CHAPTER 6

The Animal Exercise

W. C. Fields, the great comedian and juggler, once said, “Never work with children or animals. They are unpredictable and will inevitably steal the scene.” Anyone who has ever worked with an animal can easily attest to that being the case, unless you allow its relaxed intuition to open a doorway to your own performance. You have to equal the animal.

In the opening scene of The Godfather, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, a cat sits playfully in Don Corleone’s lap. Marlon Brando, who plays the Don, relaxes into the cat’s antics and seems to become one with the animal. The cat doesn’t steal the scene; they become a duo—partners in crime, so to speak. An interesting aspect to this story is that the cat was not part of the script. It was a stray that Coppola had often seen on the Paramount lot. On the day of the shoot, he picked the cat up and handed it to Brando. They took to each other, and the cat stayed in his lap throughout the shooting of the scene. The only problem it caused was that it purred so loudly, most of Brando’s dialogue was unclear on the sound track; they had to loop in his lines later in the studio.

This is just one famous example of an actor working with a real animal and merging with the animal’s innate activity. The animal isn’t acting; it’s just being itself in the moment. When a human actor can hold up next to the animal, we don’t think they are acting either when, in fact, they are. Brando was often described as an actor with animal magnetism. When any person is described as having this trait, it usually means they are someone with an alluring appeal, someone you are drawn to and compelled to watch. When actors have this quality, we believe they are simply displaying their instinctual nature and impulses. We enjoy watching them, often with a mixture of pleasure and fear.

What are the traits that make animals so interesting to watch? Certainly many animals are very beautiful and graceful, possessing a physical prowess that escapes humans. Many have a wild quality that is untamable and very attractive to those of us who are bound by society’s laws. Animals only follow the laws of nature, governed by survival, which ultimately come down to the choices of life and death. Their behavior always seems truthful, clear, and decisive. In the animal kingdom, every choice made is a choice with a high level of risk.

Great actors possess many of these traits. They are often beautiful and graceful, they often possess a wild untamable quality, and they almost always have a reputation for making choices with high stakes. In their choices is the threat that life will be irrevocably changed, even lost. They are not afraid to make a sudden turn of character, taking you by surprise, and giving you the guilty thrill of watching someone take a risk. These are all components that make great screen-acting performances so exciting to watch.

There are many types of animals, but not all of them have alluring qualities; they can be strange-looking like a hyena, timid or furtive like a rabbit, or as dangerous as poisonous snakes.

Animals have always been a part of the movie image, some becoming stars as actors themselves, like Lassie the collie or Asta the dog from the Thin Man movies, among many, many others. The animal image has played a large part in iconic movies like Beauty and the Beast or The Wizard of Oz with its Cowardly Lion and flying monkeys.

The animal exercise is one of the series of sense memory exercises taught by Lee Strasberg. He once said that the animal exercise was the most profound of all the sense memory exercises; certainly, on any given day, it can be quite true.

In today’s world of filmmaking, technology has opened up an entire world of possible animal portrayals that did not exist when the original exercise was conceived. Motion capture and CGI were things of directors’ dreams. Traditional animation or the extensive use of prosthetics was the only ways to portray a talking animal. Now an actor can create the underpinnings of an animal character that will later be manipulated by technology to an on-screen conglomerate that is both human and animal. Originally, the animal exercise was used as a tool to unlock aspects of the actor’s instrument just like other sense memories. It was also used for specific character work—to bring out a physical performance and a different way of moving and seeing the world—that had perhaps previously escaped the actor. Nowadays, it can still be used for any number of purposes, like any other sense memory, but with the demands of fantasy, futuristic, and sci-fi movies like The Planet of the Apes or the X-Men series, the animal exercise takes on a new dimension as a tool to literally create animal behavior for characters that either are animals or have partial animal characteristics. The exercise can also be used as springboard into an extreme character, like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

When Andy Serkis got the call that he should audition for the voice of Gollum, he was not thrilled. It was just another day in the actor’s life waiting to hear about an audition that he had just done. The “voice” of an animated character seemed not so important, but it was a paying gig, so he set himself to figuring out how to produce the correct voice for the character. He decided that the character’s past actions had caused a feeling of guilt that was stuck in his throat.

While he was thinking about this in his kitchen, one of his cats entered and proceeded to throw up hair balls—a common occurrence with which all cat owners are familiar. He was annoyed by the disturbance but went ahead and dutifully cleaned up the goo once the cat had finished. It was only later, in the middle of the night, that the idea came to him. The horrendous sound that the cat made was perfect for the voice production of Gollum. He got up, got down on all fours, and tried to imitate the arched back and head position of his cat before it started to barf up the hair balls. He immediately felt this was the beginning of a very important discovery and pledged to return to the process in the daytime when he could commit to it more fully.

For those of you who have never experienced a cat throwing up fur balls or would choose to forget the experience, here’s a little synopsis. Cats constantly lick their fur, and some of the fur comes off and collects in the back of their throats. Eventually, this gets to be too much for the animal and causes the cat to start coughing convulsively. This process escalates into eerie wheezing sounds, the cat’s spine arches, and a rippling effect occurs that moves from the base of the spine to the throat. The jaw opens wide, and as they convulsively try to expel the fur ball, they make a rather disgusting, hacking growl sound until they are able to cough up the gooey mess that we call fur balls. Cats do this involuntarily as need requires. If you’ve never seen it before, you might think that your cat is dying, but in fact it’s a normal response to an irritation. When the cat has regurgitated the fur ball, it goes back to normal and just walks away from it, leaving you to clean up the mess. One always hopes that it happens on your kitchen floor when you are alone and not on the living room rug in the middle of a dinner party.

Now that you have that delightful image in your head, we’ll return to Andy’s epiphany. He had already decided that Gollum held the guilt of his past actions in his throat, where it continually choked him. The next day after the hair ball episode, he got down on all fours and arched his back, imitating the cat’s convulsions. He then tried to speak the lines of the character. He was very satisfied that he had found “the character’s voice.” There was only one problem; he couldn’t produce it without getting down on all fours and arching his back. When he went to his audition for the voice of Gollum, he explained what he wanted to do, got on a chair, crouched into his cat position, and produced the voice. It was the beginning of the three-year journey in the creation and filming of Gollum for The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

THE ANIMAL EXERCISE

The animal exercise is deceptively simple: you choose an animal, observe it repeatedly for an extended amount of time, then start to apply its physical attributes to your own body. It is done with a relaxed precision of selecting and systematically applying the physical characteristics of the animal and the use of its five senses. The work slowly progresses to include the needs and habits of the animal, as well.

Most of us have done this unconsciously as children playing. We would pretend to be animals, barking like dogs or running like horses, doing it all without giving it a thought. As children, we are still freely observing and mimicking, and we put our whole body and soul into it; we do it for fun. For an actor to work on an animal, as a sense memory, it requires a more precise set of concentration and observational skills than we had as children in order for it to be effective, but nonetheless, you have to put your whole body and soul into it.

The animal exercise starts with the physical exploration of a chosen animal and moves into character work. The animal becomes upright, human, with some remaining traits. It can be used to create a new character (one that has never existed before) or to explore a character that you are working on already. In today’s world of filmmaking, where motion capture has made it possible to monitor, record, and manipulate every muscle of an actor’s body to create such characters as those in Planet of the Apes, the actor has to place a new emphasis on “physical reality.” Choosing the right animal to work on can help you accomplish that.

CHOOSING THE ANIMAL

There are many ways to choose the animal that you should work on. Often it will just come to you by chance, as it did to Andy Serkis. He had just begun to work on a specific character and was looking for a way to enter it. In the beginning, he was only concerned with what the character would sound like because, at that stage, he was only auditioning to do the voice. But, the voice is housed in the body—one affects the other—so he knew he would have to physicalize it. Although he eventually left the cat behind, it was his springboard into the world of the character. That is often the case with animal work; the animal is a springboard that propels you into being in your body in a way that creates a unique character. As you work on it, as with many sense memories, the character, the script, and the actual shooting take over and become dominant forces that propel your work.

Sometimes the choice is governed by an affinity or love that we have always had for a certain animal; we are drawn to them. Sometimes we choose the animal because we believe they have characteristics, be they physical or habitual, that we feel we need for a character. And sometimes, as is often the case in present-day filming, we are playing a character that is an animal or transforms into one that will later be altered through motion capture and CGI animation—or whatever new technology may be coming down the pike.

Then there are times when a character is accompanied by a reference to an animal, as in The Hairy Ape by Eugene O’Neill. In the opening scene of the play, we have a description of YANK, the lead character and hairy ape of the title; O’Neill writes, “The curtain rises on a tumult of sound. YANK is seated in the foreground. He seems broader, fiercer, more truculent, more powerful, more sure of himself than the rest. They respect his superior strength—the grudging respect of fear. Then, too, he represents to them a self-expression, the very last word in what they are, their most highly developed individual.” For another example, in A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams introduces Blanche Dubois with the following description: “Her delicate beauty must avoid a strong light. There is something about her delicate manner, as well as her white clothes, that suggests a moth.”

Not everyone who works on Yank or Blanche DuBois will take notice of the animal in the description and take it literally, but if an actor were to take note, it does shed light on the movements and attitude as perceived by O’Neill and Williams. You might think such a reference to an animal is not worthy of deep concentration and focus; however, you would never know, unless you tried to create the physical reality of an ape or a moth and discovered how it influences these characters. It is interesting to note that O’Neill concludes that Yank is “their most highly developed individual.” The hairy ape referenced in the title of the play is very human.

In discussions of acting technique, there is this great debate on working from the outside-in as opposed to working inside-out. The outside-in method (often called the English approach) opts to first choose gestures, clothing, and outward behavior to show or create an interior state of a character. The inside-out method (usually attributed to the “method” actor) connects to the interior workings of a character, discovering how the internal affects the way the character moves, dresses, and behaves. Choosing to take the character description literally might seem like going for the outside-in method, when in fact it is both. The animal exercise begins with the exterior and leads to the internal, which in turn has an effect on the exterior. It then leads to plenty of surprising discoveries.

Actors will often go to the zoo to study animal behavior and their physical characteristics. When I was studying, we were told to go to the Central Park Zoo and observe a specific animal. You had to go every day for a week and observe the animal for at least an hour. This way, it wasn’t just a polar bear; it was Gus, the polar bear at the Central Park Zoo, who had a very specific personality. The downside of doing the exercise in this way is that you are only observing an animal in captivity. However, you can get very close and often interact with the animal in a safer manner than in the wild; sometimes you can smell them, which has always had a strong effect on me. Try going when the weather is not optimal, such as in winter, especially in rain or snow. If you have never been to a zoo under these conditions, well, you don’t know what you’re missing. Weather conditions give you the opportunity to observe varying behavior in the animals, both negative and positive, depending on the animal. The arctic fox and polar bear are quite happy in a snowstorm.

I always try to bring my acting classes to the zoo as a group to introduce them to the animal exercise. At first they think it is just playtime; they have preconceived ideas about the animals and tend to revert to behavior left over from childhood experiences of zoo visits. After a while, each student finds an animal that attracts him or her, and they want to stay with it longer. Usually they will choose this animal to work on. Whichever way an actor comes to choose an animal, the choice reveals itself to be significant fairly quickly.

CREATING THE ANIMAL

Once you have the chosen the animal, you begin the process of careful observation. You need to keep an open mind while going about this, a mind that constantly wonders and asks questions, a mind that is always inquiring and searching to see and understand more than just what meets the eye. Most animals are fairly familiar to us, or at least we think they are, thanks to the abundance of nature shows and documentaries. Everyone knows what a seal looks like and can easily identify it as a seal. For instance, we immediately know that we’re not looking at a dog. But we should learn to carefully observe that which we easily recognize and is familiar to us. When we do this, we open the imagination to a fuller spectrum of possibilities; it brings us into the moment, discovering new things. It is always a good idea to simply start with the five senses.

THE FIVE SENSES OF YOUR CHOSEN ANIMAL

Let’s take each of the senses separately and ask a series of questions. The prompts here are just a start to the many questions that you might ask once you’ve chosen your animal. At first it is best to just observe and ask as many questions as possible. Take notes in your Journal. You might want to make a sketch of your observations. If you aren’t good at drawing, it doesn’t matter; just a rough outline to jog your memory will do fine. It’s not about the quality of the finished drawing, but about the thought and creativity that goes into making it. Later, when you get back to your studio to work, you can apply the facts that you have observed to your own body. I have listed the senses below. It is not important which order you do things in; what’s important is that you choose one and explore it fully before moving to the next.

Sight—The type of eyes an animal has gives you many clues as to how it must survive in the wild. Where are the eyes positioned? How big are they? How would I see and move my head if my eyes were in the same place as this animal? Do you think the animal’s vision is the same as yours? For instance, can it see as clearly; can it see better than you can or worse? Does it have night vision? What is it looking at? What is it looking for?

Sound—The hearing sense of the animal, like its sight, is extremely important to its survival. Ask yourself, where are the ears? Are they positioned like mine, on the side of my head, or are they on top of the head? What can the animal do with its ears that I cannot do? What is it listening for? If I had hearing like this animal, what would be possible to hear? Do the ears move in different directions?

It is normal to start asking why the animal is constructed the way that it is, but in the beginning, it is best to just stick to basic facts and keep it physical. The “why” should be explored later. I used to think that robins were so graceful, the way they hopped and moved their heads from side to side in what I perceived as a cute little dance. Then I was told that they are moving their heads that way, hopping on the lawn, to listen for worms and such moving in the dirt below. They’re hunting!

Smell—The sense of smell is often highly developed in animals, much more so than ours. For example, a dog’s brain devotes 40 percent more space to the sense of smell than ours does. Ask yourself, where is your animal’s nose? Is it obvious or hidden? How does the animal use its sense of smell? Where is the nose in relation to the eyes or the mouth? If your nose were where the animal’s is, how would it change the way you move your head?

Taste—What is the construction of the mouth? What are the many things the mouth can do? Are there teeth? How big are they? What is the tongue like? How long is it? Is it visible? This logically move to the question—what does the animal eat? Then, how does it get its food?

Touch—Touch is an adventure when it comes to working on the animal exercise. Touch is not only done with the hands; it occurs over the entire body. As mentioned in Chapter 5, “The Skin and the Overall,” we are encased in the largest organ of our bodies, our skin. Animals are also encased, but depending on the animal, it is not always only skin; they have much more variety.

What is the nature of the “skin” of the animal you have chosen? What is on the skin? Fur? Scales? Feathers? Whatever it is, it is surely quite different than ours. Its covering has functions that human skin does not possess. How does it move? What is its texture? How does the animal care for it?

When working, I think it is always good to apply the “What if.” What if my body was covered with fur, with much longer fur around my head, neck, and shoulders like a lion’s mane? How would that change me? What if I were covered in bright pink feathers that I could ruffle and make stand up when something excited me? How would that change my behavior? And so on. Simplistic? Yes, but try it and see what it brings.

While exploring the five senses of the animal, you have already started to explore the anatomy. Like any of the other sense memories, it is very important to remain methodical and try as much as possible to stay on track, exploring one aspect at a time. This way you won’t get too confused.

Creating the animal should be a slow process. The actor’s imagination will want to take flight and do the whole thing, create the whole animal quickly and have some fun. But it is best not to move too fast to playing and being the animal; instead, allow a targeted area to be fully explored before moving to the next step.

ANATOMY

The skeleton of all mammals is relatively the same. If you study your own skeleton, then that of several mammals, you will quickly see the similarities. Even fish, reptiles, and birds all stem from common ancestors and have skeletal similarities. It doesn’t hurt to be familiar with the structure of your own skeleton when discovering the differences that make up your animal. There are thousands of questions that you can ask to discover more about the animal as it merges with you. My suggestions are just a few. Invariably you will find many more of your own, as you work day by day. I personally like to start with the hands. I find this illuminates so many more aspects of the anatomy, but that’s just my choice; you will no doubt find your own way. Here’s a typical path of questioning that I might follow:

I observe my hand; I feel its weight, how it hangs from the wrist and how the fingers are joined to the palm. I move my fingers and notice how the various joints work. Even though I’ve done it a thousand times and obviously have used my hands throughout my entire life, I am always amazed that I discover something new about my own hand and how it works. Then I imagine that the animal’s “hand” is my hand and notice what the changes are. I use the Stanislavsky “What if.” What if my hand was a hoof? How would it hang from my wrist then? How would the arm hang from the shoulder? And so on.

MOVEMENT

The exploration of the five senses and the anatomy of your chosen animal will inevitably lead to the way the animal moves. This will bring you to the question of not only how the animal moves because of the way it is structured, but why it is moving. The environment in which it lives and the way it meets its basic needs will guide you to how and when it moves. This will then lead to a further exploration of the five senses and the anatomy.

There are so many different variations to follow as you continue to work with the anatomy. The path you follow will be the one that inspires you the most; it will be the path that your new animal ally will lead you down. There will be a point in the animal exercise when you no longer know who is leading whom. Are you conducting the exercise, or is the animal now leading you? It is like the acting class mirror exercise, where partners mirror each other’s actions, one leading and one mimicking in a mirror image. There comes a point when the partners no longer know who the leader is, but you both move in a kind of mirroring, unison dance. This is what happens with your animal and you.

RESEARCHING YOUR ANIMAL

After you have worked on the animal for a few weeks, you will want to do some further research on it. Certainly you already know the basics, such as where it comes from, what type of terrain it lives in, what it eats, and so forth. Each species has its own complex rituals of social behavior that govern the lives of its members. There is much information readily available today on almost any animal. Just a word of caution: don’t get caught up in too many facts. Again, choose a specific topic, such as mating rituals, hunting, or rearing of the young. Then systematically concentrate on it to see what it brings you. It is helpful to look at the needs of the script to determine which direction to go. If you are simply working on the animal to open up your acting instrument, then you have the luxury of time, and you can enjoy the relationship that has emerged between you and animal without being distracted by unnecessary information.

CREATING THE CHARACTER

Much has been written about the magical qualities of animals. Mythology is full of references to animals leading humans to a greater understanding of nature and the universe. The stories are often tales of being lost in the woods or being at wit’s end when a guiding force appears in the shape of an animal. It is in this spirit that the actor allows the animal to become human, with some of the animal traits remaining. This is a difficult process to describe because it is so individual. Everyone finds their own way to do this, governed by the animal that they have chosen. If the character is ultimately a human one, then the goal is to get upright and move in a fashion that will eventually be recognizably human. Here one slowly allows the inner workings of the character to merge with the outer aspects of the character, cloaked in the animal traits. It takes time to discover the right balance, and certainly you’ll be governed by the demands of the script. If the exercise is done with the proper relaxation and concentration, the choices of what stays and what goes will become clear soon enough, but the animal will stay within you and come up in the most surprising ways.

If the character is in fact to be an animal, or partially one, then you will be governed by the needs of that character. Many actors who have worked on characters that are a hybrid of advanced technology and the actor’s craft have been astounded by how much like theater rehearsals it becomes. Yes, there is the physical work on the animal, but ultimately the discussion moves to motivations and needs. These are still the basics that all actors must find out about the character that they play. Whatever the medium or technological enhancement, the basics remain the same. The tech team will explain the physical attributes that are necessary for their enhancements. The interior, or soul, will still be up to the actor to create. If you’ve worked on the animal correctly, then some of their instinctual motivations, their life-or-death choices, their will to survive will stay with you and enhance your character in a way that is still not possible to be produced with technology.

PERSONAL NOTE

The animal exercise is one that is very dear to my heart; it is one that I find most enjoyable and enriching. It is what one finds on the inside of the exercise that can be deceptive, at first, to the eye. It is an easy conclusion that actors who are very physical in their approach merely have to train their bodies to produce wonderful results. There is a personal growth that comes through creating a corporeal illusion, although that growth may be elusive to many. An actor can always take it to another level and explore what the outward physical process inspires in the soul. This type of work comes with consequences that go beyond mere storytelling and takes on the power of true transformation. This transformation can be found in dedicated work on the animal exercise.

The next chapter will begin to deal with the space outside of yourself, as we begin to explore to whom we are speaking when we speak to the camera and how to create an imaginary partner through substitution.