Psychophysical Anchoring for Actors: How to Emotionally Connect to a Role

The actor’s imagination is limitless, but imagination alone is not always enough. To bring life to a role, imagined circumstances need to connect with the physical body.

Drawing upon the work of established practitioners, I developed Psychophysical Anchoring as a technique to connect an imagined circumstance with a real physical sensation, giving the actor something tangible through which the fiction can be experienced. By engaging the imagination and body simultaneously, the actor can create a sensory association that leaves a lasting impression — something that can later help fuel a connected performance.

A Note on Emotion

Emotion is a dangerous word. Often my work is helping actors to fight against the emotion and not lean into it. It’s very easy to slip into generalisation and start feeling rather than doing; playing an emotional state rather than actively pursuing something from the other person. You cannot let the emotion lead you. Psychophysical Anchoring is not a way to feel more; it’s a way to underpin your action with a stronger sense of the stakes by establishing a psychophysical connection to fictional events and relationships.

The Challenge

Imagine you’re approaching a character who’s deeply in love. Unlike real life, the relationship between you and your fictional partner is not rich with genuine memories and shared experiences. You didn’t feel the butterflies in your stomach when they asked you out. Your heart didn’t skip a beat during your first kiss. You never felt the warmth of their embrace.

Now imagine this person walks out of the relationship and your character is heartbroken. To connect with the stakes of this situation, it can help to establish the love you shared, not only as an intellectual idea, but as a sensory experience.

Alternative Methods

To connect with a high-stakes scene, a good exercise might be to improvise a scene from the character’s backstory – their first date, or a special memory from their fictional past. This is useful if you have the rehearsal time and other actors to do it but can be limited in some circumstances — sexual intimacy, violence or traumatic experiences — which can’t be improvised freely.

Another approach might be to draw upon your own memories and experiences during performance. The danger with this technique is that it can pull the actor’s attention inward, encouraging them to play a generalised emotional state rather than remain connected to their scene partner and objective.

Or, in an attempt to avoid overthinking and intellectualising, you could rely solely on instinct and just feel it. A masterful actor might be able to do this effectively when tackling contemporary work that doesn’t stray too far from the world they already inhabit. For them, experience and craft might allow some of the work to be intuited. For most actors, most of the time, more preparation is required.

Psychophysical Anchoring

Psychophysical Anchoring can be explored with other actors, but it can also be done alone, before a self-tape, rehearsal or shoot. It doesn’t rely on your own memories, it creates new, fictional experiences that are entirely relevant to the character.

The technique includes two interconnected elements: the Daydream and the Imprint.

The Daydream involves closing your eyes and thinking through an improvised fictional character memory in detail. Specificity and focus are key. If the scene you are working on involves pain, suffering, or loss (as in our breakup example), then explore the love, joy, and trust that existed before it. You can’t understand the great pain of your character’s loss until you have experienced the great joy of their love.

At the same time, we introduce the Imprint – like pressing hands into wet concrete.

Find a physical activity that engages the body through sustained effort, such as pushing firmly against a wall. Allow the physical experience to become a metaphor for something within the imagined relationship. The resistance of the wall might represent the solidity, strength and security this person gives you; in another circumstance, that same resistance might represent rejection, stubbornness or turmoil.

Once you have thoroughly explored your fictional memory, come away from the wall and feel the change in sensation. The Daydream and Imprint end, and, in stark contrast, the reality of the current moment – the scene at hand – returns. Wait a few seconds, then go straight into the scene.

Don’t be tempted now to indulge in your newfound anchoring. Don’t lean into any emotion that comes and begin to play self-pity – that is rarely truthful behaviour. Remember your objective, listen, and fight for your character’s life. The psychophysical association you have created can continue to give substance to your future performances.

The wall exercise is only one simple example. Psychophysical Anchors can be created in many different ways using a combination of stimuli including written words, objects, other actors, and physical tasks to represent and create any number of fictional scenarios.

Psychophysical Anchoring offers a way of connecting to a demanding role, that can be explored in a studio with the full cast or alone in your bedroom. The Daydream creates the fictional experience; the Imprint gives the body something real through which to experience it. Together, they create the Anchor which grounds your performance.