Perhaps the most helpful, albeit difficult talent for any film actor to have is the ability to cry on command. Whether it's to portray a moment of pain, grief, anger, desperation, or even glee, there are a lot of pivotal movie scenes that really require thespians to crank up the waterworks and send home the emotion of the moment.
So, how do these stars manage to trickle out those tears again and again with each take? Let's take a look at how some of Hollywood's finest make it happen. It may not be common, but there are some actors who have the ability to summon up authentic sobs by sheer force of will and lots of practice.
Bryce Dallas Howard famously demonstrated her natural gift for crying on command during an interview with Conan O'Brien. First, she told him that she'd just need him to start talking about something, any thing to allow her to work. Lo, as the show host started going on and on about some made-up trip to his local Home Depot, she managed to squeeze out a few very real tears in the span of two minutes.
The actress later returned to the same show and explained that it's not her genetics that give her the ability to cry on cue. It's something that can be learned and taught," she said before sharing some of the details of her method.
As it turns out, for Howard, inducing the soft palate lift that comes with yawning again and again will help her produce those crocodile tears. Like Bryce Dallas Howard, If I Stay star Jamie Blackley said that he too relies on an unseen bodily cue to bring about his fake tears for those sadder scenes.
Only instead of focusing on flexing his soft palate to get the water flowing, he goes an entirely different route that doesn't exactly sound healthy. The actor explained in a promotional interview , "You can make all the blood rush to your head Chances are, there are all manner of complications that could emerge from forcing a blood rush to the brain again and again as such scenes are shot and re-shot, so this is definitely an instance of an actor suffering for his art.
However, his back-up approach does sound a little bit safer: Blackley also mentioned thinking of "a poor puppy on the street who's crying" to drum up the requisite sensation and shed a few. Considering how much emotion he had to show for his teen romantic drama, let's hope he stuck to the latter option more often than the former. Amy Adams can also turn on the sprinklers at a moment's notice, but instead of relying on a physical trick, she uses a strange bit of memory recall to make it happen.
The acclaimed actress has repeatedly demonstrated her own trick on several late night talk shows, including The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and The Graham Norton Show , and of all the things that could get her worked up, her go-to is a bit about hot sauce. That's right, the actress revealed that her daughter helped coax her into crying on cue by telling her about a news story about a Sriracha plant in California being shuttered after complaints by neighbors about the unpleasant fumes issuing from the production facility.
Evidently, Adams is a big enthusiast of the spicy sauce, so that little tidbit did the trick to get her weeping, and it's what she turns to anytime she needs something to bawl about.
Holly weird. The late, great Shirley Temple might have been just a tiny tyke when she became a legend of the early screen scene, but even then she was a consummate professional. In a interview via the Associated Press , the former child superstar revealed her method for breaking out with a wail on camera, saying, "I guess I was an early method actress.
I would go to a quiet part of the soundstage with my mother. I wouldn't think of anything sad, I would just make my mind a blank. In a minute I could cry. Temple did have one caveat to mustering up the mopes, though.
Like most little ones, mealtimes mattered a lot in her life, so once her belly was full of animal crackers in her soup , no doubt , she couldn't do it anymore. Hollywood is all just a game of smoke and mirrors At least one actress has copped to faking her crying scenes with the help of some artificial tears.
Actors use a variety of ways to elicit tears. Unfortunately, there is a problem with the "Be In The Moment" technique. It does not work in every play. What if you have to cry, but you personally don't "feel" it? Any actor who has performed in a less than wonderful or poorly written play will find it nearly impossible to cry on cue.
It is hard to "be in the moment" when you do not truly value the power of the play. In this case, there are a few more "tricks of the tears" that might help lacrimation. Keep in mind that tears are not the only means to convey extreme grief or misty-eyed happiness. To quote Ursula, the sea witch in The Little Mermaid : "Don't forget the importance of body language!
Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. She also spoke about how that took such an emotional toll on her that sometimes one scene would require her to be out of commission for days afterward because it would take her that long to recover from the emotional trauma.
She later said that, as she got more experienced as an actor, it was easier for her to express certain emotions without reliving them, which leads us to the next technique. For example, Julianne Moore has just always been able to draw on emotions and instantly feel things.
By the way, you might notice that, when you try to smile genuinely for a while, you actually do end up feeling a bit happier than you were before. You can learn to pretend to be sad enough to cry in a similar way. For example, when laughing, some people notice that they shake their shoulders, and then they can trigger laughter in themselves by shaking their shoulders. Like how throwing up can be triggered by tickling the back of your throat. With crying, you might notice how your breathing is different, the way you suck in the air with an irregular pattern.
It all depends on you, however, because different people cry in different ways. To make such pretending easier, some actors also have tricks to achieve red, puffy faces and water eyes.
For example,. An actor might be able to portray the emotion but if physical tears are required for a specific close-up, sometimes a makeup person will just put some eye drops in your eye. Some people might consider this cheating but remember the logistics of being on set. You might be doing the same scene from five different angles, three to four times per angle. You may have brought real tears on the first take but, after the 9th or 10th take, perhaps you might just want to complement your sincere emotional delivery with a couple of eyedrops.
Additionally, actors can apply chemical eye irritants to produce tears. It looks like lipstick and is applied under the eyes to irritate them into crying. You can see from the reviews that actors do use it. However, this is simply not true. Take these words to heart: acting is not crying. One of the biggest traps that a lot of new actors fall into is they try to add tears to every scene and make things hyperemotional.
This is a sign of melodramatic, cheesy acting because you can see it coming. You can see the person trying to cry and, as a result, it leads to a lackluster performance. For example, not everyone expresses heartbreak with tears; therefore, tears are not necessarily required to express emotional pain. In fact, in some cases it might be more effective if there are no tears at all.
Michael Caine gives the acting advice, at least for men, to actually hold back the tears, because then the audience will cry for you. Skip to content.
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