Method Acting: What It Is, How It Works and How to Practice It Safely

Where method acting comes from

The story starts in 1923, when Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre toured the US. Strasberg, then a young actor, sat in the audience, and the company’s truthful, effortless acting stunned him. Two of its actors, Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya, stayed in New York and opened the American Laboratory Theatre. Strasberg studied there, and so did Stella Adler. Our guide to the Stanislavski method covers the Russian side of the story.

In 1931 Strasberg, Harold Clurman and Cheryl Crawford gathered 28 actors and founded the Group Theatre. Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner and Elia Kazan were all part of it. Strasberg trained the company with sensory exercises, relaxation, script analysis and improvisation. According to the Stella Adler Studio, he called it “my method of acting,” and later simply “the Method.”

After the Group broke up, Elia Kazan, Cheryl Crawford and Robert Lewis founded the Actors Studio in 1947. Strasberg joined in 1948 and became artistic director in 1951, a post he held until his death in 1982. The Studio’s own history calls it “the home of method acting.” In 1969, he and his wife Anna opened the institute that carries his name, to reach a wider public. Late in life he even acted on screen, earning an Oscar nomination as Hyman Roth in The Godfather Part II.

How method acting works, tool by tool

Strasberg’s Method rests on a few connected skills. You build them step by step, since each one prepares the next.

Relaxation

Everything starts here. You hunt down the tension you carry without noticing, maybe in your jaw or your shoulders, and you let it go. In Strasberg’s view, mental and physical tension restricts expression. At the Strasberg Institute, students practice relaxation in every class until they can release tension at will. Later in life, Strasberg also added unusual movements and sounds to the exercise.

Concentration and sense memory

Sense memory comes next. You recreate a simple object or sensation with your five senses, while your hands stay empty. For example, you might rebuild the weight and heat of a coffee mug, or the sun on your face. Over time, the exercises grow more complex and more emotionally charged. They also train concentration, because they give you something real to focus on instead of the audience or the camera. If nerves get in your way, our guide to stage fright has more tools.

Affective memory

This is the best-known tool and the most debated one. Strasberg asked actors to recall an intense moment from their own past, in sensory detail, and use the feelings it brought back in a scene. The Institute describes the classic version as reliving a “once in a lifetime” event so you can reach an explosive moment at will. For Strasberg, recreating an emotion on stage wasn’t enough. You had to relive it.

The term goes back to Stanislavski, who borrowed it from the French psychologist Théodule Ribot. Strasberg, however, put it at the center of his training, and that choice started a long fight, as you’ll see below.

Private Moment, Animal and other exercises

At the Actors Studio, Strasberg developed exercises aimed at the personal habits that make actors hold back. The best known are Private Moment and Song and Dance. In the Animal exercise, you physically recreate an animal’s behavior and then bring it into a human character. You’ll also hear about the Place, the Personal Object and the Emotional Memory exercises, all part of the sequence Strasberg kept refining in the 1960s and 1970s.

What a Method acting class looks like

At the Strasberg Institute in New York, Method Acting classes are the core of the program. Each student takes two of them per term, with two different teachers. A class lasts four hours and comes in two halves, according to the school’s class descriptions. “Work on the self” uses relaxation and sensory exercises to build concentration. Then “work on the character” applies those exercises to scenes.

Electives build on that base. A character class, for example, uses the Animal exercise, a Need exercise and a Private Moment for the character, along with improvisation. Having a trained teacher in the room matters most once the exercises turn emotional. To practice scene work on your own, try one of these dramatic monologues.

Method acting vs. Stanislavski, Adler and Meisner

All four approaches chase truthful behavior. Where they split is the source of emotion. Here’s a simplified map, since many teachers mix tools from several schools.

Adler, Meisner and the fight over memory

The split goes back to 1934. Adler spent five weeks working with Stanislavski in Paris and came back to the Group with a new understanding of his work. Her studio’s history says she was uncomfortable with Strasberg’s way of working. She began teaching other members herself, and in 1949 she opened her own school. As PBS’s American Masters puts it, her teaching grew from the idea that “the theater exists 99% in the imagination.”

The Strasberg camp reads the history differently. Its institute quotes a 1937 letter in which Stanislavski called it “untrue” that he had given up the memory of feelings. So the argument over affective memory is still alive, almost a century later.

Sanford Meisner, another Group member, took a third road. He joined the Neighborhood Playhouse in 1935 and developed his technique there. Instead of your own past, it puts your attention on the other person, so you respond truthfully to what they actually do. If you’re choosing a teacher, ask which of these traditions they work in. Our guide on how to choose acting classes lists the other questions worth asking.

Famous actors who trained in method acting

The Actors Studio’s list of notable members reads like a film history class. It includes James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Paul Newman, Jane Fonda, Ellen Burstyn, Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro. The Strasberg Institute adds Al Pacino to its own list of Method actors. Butler, for his part, calls Pacino’s work in The Godfather perhaps the purest example of the technique.

Marlon Brando is the tricky case. He appears on the Actors Studio list, and the publisher’s description of Strasberg’s book A Dream of Passion names him among Strasberg’s actors. Yet PBS lists both Brando and De Niro among the students of Stella Adler’s conservatory. Many actors trained with more than one teacher. So before you call someone a method actor, check who actually taught them.

Criticism and risks of method acting

Staying in character, the myth Strasberg rejected

This is the biggest misunderstanding. In Butler’s account, Method actors on film sets faced a practical problem. How do you switch it on the moment someone calls “action”? One answer was to never break character at all. “That is not what Strasberg taught,” Butler told NPR, adding that Strasberg strongly opposed it.

The habit spread after De Niro won the 1981 Oscar for Raging Bull. According to Butler, stories of extreme preparation then became part of the publicity and awards campaigns around acting. The Strasberg Institute goes further. It calls the image of an actor who mystically “becomes” the character, or lives it in real life, a cliché.

The emotional cost

Affective memory sends you back to real moments, sometimes painful ones, and that’s where most of the criticism lands. Reliving a loss again and again, in class and then night after night in a run, can leave you drained. It can also stir up things a scene was never meant to heal. Adler and Meisner, for their part, built their techniques on imagination and on the scene partner instead.

Acting itself can be hard to shake off, whatever your technique. In a University of Sydney study of 782 actors, about 40 percent had trouble relaxing or letting go after an emotionally and physically demanding role. The authors asked drama schools and theaters to build in structured cool-down time after performances, just as actors already warm up before them.

How to practice method acting safely

Used with care, the Method’s tools can deepen your work. These habits help keep it that way.

Train with a teacher, and set your limits

Emotional exercises need someone in the room who knows when to push and when to stop. So ask any teacher how they handle an exercise that goes too far. If you draw on your own past, pick memories you can already look at with some distance, never a fresh wound. You can also pause or stop any exercise. Imagination works too, and our guide on how to cry on command covers gentler routes to emotion, like specific images and breath.

Step out of the role when you finish

Drama therapists call this de-roling. A Kansas State University release describes it as taking a role off after rehearsal so you can come back to yourself. Simple versions include shaking out your arms and legs, or handing a prop or costume piece back to the director as a small ritual. Sally Bailey, then head of the school’s drama therapy program, noted that actors spend years learning to get into a role. Yet “they’re never taught techniques about getting out of it.”

Build your own exit routine and use it every time. Change clothes, wash your face, drink some water or say your own name out loud. Moving in a way your character never would also helps, and so do a few improv games with your group. For more body-based tools, see our guide to physical acting.

Ask for help when something stays with you

Sometimes a role or an exercise leaves you anxious for days, keeps you up at night or brings back a painful memory. If that happens, talk to your teacher or someone you trust. If it doesn’t ease, see a mental health professional. In the US, the Entertainment Community Fund offers mental health support to people who work in performing arts and entertainment, from counseling to referrals.

Where to study method acting today

The Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute has campuses in New York and Los Angeles, with conservatories, shorter programs and intensives. Our guides to acting classes in NYC and acting classes in Los Angeles cover both campuses. If you also speak Spanish, the LA campus runs a two-week intensive in Spanish.

The Actors Studio works differently. As its FAQ explains, it doesn’t sell classes. Actors earn a free lifetime membership by passing a series of auditions, then work on scenes in private, a bit like athletes at a gym. If you want a degree, the Studio partners with Pace University on a three-year MFA at the Actors Studio Drama School, in acting, directing or playwriting.

Want a look inside the training? In this short video from the Institute’s New York campus, teachers, alumni and co-founder Anna Strasberg talk about the Method, with glimpses of students at work.

What is Method Acting?