Name: Oscar winning actor & writer Tom Hanks gives the Oxford Union an acting lesson
Uploaded: 2024-12-29T14:47:37.000Z
Duration: 18 min 41 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

There are no small parts, there are only small actors.

What you have to get over in order to do what I do for a living, and a handful of other people in this room also do for a living, is you have to get past any sense of self-consciousness.

You cannot care what you look like or what you sound like.

You can only get up, hit the marks, and tell the truth, no matter what the line is, no matter what the circumstance is, no matter what the emotion is, that you must not fake, but recreate at that individual moment.

Spencer Tracy said you have to hit the marks and tell the truth.

That is a very hard thing to do naturally.

So we are all going to take part in an acting class tonight, every single one of you.

All right, this first and probably most precious exercise is called repetitions.

If you take an acting class, which, in all honesty, I never did, but if you take an acting class, one of the ways you break down self-consciousness, which is your own concept of what you look like and how you sound, you do this little exercise called repetition.

And what you have to do, and we're going to do it out loud so everybody can get past any of that.

No one's going to be called on the carpet, but everybody does have to participate, otherwise I'll cripple you.

You have to ring out every possible meaning, every possible cadence, every possible variation of that line of dialogue.

In a repetitions class, you would have to stand in front of everybody else in the class and keep saying it again and again and again in a different form, and you only lose your chance to do that when you repeat yourself.

So the line is, is there something I can do for you?

And we are all going to now say that as many different ways as we can.

The line, once again, is, is there something I can do for you?

So you know the words, and you've already experienced them.

Okay, now I'm going to give you the circumstance.

You're going to go off, and you're going to have a cup of coffee with someone that you have a great crush on, and you believe that person has a great crush on you.

You're at the beginning of a marvelous relationship with someone who you think is going to perhaps give you, if not a lifetime of happiness, a few weeks or a few months.

It's going to be a lovely, lovely evening, and you are going to go and have a delightful exchange with somebody you're looking forward to.

But up in front of you, an elderly person carrying a package has tripped and fallen down onto their knees.

And someone who looks like one of your grandparents or an elderly neighbor has fallen down and landed on one knee.

It must be different from what you just did.

You work in an information booth at City Hall.

All you do all day long is say those words to everybody that comes in through the door.

Sometimes they don't speak your same language, but it doesn't matter because your job, the way you earn your living, is to sit in that booth and all day long say, is there something I can do for you?

You've said it 8 million times in the course of the last 3 years, right?

Not only that, your spouse at home, you've been arguing with them like crazy, your kids are all brats, you'd like to go off, you haven't been to see a movie in months because you can't afford it.

You are not a happy person on this midweek exchange your hours that you're putting in.

You are bored, you are tired, and you're angry.

But guess what you have to say to everybody that comes in to the hallway.

You have to say, you're way too passive, far too interested.

Again, you're going to be, look at the clock, realize that it's still 17 minutes to lunch, and you're going to look up and say, OK, ready?

Can you be a little more angry, bored, and vituperative, if I'm using that word properly. 1, 2, 3.

Someone has stood in front of you for a few minutes and hasn't asked a question.

You're just going to look up to them and say, 3, 2, 1.

Alright, look at the difference between those two lines.

One, you're incredibly happy and you feel sorry for somebody who's there.

This one, you're incredibly bored and unhappy and you have to say this to this person.

Is there something I can do for you has very different connotations.

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Oscar winning actor & writer Tom Hanks gives the Oxford Union an acting lesson

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