Inside Out or Outside In?

As an actor and director, I’ve had many debates with professors, classmates, and coworkers about the “right” approach to a role; whether it is outside-in or inside-out. I used to maintain that the latter was the only proper way. I would cite Meryl Streep’s refusal to do more than one take of the final scene in Sophie’s Choice, or the minute physiological changes that occur when we actually have genuine feelings. I used to insist – and sometimes, still do – that acting cannot be simply product-based, where talent simply consists of good eyebrow and tear-duct control.

Gledhill writes about the “outside-in” approach in relation to melodrama. She argues that melodrama focuses on external indicators — much like the Diderot/ Coquelin approach — in order to show the heroism of the protagonist. There is an important parallel between this externality of melodrama and the creation or maintenance of a star as reliant upon public indicators rather than anything genuinely felt.

When Dyer writes of the outside-in and inside-out approach, he says that, “[in] principle both approaches may produce the same result, but in practice this is rarely the case since both … are historically allied with given and various performance conventions” (132). This is not necessarily true. Perhaps in the decades since this text was written, acting styles have expanded, but almost no modern actor’s approach is completely either/or.

The Stanislavskian approach and the Diderot/ Coquelin approach work to the same end — a convincing performance — from different starting points. However, there is a crucial flaw in the Diderot/ Coquelin approach: it is scientifically impossible to be emotionally unaffected by the actions of the body. It’s been found by a great deal of studies (two can be found here and here) that smiling or frowning make you more happy or sad, respectively. In essence, the life you perform is the life you eventually grow into. I've had an acting professor explain it thus: "If you can't cry on command, try sniffling and breathing like you're crying. Eventually the tears will come."

The implication here is potentially unsettling for what it means to be an actor and a star. If an actor performs their public persona — their star role — over and over again, at what point do they begin to become that role, both publicly and privately? Oddly enough, this is an issue faced by many heroines in melodramas, Mildred Pierce coming to mind first. As Joan Crawford’s Mildred comes to grips with the horror of a daughter she has created, and as her daughter begins to speak to her unkindly, Mildred turns into the imagined nightmare of a mother that her daughter feared. Maybe the tabloids have already answered this question many times over, but it may deserve more credit than we give The National Enquirer at first glance. Can the same fate happen to real-life stars? Can the created image of a star eventually overtake the “real person” behind the star?