then thinking of a similar moment from my own life ("okay, my character has just learned that the guy she's been crushing on for years has just dumped the head cheerleader because he likes ME - wow, that probably is like when Tom and I had our first date") and then trying to sort of project myself back into that moment in time ("Okay, so what did Tom and I DO on our first date? Okay, yeah, we went to that pub quiz....okay, what was I wearing? And what was he wearing? And how did he sound? And how did the air feel? And how did his skin feel when I accidentally-on-purpose nudged his knee? And how did that first kiss taste when he finally kissed me?....")

Thinking in detail about that memory can bring back an echo of the feelings you felt at that time, and you take that echo and use that to fuel your performance. So I may be playing Juliet and being all giddy because I've just met Romeo, but in my head I'm not thinking about Romeo, I'm thinking about this guy named Tom and our first date in 2007, and that giddiness that I felt in 2007 makes Juliet's giddiness look genuine.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:40 PM on July 12 [3 favorites]

Best answer: Well, for me it's the same as composing myself to go to sleep, or trying to focus on something complicated, or trying to listen for something in the distance. I just deliberately reset my brain mode. Right. Now I am going to be happy. It's a similar switch to the one you use to reset languages, so you think in French rather than in English. You can switch your attention from using the computer to listening hard to hear who is yelling down the street. You can switch from being preoccupied or grumpy or whatever other mental state you are in, to being happy by deliberately doing it.

Now of course this doesn't mean you won't switch back into being grumpy almost immediately, the way you might be distracted by the video game on your computer instead of continuing to listen to the faint noises outside, but that's a matter of focus. It's like you let yourself switch back into English from French. You let your attention wander.

For me, the switch to being happy is easy to find. I just check if I am in pain or not. And if I am not in pain - then I can be happy because it is so, so absolutely fantastic not to be in pain. Today is a day that doesn't hurt! The happy dance is only a few steps away. Up comes the smile the moment I think, wait, right now I have a reason to be really happy.

But I also have to say that by sheer unaccountable luck I turned out to be someone who can easily produce happiness brain chemicals, and will produce them if nothing is going wrong and there is no on-going situation making me miserable. Happiness is my homeostatic set point. Left to my own devices I am a happy little idiot. Just let me reset from anxiety, or discomfort, or being in responsible focus-on-others-who-are-demanding-I-rescue-them mode and that's the one I default to. It's likely that this is easier for me than for most people because working on my happiness became one of my basic self care habits when I was miserably unhappy around age thirteen or fourteen, which means by now I have put thousands of hours into the project. This does not correlate to optimism, btw. It goes with the belief that by six PM I will be pacing the house in agony, with four more hours to go until I can puke and then sleep. But I'm not in that situation right now, it's only 9 AM, so YAYE!!


I read something a long time ago that explained that when you smile you use all the muscles in your face, not just your mouth, so the way to tell if a smile is genuine or not is to look at the eyes, because the muscles around the eyes crinkle. If you are looking at a picture of someone smiling, cover up the bottom of the photograph with your hand and you'll find it much easier to guess. But the REALLY cool part of this is that is that if you can figure out which muscles are involved in really smiling, and use them, when those muscles will engage it will produce dopamine.

You can feel if you are giving a genuine smile or not. You can feel it in your forehead on both sides, and you can feel it in the bridge of your nose. When you feel it in your forehead and the bridge of your nose, you will feel it in your brain. It long ago turned into a habit for me when I notice I am feeling crummy, to put on the right smile and give myself a dopamine rush. I read that information on how a genuine smile will produce dopamine and I have been beaming like a gormless twit ever since. It works.

So what you want to do is watch a video that makes you happy, some movie that makes you feel delight and then sit still to feel what your face is doing when the video makes you smile. And while you are watching the video that reliably makes you smile because you can't help but smile, practice turning the smile on and off. Turn it off, let the video turn it off again. Keep doing that until you can make yourself smile with your eyes and forehead and nose. You can also work with some happy memory or fantasy that never fails to make you feel glee so strong you want to laugh with joy. But it will probably work better to go with happy making videos while you are learning, because chances are that happy memory isn't as sharp and in colour as the movie and doesn't have a music track playing to make it really effective. First learn what if feels like to smile and how to do it confidently, and then start using your memories to trigger it.

Harrison Ford is an actor who really struggles to smile on command, and when he has to do a photo shoot, he warns the photographer that there will only be ONE shot with him smiling and it had to take place at the end of the shoot. I suspect this is why he mainly takes parts where his character is intent or contemptuous or angry or afraid - happiness on command is really hard for him although he is a well regarded professional actor. But you'll never have seen him in a movie where he goes around being a besotted lover. His love smile is really a grimace, that looks like he doesn't believe the relationship will work.

I don't know how easy it is to learn to do this. But I do know it can be learned because I learned it.
posted by Jane the Brown at 8:08 AM on July 13 [3 favorites]

Best answer: The grandpa of modern acting is Sanford Meisner who said, "“Acting is the ability to behave absolutely truthfully under the imaginary circumstances.”

So, you pretend the situation is real, and then you react truthfully. So you're not "acting happy", you're actually becoming happy. You can literally make yourself fall in love with someone if you just look at them the way you would if you were in love, find beauty and charm in them, etc.

If your brain tells your body you're in a certain emotional state, and if you help it by doing a few things to cue it, your body will get there. You can probably already do this in real life. You can use your body to trigger an emotional shift - like, if you feel a bit blue but you choose to smile when entering a party or interacting with a child, you may actually cheer up. Or, you can use your thoughts, like if you ruminate on problems, you can actually piss yourself off! You can often MAKE your real emotional state morph to a new chosen state.

So if a good actor has to act scared, they use their body - they deliberately breathe differently, and tense their eye muscles, facial muscles, and shoulders and belly. If they need to act sad, they catch their breath differently, tense different facial muscles, sag their shoulders a bit. If they need to act happy, they smile and use more expansive gestures and put a bounce in their step. The gestures are fake at first, and they certainly won't fool a camera or maybe even a stage audience, but that's not the only tool the actor has.

The actor also THINKS about happy or scary or sad stuff, maybe from their own real life history, and certainly from analyzing the script and putting thoughts under the different moments, likely from the music they listen to before the scene, etc. And the thoughts and prior history and music they're working with will also help the emotion come forward. The actor is likely putting themself CLOSE to that emotional state for a week, day, hour before the shoot.

This is why a lot of actors actually fall in love or have affairs while playing a couple. The flip side of this is why actors sometimes get depressed after they play traumatic roles - if you make your body believe you're sad and shitty all day, it's hard to bounce out of it, drugs and drinking can help, and the spiral begins.

The production also helps out by scheduling scenes with an eye to the emotional content and the actor's temperament to help them get a great performance when possible. Sometimes a certain scene needs sunset light or whatever, but many scenes could be done at any time, so they choose quite deliberately. Crying is easier late at night when you're already tired. Being super energetic and happy is easier for some actors in the morning - like I bet Reese Witherspoon is fun at 7am - and I know from a crew member that Johnny Depp can barely get himself out of bed so they don't ask him to be energetic early in the day. If he's happy and chipper on screen my guess is they shot that scene around 6pm. They also don't put opposite-mood scenes back to back, to minimize the actor flip-flopping. They'll try to do all the sad stuff on the same day, and in the right sequence if they can, so the actor can escalate naturally.

There will often also be an acting coach, or the director, who'll take the actor aside and help them get to their emotional state, quietly talking them through it, maybe reminding them of all the sad thoughts they'd be having, or talking them through the joy and fun they're noticing. It's very focussed coaching like a therapy session. I worked on a show where we had an incredible acting coach who could gently talk a teenage actor from happy to tears in about 5 minutes. This can be done abusively or with love and gentleness, and she was amazing. The performances were so connected and authentic - and the teens LOVED it - they WANT to do a great job and hit those emotions.

Finally, remember that actors LIKE having big emotions! It's what gets them praise and paycheques . So where normal people probably spend most of their lives clamping down as hard as possible when they want to cry, I guarantee ALL actors have felt sad and then SPRINTED TO THE MIRROR and had a rather great time watching themselves cry and seeing if they can do it even harder, or even prettier, or get that tear to drop at just the right time! Or TRYING to cry on a boring car ride, or during the breakup of a meaningless fling, or at a random funeral for a distant auntie. And certainly in acting classes, you see people doing their very best to FLING themselves into all manner of dramatic emotions. So the emotional floodgates of most actors are pretty ready to swing open on cue. Actors LOVE emotions for the most part, and they play with them the way a soccer kid might play keepy-up around the backyard!
posted by nouvelle-personne at 8:33 AM on July 13 [3 favorites]

One more thing, casting is about 80% of acting! You cast the actor who can do the thing. Hence the point above that Harrison Ford isn't smiling in his movies - because he's not a smiley guy. If you need an actor with a huge genuine smile, you hire one! That's why Harrison Ford does different roles than Matt LeBlanc.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 8:43 AM on July 13 [4 favorites]

Response by poster: Thank you so much everyone.

I'm in complete awe at the depth of the some of the answers here.

I never knew the complex emotional process that actors were employing in their heads. I'm never going to watch a sitcom or movie in the same light ever again!

My question is more than answered - but you've also given me more ideas to research!

Thank you.
posted by jacobean at 6:35 AM on July 15 [2 favorites]

Oh one last thing, an emotion doesn't need to be "pure" to be interesting! So the actor doesn't need to hit a certain emotion at 100% perfect intensity for the performance to work.

In fact, "pure" emotions are kind of boring. Muddy, complex emotions are WAY better on camera. So if an actor is internally feeling a little sad in real life when they do a happy scene, you're correct that the sadness may bleed through a bit. And that ends up being gorgeous and fascinating - it gives some depth and mystery under the happiness.

I think this is why so many successful film actors have naturally sad-looking eyes. Having sad eyes creates an interesting contrast with all the other emotions and actions in the story. A happy scene with sad eyes has depth. An angry scene with sad eyes has vulnerability. A leadership scene with sad eyes shows the burden. A violent scene with sad eyes suggests a traumatic past. Etc etc. It gives the work more complexity and vulnerability when the emotions have some inherent contradiction!

TV actors can have happy eyes, because TV is usually less sad than film. But film actors almost always look sad. Even the funny film actors, like Seth Rogen, Diane Keaton, Woody Allen (ew sorry), and Bill Murray, often have sad eyes.

Look at all the Best Actor and Best Actress Oscar winners. Find photos of them when their faces are at rest, and notice their eyes. A few of them have naturally Happy Eyes, like Will Smith and Emma Stone. (I'd say Meryl Streep has happy eyes, too, which makes her sad moments feel particularly light and beautiful, even quirky.)

But most of the great film actors have SUPER SAD EYES, even when they're happy - like Al Pacino, Anthony Hopkins, Brie Larsen, Olivia Colman, Cate Blanchett, Cillian Murphy, Adrien Brody, Colin Firth. Sad eyes give us "emotion bleed" which makes other emotions more interesting.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 7:14 AM on July 15 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: That's a really interesting theory NP.

In the art world, they say the same thing. It's all about the nuance. Mona Lisa also had a mysterious smile. Now if Mona Lisa was giving a toothy grin as if appearing in an ad for Sunny Delight - that would ruin the mystique!

Very interesting theory on happy eyes vs sad eyes on TV vs film. Really, I'm going to be watching stuff now with a completely different lens.
posted by jacobean at 7:29 AM on July 15 [1 favorite]

I should add that there are also people who do that kind of "outside in" approach to getting in touch with their character, in the sense that there are some actors who don't go with the "this reminds me of a moment from my actual personal life" approach.

There are also actors who 100% pretend - they're just really, really good at pretending. Think back to when you were a kid and playing pretend games - do you remember how thrilling and exciting they were sometimes? Remember when you were playing that the floor was lava or that the neighbor kids were monsters coming to chase you? Remember how "real" that felt? That's the same kind of thing some actors use - they just never grew out of the ability to do that the way most of us do; most of us are trained out of that as we grow up, but they're still in touch with that. They are just pretending that "I'm the son of a murdered king and I think that guy who did it married my mother" instead of pretending that "I'm trying to escape from lava in the living room".

A lot of acting training is about figuring out a way to get in touch with that kind of emotional inner life somehow - whether it's by comparing it to something that actually happened to you, or strengthening the pretend games - like, if I were an acting teacher trying to teach the "pretend" approach, I might encourage my students to get detailed about "okay, so the floor is lava. Really look at it - what color is it? what does it smell like? Is there a sound?" There's no "right" answer to any of those questions, it's more encouraging the students to really get vividly detailed with their pretending so that they're really, really immersed in it. (Just like the vivid recall of the emotional moments if you're taking that approach.) There's also training about things like how to speak clearly and how to use the way you move as well, because all that emotional work you're doing isn't going to matter if you're in such an emotional state it makes you panicked and you talk too quickly and people don't understand you.

Stage fighting is a special case too, because if you're "pretending" you're fighting you might actually try landing a punch and that's NOT good, because then you've punched your co-star for real. So any stage fight is a very, very carefully choreographed sequence that is designed to LOOK real without actually BEING real, and is designed to keep you both safe, and you rehearse that until it's muscle memory - and you even run through any fights every night before every performance of a play, just the moves, so you make sure everyone's got the moves down in muscle memory; that way, when the actor adds the emotional stuff on top of it, the muscle memory keeps everyone safe.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:30 AM on July 16 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: I should add that there are also people who do that kind of "outside in" approach to getting in touch with their character, in the sense that there are some actors who don't go with the "this reminds me of a moment from my actual personal life" approach

I think that's why some actors decide to work with or shadow certain professions to get that "outside in" profession.
posted by jacobean at 2:05 PM on July 16

I think that's why some actors decide to work with or shadow certain professions to get that "outside in" profession.

Nah, that's more about research; like, if you want to play a firefighter, it behooves you to know as much detail as possible about what "being a firefighter" involves, you know? Some details are obvious (when there's a fire, it's your job to stop it), but there are procedural details that it would be useful to know about. If you are playing a woman from Regency England, it's useful to know what your daily life would have been like. The same is true of every job. I mean, in this conversation you've learned an awful lot about what being an actor involves in terms of the emotional work, right? (smile)

Being aware of the little routine day-to-day details about your character can help you "get in their head" - like, if I were playing a character in something set in 1803 England, it might help me to know about all the social rules of that time, and how they might affect the way I behave, especially if I'm supposed to be very upset about something; if something's made me mad, but I'm a lady and I'm not supposed to scream and shout, what exactly do I do to get rid of that anger? How would I deal with that frustration? And how would my frustration affect the conversation if I'm randomly bumping into Mrs. Pettiwomble who doesn't know anything about what's making me so mad?

Sometimes it isn't just the words the characters say that's supposed to tell the story. Sometimes it is the look on their face WHILE they're saying certain words that tells you that "oh, they're saying that things are fine but they look a little out of it, I bet they just got some weird news" or whatever. And sometimes learning about the day-to-day routine of a character's job can give an actor an idea for what to do with themselves during a scene, to help the audience realize "oh I bet they're upset about something" - like, if they're playing a doctor and they learn that doctors are trained to ALWAYS wash their hands a certain way, that might make them realize that "okay, maybe when my character's upset I'll just half-ass washing my hands" or something. It's all different ways to make that "pretending" as vivid and real as possible.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 2:59 PM on July 16 [1 favorite]

And most people can easily spot a forced smile.

As someone who spent considerable time working through times of grief when I would specifically place a smile on my face before interacting with people, I challenge your assumption.

Citation needed.
posted by yohko at 7:36 PM on July 16