An Unexpected Bridge to Truthful Acting

Written by Nzingha Rothmiller

Editor's Note

What if becoming a better actor isn't about learning something new, but remembering something you've forgotten? In this article, Nzingha Rothmiller invites us to reconsider the role of play, imagination, and childhood in the creative process.

I used to have an imaginary friend named Bob. I never saw him. I can’t describe what his face looked like, how tall he was, or what clothes he wore. But his presence was strong. Whenever he appeared, the air around me grew thick with malice and mystery. I get chills down my spine just thinking about it. I shared Bob with my older sister Kaylah. We would play these games where he was hunting us and our kids, who were just a collection of stuffed animals, through all of America. Somehow we’d end up in a crafted world of dirty motels in random states, hiding away from Bob, who would always eventually find us. This is the first recollection I have of acting in my life. I had no idea what it was then; how could a six year old possibly explain wanting to escape one fucked up world by going into one of her own creation?

When I got accepted to NYU, I was placed in the Lee Strasberg Institute: the studio for method acting. I found it pretty offensive at first. My understanding of the studio placement system was similar to that of Hogwarts. The auditioners get a sense of who you are, and where you fit. I didn’t understand how Method Acting fit me. Why would I use the things that happened to me in my acting? How would my hurt help in any way? It wasn’t until my second year that I fully understood.

Method Acting put simply, is using your personal life experiences to help drive the emotions within a text. In order to reach these emotions, we learned how to do exercises called sense memory. In the first year we started off small: imagining a lemon, the bumps on its skin, the tart taste. As the training went on, we got more advanced. My second year, we had reached the point of an exercise called emotional memory. The task was to get on a bare stage alone; nothing but a cold folding chair and hot spotlight as accompaniment. The idea was to put yourself back in something that happened in your life that caused you to feel any extreme emotion. One guy imagined himself at his grandfather’s funeral when he was 14. Another girl recalled the first time she masturbated. At this point in my training, I couldn’t grasp emotional memory. All of the other sensory exercises came naturally to me. I could taste a lemon that was not there and feel rain indoors. Despite that, acting still felt like performing to me. I could not thrust myself into the depths of darkness that were my real emotions.

When it was my turn to get onstage, I was petrified. I broke out in a sweat before I even reached the spotlight. I sat in the chair with caution, allowing the cold metal to shock me back to reality. I locked eyes with my kooky teacher Gina, who had this sick excitement in her eyes, almost frothing at the mouth, ready to see what I was willing to show. She started leading me through the exercise. I closed my eyes, trying to clear my mind, and think about the worst thing that ever happened to me; an event that made me feel something. As Gina’s steady voice sent me back in time to my childhood bedroom, the events of a particularly chaotic day in my nine year old life started to unfold on the stage. As I was knee deep in this memory, I felt the air grow thick with malice and mystery. My eyes snapped open, and I saw Bob standing in front of me.

I couldn’t see his face, but I knew he was smiling. The kind of grin that spreads across your whole face as you recognize someone you once knew. Suddenly, I was placed back in those dirty motel rooms in Wisconsin, protecting stuffed animal babies with my sister. I locked eyes with Gina again, that sick excitement in my eyes mirroring hers. Together she, Bob, and I went through the exercise. I finally remembered how to play. It was like I was six again, but this time I wasn’t living through the fucked up experiences. Instead, I was using the emotions they evoked within me to breathe life onto the stage in front of me. I understood why I was placed in the method acting studio after that day. That auditioner was giving me the opportunity to take my life back, to make my memories the catalyst of hope, as opposed to a corpse of despair.

I walked out of the studio feeling lighter. I don’t know if it was raining that day, but I could feel the warm droplets on my skin. As I walked home, Bob walked with me. He held my hand as I crossed the street, moved me out of the way when a sidewalk biker came too close. He was no longer hunting me, he was helping me. I took the long route; I couldn’t remember the last time I saw Bob, and I didn’t want him to leave. When we arrived in front of my dorm, we stared at each other for a long time, me not knowing what to say, and him not speaking because he never did. I realized why he was chasing me all those years. He was giving me a reason to run away, honing my ability to make imaginary scenarios more vivid, and the stakes higher. I silently promised him that I’d always stay connected to my inner child, and that this was not goodbye. I couldn’t see it, but he smiled; that small sting of hope that makes your lips twitch up. As quickly as he appeared, he was gone. I was left with only my own reflection in the glass doors of my dorm building. I still had that sick excitement in my eyes.

The Imaginary Friend: An Unexpected Bridge to Truthful Acting

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