If you want to learn how to act for real, not just say lines or fake emotions, you need to learn the fundamentals of the art form.

Too many people skip the basics and wonder why they can’t book work or why they can’t get past a co-star role with two lines. The fundamentals of acting are the bare minimum required for an actor to create organic, vivid, fully realized human behavior. They help you connect, listen, do truthfully, and breathe life into those words on the page.

At the Maggie Flanigan Studio, we believe that acting is an art form. We believe that the best artists are grounded in process and technique. Acting is a craft built on emotional recall, preparation, and bold, personal choices. In this blog, we break down ten key fundamentals every serious actor should know. This is where the real work begins.

Key Takeaways

• Great acting starts with the fundamentals, not shortcuts.

• Every honest performance comes from real preparation and emotional truth.

• If you want acting to be your craft, train like it matters.

1. Show Up Fully Present

Before you can create anything meaningful in a scene, you need a process, a way of working. Acting is the ability to do truthfully under an imaginary circumstance. Good actors truthfully do, bad actors indicate. Acting is about responding truthfully to what's happening around you. That starts with craft.

In any scene study class or performance, being grounded and focused gives you the ability to connect with your scene partner in real-time. If you're in your head, trying to control the outcome or think ahead to the next line, you're not acting—you're pretending. Craft is what allows the work to feel alive, spontaneous, and human.

At the Maggie Flanigan Studio, we train students to stay connected to their imaginations, use their senses, and respond with truth. That’s the foundation of the Meisner Technique—doing truthfully under imaginary circumstances. 

When you're fully present, responding with spontaneity and a personal connection, the material can come to life, and the character becomes something more than words on a page. This is where real acting begins.

2. Understand the World of the Play

Great acting starts with facts, not feelings. To work truthfully, you need to understand the world your character lives in. The given circumstances—who you are, where you are, what’s happening, what are the relationships and the issues—are the foundation of every scene.

These details shape how a person thinks, feels, and behaves. Are you in danger or at ease? Are you talking to a friend or a rival? This kind of script analysis helps you play each moment with clarity and truth.

In class, actors are trained to read deeply, ask the right questions, and build the world with imagination and honesty. Understanding the world of the play allows you to bring the material to life and make bold, grounded choices.

3. Get Specific About Who You Are

If you don’t know who you are, the audience won’t either. Surface traits aren’t enough. Real character work means building a full, layered person with a past, beliefs, and a point of view. 

You need to know what shaped them, what they care about, and what they’re afraid to admit.

Creating a role starts with asking the right questions. What kind of education did they have? What do they want most in life? How do they see themselves? This kind of work lets you move beyond clichés and play someone who feels real.

Personalization is what turns a role into a human being. When you can connect your own thoughts and emotional life to the character, the audience sees something honest. If your work is not personal, why the hell should anyone watch you? Your goal should be to illuminate the human condition in all of its aspects—something every serious artist trains for in class.

4. Know What You Want

Every character wants something. That want is called an objective, and it’s one of the core fundamentals in crafting as an actor. Without a clear objective, the scene has no direction, and you won’t actually be doing anything. When you know what your character is fighting for, every line, pause, and reaction has a purpose.

In most acting classes, students learn to identify both the immediate objective in a scene and the larger need that drives the character through the story—the super objective. These objectives work together. One pushes the moment forward; the other pulls the entire performance into focus.

Clear objectives give the actor something to do, not just something to say. It turns talking into action and makes the scene active, not passive. The result is a performance that feels alive and grounded in something real. 

Knowing what your character wants is a non-negotiable part of the craft and one every serious actor should know how to craft.

5. Fight Through the Obstacles

Acting lives in the struggles between human beings. Every character wants something, but something always stands in the way. 

These obstacles—both internal and external—are what create tension, urgency, and forward movement in a scene. Without them, there's no real conflict, and without conflict, there's no story. So, if you want to be an actor, you will need to get comfortable with conflict and, even more importantly, your relationship with anger.

External obstacles might be another person, a rule, internal struggles, or literally a physical barrier. The internal struggles are often more complex: how we grapple with fear, self-esteem, regret, humiliation, and guilt can create incredible obstacles for us.

These obstacles shape how a character reacts in various circumstances, what they choose to say, and how far they’re willing to go to get what they want. The more specific the obstacle, the more personal and grounded your acting becomes.

Developing your ability to recognize and grapple with these obstacles is a core part of a solid acting technique. It's where the best storytelling springs from, and it's what contributes to a compelling script.

When a character is fighting for something and keeps hitting resistance, the audience leans in. When the stakes are life and death, either literally or emotionally, a scene becomes something worth watching.

6. Stay Connected Emotionally

Acting is experiential, and the best actors create work that is deeply personal and emotionally rich. If the emotions aren’t real, an audience will never be moved. 

Acting that connects with an audience doesn't come from forcing a feeling—it comes from a place of ease and fluidity. Most actors have a flawed understanding of emotion, and its place in acting. Bad actors try to feel, they want to show everyone that they are alive, and they strain and push to get there. It is the mark of a hack actor. 

Emotional fluidity and accessibility is a fundamental skill of a well-trained actor. It is also one of the key points of emphasis in the Meisner Technique.

You can’t fake vulnerability. An audience knows when you’re acting a feeling versus when you're actually affected in the moment. That’s why emotional preparation matters. This is another core fundamental of the first year of the Meisner Technique. 

Emotional preparation is self-induced emotion. It’s what an actor does off-stage or off-camera to emotionally relate to the previous circumstance of the scene. Meisner teaches you how to use your ability to daydream and fantasize in order to alter your inner life. If you want to be an actor with a rich inner life, and emotional fluidity, you will need to develop your instrument, to allow your vulnerability, your empathy, and your humanity to come to the surface. 

The ability to take things personally, to breathe into moments, to allow the other person to really land on you is fundamental to an actor's craft.

This emotional availability is what separates hack acting from a rich and moving performance. It’s a core part of the techniques taught in a serious acting course.

7. Break the Scene Into Beats

A scene isn’t one long emotion—it’s made up of moments that shift and turn. These shifts are called beats, and they’re a key part of the fundamentals of acting. 

A beat marks a change in thought, feeling, or intention. It’s the moment when something changes for the character, even if nothing is said.

Breaking a scene into beats helps actors understand the rhythm of the material. It’s not just about saying lines. It’s about identifying when something new happens and responding with clarity. Without that awareness, the scene can feel flat or one-note.

Beats keep students connected and present. They help you listen, respond, and move with purpose. That kind of moment-to-moment attention brings scenes to life, and it’s a skill every strong acting course develops.

8. Use Actions to Get What You Want

Actions are the clay of behavior. The definition of acting is the ability to do truthfully under an imaginary circumstance. When it comes to text, actions are the doing. Once you know what your character wants, the next step is figuring out how you get it. That’s where actions come in. 

Action is what an actor does with text. Actions are not complicated, and they are universal. In life, we are always doing something; most of the time it is unconscious. But for the actor, it must be conscious because you are making choices when you work on a script. 

How you do actions is the character. Are you warning, threatening, flirting, teasing, demanding, reprimanding, mocking, ridiculing, etc? Ultimately, this is how an actor needs to think, and needs to become second nature.

Using a range of actions brings variety, life, and truth to a performance. You might try to flirt with someone one moment, then threaten them the next. If the first approach fails, your character shifts to something else. 

These changes are often subtle, but they’re what make the performance dynamic and believable. A well-trained actor can read a script and figure this out instinctively. Learning how to do this however is really difficult.

Actors who train with strong techniques learn to adjust actions with precision and ease. This kind of work doesn’t happen by accident. It comes from script analysis, rehearsals, and repetition. Learning to make bold or unexpected choices without ever forcing them is what keeps a scene spontaneous and alive.

Knowing your objective is only part of the process. The way you go after it is what keeps the scene moving and active.

9. Pinning Down the Acting Relationship

One of the fundamental questions that need to be pinned down for the actor working on a script is the relationship between them and everyone in the scene. This is primarily emotional and can be figured out through script analysis and solid training. 

Who are you to me? How do I feel about you? These questions are usually rooted in the previous circumstance or the past issues in the relationship. These questions are vital. It will determine how a character feels about what is being said to them, and how they are being treated.

One thing you never want to be as an actor is indifferent. No one wants to watch that. A script is about people in action, and if every moment isn’t personal, why should anyone watch you?

My students are trained thoroughly in the Meisner Technique, and learn how to answer these important questions. A solid acting technique needs to teach the actor how to craft in this way. The actors that have no real process are more than likely general, boring, and uninteresting to watch.

10. Trust the Work and Let Go

After all the preparation and rehearsal, the final step is to let go and trust in your work. You can’t control how a scene unfolds. 

The best actors understand this, and allow the other person to take them for a ride. This requires that your placement of concentration gets off of yourself and onto the other person, or what you are doing. This is where trust matters—trust in the craft, your preparation, and the other actors in the scene with you.

Letting go doesn’t mean being unprepared. It means you’ve done the work and are ready to respond in the moment. Simple practices like breath work or meditation can help actors stay present and emotionally available without forcing anything.

When the foundation is strong, you don’t have to chase results; they will take care of themselves. You just show up and do truthfully. That’s what makes a performance feel alive, whether it’s on stage or TV. Real freedom in acting comes from trusting the work you’ve already put in and living through the experience.

Why Train at Maggie Flanigan Studio

Learning the fundamentals of acting is one thing—instilling them into your body, voice, and imagination is something else entirely. 

At MFS, we don’t just teach technique. We shape serious actors through our conservatory courses built on discipline, depth, and the Meisner Technique. 

Every aspect of the work—presence, preparation, crafting, emotional truth—is trained through Meisner’s repetition exercise and its progression over the nine months of first year. Our faculty is made up of working professionals who expect real commitment. With small class sizes, students are seen, challenged, and supported from day one.

If you're thinking seriously about acting as a craft, not a hobby, this is the place to start. Have questions about the course, upcoming start dates, or the signing process? Call us. We’re here to talk through the details.

Conclusion

Mastering the fundamentals of acting isn’t flashy. It’s not about tricks or shortcuts. It’s about showing up every day and doing the work. Actors who take their craft seriously understand that real skill comes from repetition, discipline, and hard work—not talent.

If you're considering acting school, thinking about your future, or just starting to look at programs after college, don’t get distracted by promises of overnight success. Build a foundation. Focus on craft. Train in a place that values growth over shortcuts.

Maggie Flanigan Studio was created for that purpose. Serious actors. Serious training. If you have questions about how to register, what classes look like, or our refund policy, give us a call. We’re here to help you take the first real step.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are acting fundamentals?

Acting fundamentals are the core tools and techniques every serious actor must possess. These include listening, crafting, placement of concentration, emotional accessibility, and a vivid imagination.

They serve as the foundation of the craft, and students exploring a professional acting introduction will return to these principles throughout their careers.

What are the 7 principles of acting?

The 7 principles of acting often include listening, placement of concentration, crafting, emotional fluidity, spontaneity, vulnerability, and the ability to go from unanticipated moment to unanticipated moment.

These principles help actors stay grounded, respond truthfully, and create believable moments. They’re introduced in the first year of the Meisner Technique.

What are the 5 components of acting?

The 5 components of acting usually refer to a pliable body, resonant voice, a vivid imagination, a wide ranging temperament, and vulnerability. These are essential parts of the actor's instrument and must be trained with care and intention. 

Parents or students exploring acting for the future—especially post-college—should look for a program that treats each component as part of a full, disciplined process.