June 8, 2026
As an actor, I’ve often been challenged by learning lines. Yesterday in acting class I had a breakthrough.
The theory was simple: We absorb, learn, retain and are better able to recall things we learn in a highly emotional state.
Makes sense, right? We all remember minute details of where we were when we got the news of major life or world events.
It soaks in.
So in practice, our teacher Jon had a person feeding us a line auditorily. They held the script and read each line to the actor who was learning the text.
Importantly, when you’re the one learning the lines you have no visual reference of the text. So you’re not reaching internally to create an image of the text to recall it. You are hearing it, but that’s not what this technique encourages you to do either- you aren’t supposed to hear the word in your minds ‘ear’.
Instead, as we’re being fed the line, we are working extremely physically inside one of five actions that relate to emotions; essentially variations of pushing and pulling.
While we are working physically in this way, the line is fed to us, and we repeat the line over and over, using the words we’re saying to help us play our action of pushing or pulling. We are generating physicalised emotion with the body.
We continued this for 15 minutes per actor. And the lines went in, yes… but not in a way I’m used to.
When it came time to recall the text, I wasn’t grabbing at it the same way I usually do, it was more… seeping up from underneath. Coming up from underneath to support me. Much more like how ideas form into sentences for me in real life. It didn’t feel like I knew them, but as I said the first line, the next one came out and then the next and the next.
The best part was they came out differently every time (which is gold for an actor)
It changed a fundamental building block of my whole craft as an actor- how I learn lines. If this fundamental thing changes, I wonder what the trickle down effects are?
