A few weeks ago, I was watching Matt Damon and Ben Affleck on Joe Rogans podcast talk about acting and AI and how human emotions aren’t easily replicable by AI generated videos because humans are creative in how they feel emotions. They talked of Dwayne Johnson in Smashing Machine adopting certain characteristics to reflect the sadness of the characters’ father passing, which wasn’t obvious and would unlikely have been something that AI could have thought of. I can’t recall who out of Matt or Ben said then that the difference is that while actors try to cry, real people try not to cry.

This struck me as immediately true.

Real people adopt all these innovative mechanisms to avoid doing the emotion that necessarily arises. We cry less than we should or we hide the fear or sadness under something else like anger or despondency. And in fact, great acting is often complemented when it can show the layers of an emotion – show the fear while acting angry. We complement it because assumedly that’s how people really are: Expressing emotions through layers. We make it difficult for ourselves to cry whereas actors try to show their sadness more than most normal humans do. And so bad acting just becomes an obvious (on the face) expression of the emotion – it lacks depth.

For the last two or three months, I have been pretty focused on looking at how I am avoiding feeling emotions. One aspect of this is just genuinely asking what it means for me to feel the emotions. It’s difficult to know at the start what this means exactly. But after a lot of time of watching myself and my reactions, I can see how feeling a difficult emotion is avoided by tightening my body, or intellectualising what I’m feeling to soothe myself, or coming up with a story about what I’m feeling to make myself feel a different emotion, or immediately springing into action to fix myself to make myself feel okay with doing a bad thing, or 20 other things.

The funny thing I realised in the process is that when I end up not resisting the feeling, I can feel my body wanting to act out the emotion in the stereotypical way we see the emotion. Like, when I stopped resisting grief, I can feel my body scrunching my face ready to cry and let tears out. And when I do that, just doing the motion, I feel so much better. Or when anger is arising, I can feel a feeling to release energy from my throat by speaking or yelling. And when I let it to do that, I feel instantly better.

And this got me to think about how actors act those emotions. There’s a reason why we associate sadness and anger with certain movements and actions – people have been releasing the energy of that emotion in that way throughout history. And so an actor steps into the role and performs those actions, without needing to hide behind impossible layers that resist the emotion.

So a practice I’ve been incorporating is too see how an actor stepping into my situation would act it out. Deep down, on an objective basis, I can tell how someone in my situation would be feeling. And if it had an audience to convey its feelings to, it would behave in a certain way. And so I do that – pretend I’m an actor in my body and perform the actions of showing my the emotions my character is playing. So then acting becomes a method of moving emotions through my body. Cos the actor doesn’t feel shame around the emotions and it doesn’t need to intellectualise the emotions to avoid showing them (it wants to show them).

I think in that aspect the movie Hamnet (2025) was super inspiring as well. I don’t know the accuracy of the novel but in it, William Shakespeare creates Hamlet and steps into the role of the dead father as a means of feeling like his dead son must have felt in real life. He feels the grief, and then to connect with his son, acts the role of the dead person seeing those he left behind him.

One practice I’m thinking of adopting is to write a monologue of all the thoughts running through my head, and then performing that monologue as a third person actor stepping into my shoes to really help the emotions move through my body.