So You Want to be an Actor? We still have a problem.
Every now and then, and this has happened for decades since I’ve been an actor and in the actor-training game, someone tells me they’re thinking of becoming an actor too. It usually comes with a hopeful look and the slightest wince, as if they’re waiting for me to deliver bad news gently. And yes, the profession is still as stubbornly difficult as it has always been, but the trouble isn’t the work itself. It’s the training.
Back in the early 1990s I first read Robert Hornby’s The End of Acting, and I still think about his central argument: acting begins only once the skills are so well learned they become second nature. Nothing mystical. Nothing glamorous. Just technique absorbed through repetition until ease appears. His “three things”: relax, relate to your scene partner, pursue objectives seem almost laughably simple until you try teaching them to a large cohort in a shrinking timetable.
A question that comes up often is, “What should an actor learn?” Historically the answer was straightforward: you learnt on the job. Formal actor-training is a surprisingly recent arrival in the English-speaking world. When the British started looking to the French in the 1930s for a more systematic approach, Michel St Denis became the key architect of what we now recognise as modern conservatoire training. His influence is still woven through long-established schools and just about any institution that advertises itself as a place where actors are “made”.
Australia followed suit, borrowing liberally from the UK, then the US. NIDA opened in 1959. Colleges of Advanced Education joined in from the 1970s, producing strong industry-focused courses until the late-1980s when Canberra decided that everything should be tidier, cheaper, and more “efficient”. CAEs were folded into universities, often unwillingly, and the corridors changed overnight. Practical training sat alongside more traditional academic work, and while the best programs managed to let theory and practice inform each other, many did not. Courses disappeared. Schools were merged beyond recognition. The dust never quite settled.
The sticking point still is the assumption that practical arts training can be trimmed, rationalised, or sped up in the same way other academic offerings can. The result is a decades-long tug-of-war between theorists, practitioner-scholars, and artist-practitioners, each group trying to prove the legitimacy of their corner of the discipline. The argument tends to miss the point. Acting is not learned by reading about it. Nor is it learned by a crash-course in “industry skills”. It is learned through doing, and doing takes time.
David Grant, writing about courtroom advocacy of all things, suggested that alongside “knowledge” and “skills”, we should consider “qualities” the attributes that emerge only from sustained practice. It’s a useful lens. Hornby’s much-quoted “three things” fall into this category precisely because you cannot teach them once and tick them off. They are reacquired continuously, refined, tested, forgotten, rediscovered. They require patient, repeated work with other human beings in a room, not a lecture theatre.
And this is where the modern system buckles. Experiential training is resource-heavy. It needs small groups, long rehearsal blocks, and staff who aren’t spread across five different roles. When universities tighten budgets, which is most years now, these programs become the first to be reviewed, restructured, or quietly wound down. The public language is always about innovation, efficiencies, or “aligning with contemporary needs”, but underneath it lies a reluctance to fund the very conditions under which artistic skill can take root.
The irony is that everyone agrees acting is an embodied, collaborative craft. Yet the structures around training increasingly treat it as if it can be delivered in bite-sized modules with fewer hours, fewer staff, and a glossy promise of “industry relevance”. The loss isn’t just institutional; it reaches young artists before they’ve had a chance to find their feet. A rushed or diluted education sets them up to struggle in an already demanding profession.
Intensive, immersive training isn’t a luxury. It’s the foundation. Cut it back and you don’t simply save money you stunt the development of the very people the industry depends on. It’s a frustratingly simple equation: artistry needs time, and time costs. We haven’t solved that problem yet.