Is Acting Important?
Actors are often seen as living a surreal kind of life – no real job, exorbitant salaries, and living life like it’s a permanent vacation. On the contrary, what actors do is priceless! With irregular working hours and subjection to rigorous and unthinkable role preparation requirements (such as method acting), the worth of actors and the service they provide cannot truly be quantified. Can you imagine what the world would be like without actors?
Acting is the art of storytelling. You take a script and breathe life into a character, portraying it on a stage or screen. Acting serves countless purposes including the following:
- It reminds us of times past and forgotten, or gives us a glimpse of a possible future.
- It portrays our raw, unadulterated, vulnerable, emotional, and at times, ugly, horrifying humanity.
- It provokes emotion, thought, discussion, awareness, or even imagination.
- It entertains and provides us with, hope, comfort, and an escape from life’s challenges.
Through their exceptional talents, actors create alternate realities that inspire us, move us, and show us reflections of ourselves, whether it’s the person we were, are, or want to be. Different types of acting can accomplish different things:
- Film, TV, and theater acting provide us with the entertainment we often crave. The characters portrayed fulfill our need to identify with a ‘real’ human.
- Voice over acting provides that human element to animation through personality and conversation.
- Commercial acting takes on a more informative role, educating us on the newest product or service on the market, through convincing performances and catchy jingles.
- Extra or background acting provides a supportive role to the main characters in our favorite plays, movies, or TV shows, helping to strengthen the story-line, and make a scene more realistic.
