Creating Emotions

I’ve been curious about what actors know and how they practice - and recently came across this podcast interview with Joseph Gordon-Levitt from HBR’s The Anxious Overachiever, in which Joseph talks about his own emotions - particularly anxiety - as well as how he cultivates an emotional state in order to play a scene.

In particular, I appreciate this passage near the end, on how to cultivate an emotional state using intentional technique:

“Emotions are a funny one because as we’ve been talking about some of them you can’t control and some of them you can, it’s not really simple. My whole skill, like what I’m really good at, is controlling my emotions. That’s what acting is in a lot of ways. But I certainly can’t just control them with the snap of the fingers. And the truth about acting is you don’t just turn emotions on and off with a switch. I don’t know, maybe some actors can do that. But that’s not how I do it. If you want the emotions to really ring true to an audience, you have to really feel them. And to really feel them, you have to work your way into them…”

“The skill of acting and bringing those emotions into a scene has more to do with—it’s not exactly fakery. It’s more just knowing myself enough and paying attention to how I’m feeling enough and gently nudging it throughout however long a time period it takes. But oftentimes it’s an all-day thing, waking up knowing I’m going to do this scene and just—you can’t force it. If you force it, it’ll look force to an audience. But you just gently, barely nudging it this way or that way with various tools or techniques, focusing my mind on given experiences or memories or stories or listening to music or doing physical exercise even, or any number of things that I do sometimes to just nudge my emotions in one direction or another.”

What do you pay attention to, to cultivate your emotional state? What possibilities do you see for yourself, from this concept?