The 12-Step Chubbuck Acting Technique

a. What does your character want from life more than anything?

b. Finding what your character wants throughout the entire script.

a. What your character wants over the course of an entire scene, which supports the character’s OVERALL OBJECTIVE.

a. Determining the physical, emotional and mental hurdles that make it difficult for your character to achieve his or her OVERALL and SCENE OBJECTIVE.

a. Endowing the other actor in the scene with a person from your real life that makes sense to your OVERALL OBJECTIVE and your SCENE OBJECTIVE.

b. For instance, if your character’s SCENE OBJECTIVE is “to get you to love me,” then you find someone from your present life that really makes you need that love – urgently, desperately and completely. This way you have all the diverse layers that a real need from a real person will give you.

a. The pictures you see in your mind when speaking or hearing about a person, place, thing or event.

a. A BEAT is a thought.

b. Every time there’s a change in thought or tactic, there’s a BEAT change.

c. ACTIONS are the mini-OBJECTIVES that are attached to each BEAT that support the SCENE OBJECTIVE and, therefore, the OVERALL OBJECTIVE.

a. The event that happens before you begin the scene (or before the director yells, “Action!”), which gives you a place to move from, both physically and emotionally.

b. MOMENT BEFORE is the event (re-imagined in your thoughts) that gives you the urgency to get your SCENE OBJECTIVE.

a. Using PLACE and FOURTH WALL means that you endow your character’s physical reality – which, in most cases, is realized on a stage, soundstage, set, classroom or on location – with attributes from a PLACE from your real life.

b. Using PLACE and the FOURTH WALL creates privacy, intimacy, history, meaning, safety and reality.

c. The PLACE/FOURTH WALL must support and make sense with the choices you’ve made for the other tools.

a. The handling of props, which produces behavior.

b. Brushing your hair while speaking, tying your shoes, drinking, eating, using a knife to chop, etc. are examples of doings.

c. The act of using DOINGS tells us what you are really thinking and feeling.

d. Remember, words can lie, behavior never does!

a. The dialogue that’s going on inside your head that you don’t speak out loud because it’s vulgar, too revealing, not politically correct, ineffective, and exposing second guessing/insecurities.

b. Dialogue, that can’t be spoken aloud because it would defeat your purpose/OBJECTIVE.

a. Your character’s history.

b. The accumulation of life experiences that determines why and how they operate in the world.

c. And then personalizing the character’s PREVIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES to that of your own so you can truly and soulfully understand the character’s behavior and become and live the role.

d. Remember: it is your past that establishes your present life choices, and how you currently negotiate life.

a. While the Chubbuck Technique does use an actor’s intellect, it is not a set of intellectual exercises.

b. This technique is the way to create human behavior so real that it produces the grittiness, textures, layers and rawness of becoming a true human being – to live a role, not perform it.

c. In order for you to duplicate the natural flow of life and be spontaneous, you have to get out of your head.

d. To achieve this you have to trust the work you’ve done with the previous eleven tools, and LET IT GO.