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How does an actor prepare for a role?

From Stanislavski to Strasberg, Adler and Meisner: how the acting schools approach preparing for a role, and the example of Raging Bull.

WyvOne Editör · 06.11.2026

To play the boxer Jake LaMotta in Öfkeli Boğa (Raging Bull, 1980), Robert De Niro first took boxing lessons from LaMotta himself. He fought three bouts in Brooklyn and won two. When the film reached LaMotta's retirement years, production stopped for about four months; during that time De Niro traveled through Northern Italy and France to gain weight, and the crew kept receiving their pay. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the role.

This is the most spectacular form of preparation. But preparing for a role is often much quieter, and each of the four big names in acting training starts from a different place.

Stanislavski: what do I want on stage?

The Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavski built a "system" for acting while working at the Moscow Art Theatre in the early 20th century. His ideas were collected in his books An Actor Prepares, Building a Character and Creating a Role.

The first question of the system is simple: what is the character trying to get right now? Stanislavski called this the "objective." He called the underlying concern that ties the small objectives together the "super-objective." The actor works this out by knowing the given circumstances of the play: where the character is, who they are with and what is at stake. In an article he wrote in 1909, he also described the idea of the "magic if": the actor responds to fictional circumstances as if they were real.

At first this analysis was done at the table. In later years Stanislavski reduced table talk. Actors discovered the sequence of events in a scene by improvising, that is, by moving. This is called the "method of physical actions" and "active analysis."

These ideas reached America through the classes given at the American Laboratory Theatre in New York by Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya, who were students of Stanislavski. An Actor Prepares was translated into English in abridged form in 1936. What follows is a debate over interpretation: what did Stanislavski say, and what should be learned from him?

Strasberg and Adler: memory or imagination?

Lee Strasberg was among the founders of the Group Theatre in New York in 1931 and taught Stanislavski's ideas in America under the name "Method." At the center of his method was "affective memory": the actor feeds the emotion on stage by recalling a powerful experience from their own life.

Stella Adler, the only member of the group who had worked directly with Stanislavski, disagreed. Adler worked with Stanislavski for five weeks in Paris in 1934. By her own account, Stanislavski had by then given up affective memory and based creativity not on memory but on imagination. On her return, Adler broke with Strasberg. In her view the actor should not rummage through their own past but imagine the circumstances of the scene. The text should also be read like a treasure map: the character's situation is hidden inside the writing. Adler also said the actor should study the values of other people and cultures, because a situation may mean nothing in the actor's own world.

Their students show this split too. Paul Newman, Al Pacino and Marilyn Monroe are named among Strasberg's students, and Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro among Adler's. So the teacher of the actor at the start of this piece was on the side that opposed affective memory.

Meisner: listen to the person across from you

Sanford Meisner also left the Group Theatre and kept his distance from affective memory. His approach turns attention from the actor to the scene partner. His best-known exercise is repetition: two actors stand facing each other, one says something they observe, for example "you're wearing a red shirt," and the other repeats the same sentence. The sentence stays the same, but with each repetition it takes on a different meaning according to the partner's behavior. The subject gradually becomes what is going on between the two people, such as "you look angry at me." The actor stops planning what to say and starts to react.

So the difference between the two approaches lies in the answer an actor gives to the question "where will I find this emotion?" For Strasberg the answer is the actor's own past, for Adler the circumstances of the text and imagination, and for Meisner the person across from you on stage.

Do you have to live inside the role?

"Method" often brings to mind actors who stay in character off the set too. Yet it is noted that this is not something Strasberg taught and is a common misunderstanding. It is also written that actors who cannot unload their emotional burden may experience insomnia, fatigue and anxiety.

The tools these schools offer for preparation do not exclude each other. Analyzing the text, finding the character's objective, preparing the body for the role if needed and listening to the partner on set can all go into the same actor's bag. As in De Niro's example: boxing is a skill and gaining weight is physical preparation, but what builds the relationship in the scene is the response the actor gives to the person across from them.