What exactly do acting schools teach? Why do some stars have extensive schooling and others appear to have just walked onto a set?
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I have no experience with acting but I do a fair amount of public speaking.
Some people are naturally good at it. They can “feel” the mood of the audience and they have an intuitive understanding of what they can say and do to change those feelings.
Over the years I’ve learned a bunch of tricks that help with public speaking though; dramatic pauses, how to stand, how to emphasize certain words or phrases etc. That’s from a series of short courses so it’s only a fraction of what someone would learn in a full degree.
I’ve also found that while there’s some carry over between speaking to a room full of people and running a webinar, there are also huge differences. Acting schools will teach about those differences (and others) too.
There are different methods of acting, and different schools teach them. Imagine you have to act as a character who is terribly sad. One method of acting teaches that if you feel the emotions your character would feel, then your physical responses will be more accurate – if you feel sad enough you will cry, you will hunch over, you will gasp for breath, etc. Another method basically teaches acting the other way around: that if you very carefully and precisely move in the ways that a sad character would (cry, hunch, gasp), the emotions will come with that.
Some actors come by those methods naturally, and really only need to be told by the director where to stand.
Acting schools will also teach the boring mechanical details of acting – for film and TV how you have to stand in specific places or the camera won’t focus on you (called “hitting a mark”); for stage, how to project your voice loudly enough to be heard even in the cheap seats; how to memorize lines or read from cue cards without looking like you are reading. No matter how naturally you come to act, you still have to learn the mechanics.
there are a lot of “mechanical” things about acting that you can teach – how to project your voice, how to deal with sightlines, singing and dancing, accents, movement, etc
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