http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EnforcedMethodActing

This entry is trivia, which is cool and all, but not a trope. On a work, it goes on the Trivia tab.

Sylvester Stallone says the wrong thing to Rocky IV says the wrong thing to Dolph Lundgren "Punch me as hard as you can in the chest." Next thing I know, I was in intensive care at St. Johns Hospital for four days. Its stupid!

Method Acting: (noun): An acting technique in which actors try to replicate the real-life emotional conditions under which the character operates, in an effort to create a life-like, realistic performance.

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Enforced Method Acting: (noun): An acting technique in which actors give a life-like, realistic performance by actually experiencing the emotional conditions under which the character operates.

Enforced Method Acting is a cinematic concept in which the actors and actresses of a work give reactions that are unplanned and unscripted or are otherwise made to genuinely feel the emotions that they are expressing on camera. The primary difference with Method Acting is that is internal to the actor, whereas this trope is about providing reactions as compelled by someone else. This reaction is not rehearsed ahead of time, and the production uses Throw It In! intentionally. This can take place in several ways:

Enforced Method Acting does not mean long term method acting the director forces the actors to do.

Compare with Throw It In! (when this trope happens by accident) and Acting in the Dark (when plot details are deliberately withheld from actors to provide a genuine reaction). Since the associated shock and strong, often negative feelings make the shoot a traumatic experience, this often requires a Jerkass director, or at least one who doesn't mind their actors hating them. After all, using this technique means the director doesn't trust the actors' skills to carry a scene. In some cases however, such as with child actors, this can be more justified. Fatal Method Acting is a lethal case of this. Contrast Lost in Character. See also Harpo Does Something Funny.

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Examples from Real Life:

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Anime

Film  Animated

During Miguel's tearjerking version of "Remember Me" in Coco, Anthony Gonzalez was actually in tears.

To give Dash in The Incredibles a more realistic sounding out-of-breath voice, Director Brad Bird would make Spencer Fox run laps around the studio.

Jordan Nagai, the kid who voiced Russell in Up, was "tricked" by the voice director many times in order to get him away from sounding too much like he was acting and give a more genuine response. For example, he was told to run around before giving lines or forced to memorize his lines on the spot. Likewise, in the scene where Russell, giggling, is being tossed playfully in the air by Kevin, the voice director tickled him. This is actually a pretty common practice (the same technique was used for the French actress who played the young Marjane in Persepolis).

The Lion King (1994): When Jonathan Taylor Thomas voiced Young Simba, they tapped his back for the scene where Simba is yelling while sliding down the back of an elephant's skeleton. The staff brought in Thomas' mother during a session where he recorded for the wildebeest stampede. The director told Thomas to visualize her falling to perfect Simba's reaction to Mufasa losing his grip. This worked too well; Thomas screamed "MOM!" on the first take instead of the scripted "DAD!".

For Marge's message to Homer in The Simpsons Movie, Julie Kavner was put through around 100 takes to get the exhausted-sounding delivery they wanted.

During the recording session for The Iron Giant, Brad Bird shook Eli Marienthal (the voice of Hogarth) with his permission, to get his voice shaky during the scene where he rides in the makeshift car in the scrap yard. He also had him actually eating Twinkies during the scene where he eats them while watching the movie when he's home alone.

In Disney's animated Alice in Wonderland, Kathryn Beaumont once admitted to an interview that her laughter during the scene where Alice is tickled by the flamingo wasn't believable. So during one later take, the director tickled Kathryn at the moment and the resulting fit of giggles during that scene is entirely genuine.

Zootopia: When Judy tearfully apologizes to Nick, Ginnifer Goodwyn actually broke down when recording her dialogue.

Music

Martin Birch, who produced Iron Maiden's most famous records, asked (then new) singer Bruce Dickinson to do take after take after take for "The Number of the Beast". Bruce was obviously frustrated and annoyed, and that's when Mr Birch told him something like 'now it's time to record the scream', which he of course delivered in a very unhuman way, which Bruce was never able to replicate.

When Miles Davis was recording his groundbreaking fusion album Bitches Brew, the session musicians did not know what they were supposed to play beyond tempo and chord changes. You can hear Miles giving instructions during quiet moments.

Bruce Springsteen wanted his folk album ''We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions" to have an informal sound, so he didn't rehearse with the Sessions band before they started recording. Springsteen can be heard several times on the album giving spontaneous instructions about what instrument he wants to hear. According to Neil Dorfsman, his producer during the Born In The U.S.A. sessions, this article , Bruce would give vague, disjointed, often confusing instructions to each member of the E Street Band on how his songs were to be played in order to allow for more spontaneity and freshness in the performances. "In those days, Bruce had a particular way of teaching the band a new song. He wouldn't play it for them from the beginning to the end; he would teach them the different parts of the song, and not necessarily in the order that they appeared. So, he might start off by saying, 'Well, there's this part,' and play them a little bit of the chorus, showing them the chord changes. After that, he might say, 'Then there's this part,' and play them the bridge, and follow this with 'And then there's this part,' and play them a verse. While the guys would be making notes, he might say, 'Then there's this part, which is like an intro‑instrumental thing,' and if there was any other part, such as a solo, he'd teach them that, too. Then he'd ask, 'Everybody got that?' and if they did, he'd say, 'OK, we're going to start with the second part I showed you and then go to part number four. We'll play that twice, and then we'll go to part number one before going back to part number four, then on to part number three, back to part number four, back to part number one, then part number three again, then part number four, and then number one, number one and we'll ride out on one...' They'd be like, 'Huh?' and he'd go, 'All right, you want to run through it?' while the guys were scrambling to understand exactly how the song should be laid out.

Captain Beefheart And His Magic Band's Trout Mask Replica was intended to sound uncomfortable and on the brink of falling apart. That's because the band really was uncomfortable and on the brink of falling apart; they had rehearsed the songs on the album for nine months, and were recording most of them in one single, manic five-hour marathon session with almost no retakes or overdubs. Antennae Jimmy Semens' performance of Pena sounds hysterical, and he probably was at the time. In a similar manner The Blimp, which is recited in a similar voice, over the phone to Frank Zappa.

On their album Pooping Like Dogs, The Pennock Bridge Collective had a handful of experimental tracks where they deliberately made sure no one in the band knew how a song was going to turn out: Mainly, they'd have members pull instruments and track numbers out of a hat, then have each member write and record a part based only on whatever had been recorded before they got their turn. The most extreme case of this was "The C.C.H. Pounder Blues", where everyone was instructed to improvise wildly for exactly 30 seconds without being able to hear what anyone else was playing.

As mentioned under Film, the call to the operator in Pink Floyd's The Wall is genuine. The character Pink phones his wife, knowing she's with another man, and the other line keeps disconnecting. The operator's confused reaction ("There's a man answering...") is real. They had to do the call several times before they found one who realized what the situation was. During some tour performances (notably the 1990 Berlin performance), Roger Waters called a real operator and had them dial a stage hand who pretended to be Ms. Floyd's new lover.

In British hardcore/electronic/everything band Enter Shikari's song "Gandhi, Mate, Gandhi", frontman Rou descends into borderline Angrish about halfway through, before being interrupted by voices urging him to "calm down mate, calm the fuck down" and "Gandhi, mate, just remember Gandhi". These lines were not prepared or written - fellow band members Liam/Rory and Chris were loitering outside the recording booth, drunk, and were heckling Rou as he recorded. For the "Ello Tyrannosaurus" lyric just before the breakdown in 'Hello Tyrannosaurus, Meet Tyrannicide', the producer had Rou run to the back of the room and shout the lyric in order to get the correct sense of distance and shouting in a large space.

Red House Painters' entire album Rollercoaster is this in spades. It may very well be the largest case of Enforced Method Acting in music history: Some of the record engineers were ordered by 4AD manager, Ivo Watts to make recording as stressful as possible to put Kozelek under a lot of pressure in order to get a more genuine performance out of him. So that strained, stressed sound present on it that you don't hear anywhere else? Not faked even in the slightest! "Things Mean A Lot" had an unexpected piano riff added in that caught Kozelek by surprise. The song, being about Kozelek finally getting over an old muse of his, always seems to bring a tear to Kozelek's eyes because of this. "Katy Song" was originally supposed to be shorter for the album version, but when the band parts were recorded first, they were told to drag out the second section extra long. Kozelek was not told of this, so when his guitar and vocal parts were recorded he got confused and frustrated when the song was going to end. So that effect of how the guitars and vocals sound progressively more and more exhausted is actually Kozelek trying to keep the song going and getting frustrated. "Strawberry Hill" has the chorus sung by a group of strangers picked up from the street outside of a Los Angeles recording studio. When Mark was doing his final take for the vocal line, the crowd started singing in the background with Mark. He was not expecting this and the frail sound of his voice is actually him trying to hold back tears. The song had a lot of personal meaning to him, since it was about his troubled suicidal and depressed past. "Brown Eyes" was supposed to be a closing track featuring just Mark Kozelek on guitar. As things progressed, however, he was caught by surprise when the rest of the band came in and started playing with him, re-enforcing the theme of "Strawberry Hill" even more.

The Lou Reed song "The Kids" ends with children screaming and crying. Producer Bob Ezrin allegedly told his children that their mother left and is never coming back, and he recorded their reaction.

While recording the song "Living for the City", Stevie Wonder's recording partners deliberately interfered with and criticized his performance, in order to get a raw sound out of him. In the end, Wonder's voice was so angry and hoarse that he got the result they were looking for.

Producer Ross Robinson is notorious for this approach. The most infamous example is Korn's song "Daddy", where singer Jonathan Davis starts crying at the end. note They would go on to record two more albums with Robinson before Jonathan decided that he's had enough of the producer. Then there's "Pretty Lush" by Glassjaw, where you can hear him shattering the glass in the vocal booth. He also threw lit candles at The Cure and insulted them for not making music as good as they used to. note Which singer Robert Smith apparently took to heart, prompting him to push himself even harder

Then there's "Pretty Lush" by Glassjaw, where you can hear him shattering the glass in the vocal booth. He also threw lit candles at The Cure and insulted them for not making music as good as they used to. Toby Keith was asked to record a song for the Clint Eastwood movie The Mule and came up with "Don't Let the Old Man In". He recorded the demo on a day that he was very sick, giving the vocal a very weathered and tired sound, that Eastwood and Keith agreed fit the song's world-weary narrative.

Music Video

Podcasts

In the Wolf 359 episode "Box 953", Minkowski sings "I Am The Very Model Of A Modern Major General" while extremely intoxicated. But because Emma Sherr-Ziarko (Minkowski's voice actress) couldn't get it to sound drunk enough, one of the writers took her script and had her recite it from memory. She did not, in fact, have the song memorized.

Professional Wrestling

Tabletop Games

In Paranoia, combat is intended to be portrayed as fast, confused, and entertainingly deadly, rather than tactically optimal - so the GM is encouraged to give the players only a few seconds to decide what their characters are doing each round. The rulebook contains an example of play that runs something like this: GM: Suddenly some hairy guys jump up from behind the gray things and shake sticks at you. Fred, what do you do? Fred: Wait, what? GM: Right. John, how about you? Extending this beyond combat, some games even suggest in the guidebook that in order to keep the players on their toes, the GM should make rolls for no reason at all, and occasionally pass private notes to players saying things like "just smile and nod". Then that player knows what's actually going on. A note saying "Make a perception roll, but don't tell the others" makes everyone paranoid.



Theatre

In the original production of The Phantom of the Opera, at one point the Phantom is underground, having kidnapped Christine. He loads her into the boat. On stage, the boat needs to be pushed out to the front, as though he was pushing it into the water. Not knowing that the boat was so heavy, it took a lot out of the Phantom and he was severely out of breath. The rendering of the next song, "slowly, gently, in anticipation" is so affected that the director decides to keep it like that.

In fact, during Shakespeare's time, it seemed perfectly common to be cruel to the actors like that, not telling them when they were going to be slapped, etc. Then there is one scene where a character tries to get a word in but can't manage to interrupt someone. Since the actors weren't given the full script, only their own lines and the key lines before them so they would know when it was their turn, the previous actor would say a phrase similar to the key line three times, each time causing a false alarm, making the actor after him think it's his turn to speak, only to be cut off by the first character's continued talking. This very convincingly created the illusion of the second character trying in vain to get a word in.

A bit of unintentional Enforced Method Acting appears on the original Broadway soundtrack of Gypsy. In the song "Some People," the actor who plays Rose's father has a small line — "You're not gettin' eighty-eighty cents out of me, Rose." Unfortunately, on the day of recording, the actor failed to show up to do the line, so Stephen Sondheim himself ended up recording it — and he was so pissed off at the actor for not being there that the anger came across as genuine, prompting a similarly angry response from Ethel Merman.

Theme Parks

Supposedly, when creating the soundtrack for Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln for the 1964 World's Fair and then Disneyland, Walt Disney kept having voice actor Royal Dano redo the entire speech, complaining about small things that made it "not quite right," until Dano was absolutely exhausted, and could barely make it to the end, at which point Disney said it was perfect, that it was what a weary Lincoln would have sounded like. He may have had a point, as the speech still induces shivers half a century later.

Video Games

Web Original

Western Animation

Other

"Confessions of a Republican", in which a Republican voter expresses his anxiety about voting for Barry Goldwater, hired William Gibson to play the guy because he was a Republican voter expressing his own fears about voting for Goldwater.

In-work Examples:

Advertising

A French McDonalds ad parodies this by showing how an actor is forced to display such genuine emotion: a crew member is dangling a hamburger in front of him, usually just out of reach.

Anime and Manga

Film  Animated

The fictional director in Bolt ran Bolt's life this way. The words "method acting" are even mentioned by the exec who came to evaluate the show. Director: And if the dog believes it... the audience will believe it.

Film  Live-Action

Lady Killer: The director on the film set insists that Dan eat a bunch of garlic so that his co-star Lois's disgust at his bad breath will be real. He does, and it is.

In Superman Returns, Lex Luthor cuts the brakes on his assistant's car so that her screams for help will be authentic. When she confronts him later, he explains that if she hadn't really been terrified, Superman would have been able to tell.

Tropic Thunder uses this trope in the plot, which involves a director filming a movie about The Vietnam War dropping his five actors into the Golden Triangle of Asia while riddling the jungle with hidden cameras as advised by Shell-Shocked Veteran Four-Leaf Tayback. In Epic Movie, while trying to escape a prison cell, Captain Swallows stabs Edward in the abdomen to ensure his pain is realistic enough to get the guards in.

Just the basic concept of Bowfinger is an extreme version of this, where the main lead, Kit Ramsey, doesn't even know he's in a movie, and all his scenes are filmed in secret because the titular film director couldn't afford to actually hire him.

In Show People, assistance slice onions in front of would-be dramatic actress Peggy Pepper when she can't cry on command.

Privilege features a pop star whose stage show involves being placed in handcuffs that make his wrists bleed, beaten by police officers, and locked in a cage. The public thinks it's all an act, but he really is being beaten onstage, leaving him with real scars and bruises.

Much of the plot of The Stunt Man is made of this trope. The movie is about an intense director who constantly uses enforced method acting on his actors, sometimes with dangerous consequences.

Literature

Sherlock Holmes: Holmes does this to Watson several times, each time with the explanation that he needed Watson to behave as though something was absolutely true when it wasn't. In the "Dying Detective" Holmes appears to be dying of poison. Of course, it turns out that he's perfectly fine and was only acting so that Watson's reactions to it (and subsequent conversation with the suspect who had tried to poison him) would be genuine enough to convince said suspect. A far crueler example is when Holmes fakes his own death for three years, leaving Watson alone even though his wife has died. Holmes states that it was essential the world believed him dead, and Watson's behavior wouldn't be convincing enough if it was an act.

The desperate haphazard plan Fisk comes up with in the first book of the Knight and Rogue Series, to drug the Mad Scientist Ceciel they're escaping from and pretend that he and she are going out to perform some sacrifice or another with Michael, nearly falls apart when a guard sees Ceciel's rather vacant face and bad actor Michael's fairly unconcerned expression. There's nothing to be done about the drugged look, so Fisk gets Michael to panic by beginning to talk about how they're sacrificing his 'fertility'.

In The Hunger Games, this happens repeatedly with Katniss. She can't act, and so is never warned about Peeta's interview strategies so her reactions will be genuine. By the third book, this has escalated to dropping her into a war zone in order to film propaganda because the studio shoots never work. At first they just stick to a hospital with real victims, but no one was expecting bombers to turn up . And when they do, they try to keep her out of the fighting, but she goes in anyway and they keep the camera rolling.

In Barbara Hambly's Search the Seven Hills, a troupe of girls playing nymphs is entertaining a Roman banquet when a troupe of actors as satyrs burst out on them. Marcus notes that either the girls were consummate actresses, or they had not expected to be actually molested by the satyrs.

In-universe example: In The Wizard of Sunset Strip, a special-effects adept conjures a real demon onto the set during the filming of a Human Sacrifice scene. The actress playing the "victim" freaks out for real, but the crew assume it's an illusion and keep on filming, only realizing she's genuinely terrified when she faints.

Reserved for the Cat: When Jonathan and Ninette are practicing a new illusion for Jonathan's act, he doesn't bother to tell Ninette that the flames she's about to see (while she's locked in a box) are magically-created fake flames. He then learns that you don't want to get kicked by a ballerina.

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever features the shepherds in the titular Christmas pageant, who tremble in very realistic terror when the angel appears... because they're afraid of the girl playing the angel, a notorious bully.

In the children's picture book Evie and Margie, Evie tries out for the role of Cinderella in a school play. The play includes a scene where Cinderella cries after not being allowed to attend the ball. Evie figures out how to make herself cry by remembering an incident where she cried after not getting a cupcake at a birthday party, and was offered a carrot stick instead.

Live-Action TV

Video Games

The Avatar in Fire Emblem Awakening hears about how Walhart will kill Basilio after he and Flavia attack the conquerer. Knowing that the Fire Emblem might be stolen by the Grimleal (namely Validar), s/he and Basilio devise a plan for Basilio to fake death to the Conqueror, and not actually tell Flavia, so her cries when catching up with Chrom are legit. Later on, the Avatar proves correct — the Fire Emblem is stolen, but the green gem was replaced with a fake and Basilio was not actually dead. Just as Validar (and Lucina) had thought, Grima tries to possess the Avatar... but the Avatar attacks Chrom anyways and weakens the attack so Chrom survives... but s/he does not tell Chrom or Lucina that they'll do that, so their Big "NO!" and reactions will genuinely fool Validar. Cue Basilio walking in talking about how they fooled them all.

Later on, Mass Effect: Cerberus News Network extra had a few headlines about how an actor was nearly fried to death by freak space lightning during a film shoot, and went along with it. They kept it in and made trillions. The Mass Effect 3 Citadel DLC features Shepard in a Blasto movie. The subsequent crisis causes Shepard to make one of his/her famous "Conversation Wheel Decisions", enforcing the acting... but not by a lot.

A Hat in Time: The Conductor is a big fan of this method when making his movies, faking a murder mystery for you to solve in his detective movie and actually destroying half his train as you rush through it to stop a real bomb from blowing up the whole thing for his action movie.

Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony: The entire killing game is really the latest season of a hugely popular reality show based on the Danganronpa games and anime. All of the students willingly and eagerly auditioned to kill each other as part of their favourite show, then had their memories and personalities erased and replaced with fictional "Ultimate Student" personalities and backstories from the Danganronpa universe. In the final chapter, the surviving characters are horrified by the revelation that they aren't real and all the pain and suffering they went through was just for a bloodthirsty audience's entertainment, especially after watching the audition tapes of their former selves which are the epitome of Nice Character, Mean Actor

Webcomics

Web Original

In-universe examples for the animated band Gorillaz: according to their biography, Rise of the Ogre, the band weren't told by their director Jamie Hewlett about the 300-foot elk that appears at the end of the "19/2000" video, so they'd look appropriately surprised. Also, the Groin Attack Murdoc suffers at the hands of the zombie ape in "Clint Eastwood" was apparently real, and caused his genitals to "swell up like big purple melons".

Western Animation