Acting Allows One to Creatively Explore the Human Experience

Acting is an odd wonder, and one that may be undervalued. Acting allows people to experience the potential of his or her creative side by exploring the human condition. The human condition in acting may be portrayed as the existence of ‘good and evil’ in the make-up of humankind. Actors are put into the position to understand and explain parts of the human condition through their performance. Actors, in truth, are just everyday human beings who pretend to be other people and, hopefully, in the process, entertain and serve a deeper need of an audience. No other animals create dramas or comedies like humans, on or off the stage.

Everyone “acts” daily in a given reality or context as all people to some extent try out different roles, wear different masks or for example, act like a parent, a boss, or a teacher as they interact with others. As Shakespeare stated, “One man in his time plays many parts”. Conversely, the roles non-actors perform in their private lives are usually somewhat interconnected, and generally revolve around everyone’s own perspective, emotional range, desires, and personality. Actors, on the other hand play a variety of characters having different experiences in diverse situations.

For example, Robert De Niro played an isolated and violent personality in Taxi Driver (1976); he prepared for the role by creating his own experience of driving a taxi for weeks before shooting the film. De Niro also portrayed a boxer, in Raging Bull (1980); during that time, he chose to have a new experience of gaining, in a short period of time, more than 50 pounds, to portray the aging boxer. De Niro also performed in more conventional films, including playing a priest in True Confessions (1981) and a conventional family man in Falling in Love (1984), as well as exploring his comedic side in Wag the Dog (1997), in Analyze This (1999), and in Meet the Parents (2000). Moreover, in many other films, he showed a full range of perspectives and emotions in a variety of life experiences and given circumstances (De Niro/IMDb, 2019). How does De Niro manage to portray these characters in such a truthful manner? Does he possess powerful extraordinary emotional and cognitive skills to achieve this?

McAdams, a personality psychologist at Northwestern University, stated the questions that many individuals ponder:

Am I the same person I was yesterday? How will I be different tomorrow? Given all the changes and transformations that the self experiences over time and across different situations, how can the I construe the Me to be a continuous and integrated thing? Or can it?

Actors might be seen as being multi-dimensional due to their ability to immerse themselves in multiple roles. This form of performance art can leave some curious as how individuals can take on different roles; however, in a sense, it does refer to the quality of individuals being one of a kind, strange, unique, remarkable, or unusual; all of these words describe human beings and their potential for creative change.