Screen Acting. A Cognitive Approach

Takes a cognitive approach to screen acting

Provides an innovative critical model for studying screen acting as a creative professional practice

Connects interdisciplinary ideas from film, theatre, and television studies with modern neuroscientific models of embodied and distributed cognition

Draws on interviews with professional actors and the author’s decades of experience as a professional actor

This book approaches film and television acting from an actor’s perspective rather than that of an audience member, and therefore theorizes how screen acting works as a process that engages an actor’s memory, imagination, emotions, and physical body in the creation of a character. It argues that film actors strive to perform profound empathetic connections with their characters and fellow actors, and then put themselves out there through performing to make those connections clear to the eventual audience. It combines interviews with working professional film and television actors, key insights and methods from Film, Television, and Theatre Studies, and theories of imagination and embodiment to show that screen actors are more than just the moving parts" of the mise-en-scene.