In a workshop I observed years ago, a young actor received a simple note on her monologue: stop being sad and start fighting for something. She looked confused. Wasn't the character supposed to be devastated? Wasn't sadness the whole point of the scene?

She tried again, this time pursuing something specific from an imagined scene partner—desperate to make them understand what they'd destroyed. The transformation was immediate. The sadness was still there, but now it lived inside something active, something urgent. The performance went from watchable to magnetic.

This distinction—between emotional states and playable actions—represents one of the most fundamental dividing lines in acting craft. Get it wrong, and you'll spend your career pushing emotion at audiences. Get it right, and you'll discover that genuine feeling emerges as a byproduct of genuine pursuit.

An emotional state describes a condition you're in: sad, angry, nervous, in love. An action describes something you're doing to someone: to reassure, to provoke, to seduce, to dismiss. The difference isn't semantic—it's the difference between passive experience and active pursuit.

States are results. They're what audiences might observe about your character, what critics might write in reviews. But you cannot play a result any more than you can play the concept of being interesting. Trying to be sad onstage means monitoring yourself for sadness, which immediately takes you out of the scene and into self-conscious performance.

Actions, by contrast, give you something to pursue moment to moment. They require a target—usually your scene partner—and they can succeed or fail. When you're trying to intimidate someone, you're reading their responses, adjusting your tactics, genuinely engaged with whether your intimidation is working. You're too busy pursuing to monitor.

Consider the difference between playing grief-stricken and playing trying to hold yourself together in front of people who need you to be strong. The first is a state you demonstrate. The second is a struggle you live through. Audiences don't want to watch actors demonstrate emotions. They want to watch human beings struggle with impossible circumstances.

Takeaway

States describe what you are; actions describe what you do. You can only play what you do.

Converting a state into an action requires asking one crucial question: what am I trying to get from the other person in this scene? Every emotional condition can be transformed into interpersonal pursuit once you identify what you want from your scene partner.

Take jealousy. As a state, it's unplayable—you can only demonstrate jealous behavior, which reads as indicating rather than being. But jealousy in action might become: to catch them in a lie, to make them prove their loyalty, or to punish them with coldness until they beg forgiveness. Each of these gives you specific behavior to pursue, specific responses to read, specific victories or defeats to experience.

The transformation process follows a reliable pattern. First, identify the state the playwright seems to indicate. Second, ask what this character wants from other people in this scene. Third, phrase your action as an active verb with an object—to convince her, to challenge him, to win their approval. Fourth, make sure your action requires response from your scene partner.

Some actors resist this work, feeling it reduces emotional complexity to simplistic pursuit. The opposite is true. When you pursue a specific action fully, emotional complexity arises organically. The character desperately trying to win back an ex-lover will experience hope, fear, humiliation, and determination—not because they're playing those states, but because those states are natural responses to high-stakes pursuit.

Takeaway

Transform every emotional state by asking: what am I trying to get from the other person right now?

Let's apply these principles to actual script analysis. Consider a scene where the text indicates a character is overwhelmed with guilt confronting someone they've wronged. The actor's first instinct might be to play guilty—hunched shoulders, difficulty making eye contact, perhaps some tears.

A state-based approach yields: I feel terrible about what I did, and I need to show how guilty I am. This creates performance that demonstrates guilt to the audience rather than pursuing anything from the scene partner. The actor watches themselves being guilty.

An action-based transformation might yield several possibilities: to force them to acknowledge that I've suffered too, to win absolution by proving I've changed, or to make them hit me because I deserve punishment. Each of these is specific, directable, and requires response.

Notice how the guilt doesn't disappear—it becomes the fuel for action. The character's guilty feelings drive their desperate need for absolution, for punishment, for acknowledgment. The emotion serves the action rather than replacing it. When you watch actors who move you, this is what's happening. They're not showing you their character's emotional weather. They're fighting for something that matters, and you're witnessing the emotional cost of that fight.

Takeaway

Script analysis should reveal not what your character feels, but what they're fighting to get from every other person in the scene.

The distinction between states and actions represents more than technique—it reflects a fundamental truth about how we experience emotion in life. We rarely sit in emotional states passively. We feel things because we want things, and our feelings arise from the gap between what we want and what we have.

Acting that honors this reality creates performances audiences recognize as true. Not because the actor found some mystical authentic emotion, but because they pursued specific objectives with genuine investment. The emotion takes care of itself.

Every time you catch yourself preparing to play a feeling, stop. Ask instead: what am I fighting for? That question will save your performance every time.