“The goal, maybe not for some actors but for me, is to be unconscious. And if not, to feign it as well as possible. To see an actor who is self-aware of what he’s doing as an actor — that really bugs me. The goal is to get to that place where you have done it and you’re not aware of what you did. You just trust that you are inhabiting the character, and it’s true.”
Harris experienced that kind of transcendence only once. “It was right when I first started acting,” he says, walking onto a shaded patio to light his cigarette at last. “I did Camelot in Oklahoma City and played King Arthur, and I was literally told by the director, ‘On this line, cross here, sit here, do this, do that.’ The songs were choreographed. I walked with a ruler up my back during rehearsals.”
Harris’s left hand is jammed in his jeans pocket; his right hand guides the Camel to his lips. As he speaks, he stares at the ground and kicks at something. “One night we did it, and I didn’t remember doing it. It was this little 200-seat theater, and the audience was just exploding with applause at the end. Something had really happened.”
Was that what hooked him on acting? “Definitely,” Harris says, his eyes suddenly warm. “It was incredible. It really was. It was way beyond my self-involvement, you know what I mean? It was ecstasy.”
ALEC GUINNESS USED to say that he built his characters from the shoes up. Laurence Olivier began with the nose often reshaping it with putty. Al Pacino insisted on the elegant camel-hair coat he wore in The Godfather, Part II. Externals matter, he explained.
BUT WHAT OF THE INTERNALS — the invisible tools an actor uses to make the made-up real? Compared with the surface details, the inner workings are hard to parse. Some actors fear that to deconstruct their talent is to risk its loss. Many clam up when asked how they do it. Or worse, they talk in gauzy platitudes.
WE DECIDED TO SPEAK TO actors about not their own work but the work of others. We asked Joan Allen and Ed Harris — who just turned in what many believe are their finest film performances — to name a few movie scenes that have affected them. Then we popped the scenes into a VCR and let them talk.
