Tips From An Acting Coach: How To Manage Difficult Personalities On- Set

So you feel pretty good about your acting skills after all the years of training. The thing that gets to you most nowadays is when you’re stuck working with a***holes. Maybe be the overly-controlling director, or the scene partner who arrives on set unprepared, or the acting teacher that seems to hate you.

Acting puts you in your happy place but not when they’re around you find yourself not wanting to show up, bursting with frustration but helpless to change things.

How do you handle difficult personalities on-Set?

So lets face it, some people are just plain difficult. They may have a reputation for it. They likely have already been challenged on it. They’re probably not going to change any time soon. 

Of course if they’re behaving in a truly toxic way then I’m not suggesting you should put up with it. Better to call it out and walk away. 

If not, then here are a few tips from an acting coach and therapist  to help you deal with these types of people.

1. Make an Active Choice To Work With Them

Take some time to check in with yourself around this project be it a training course, a film,  or a play. Connect with the reasons you’re doing it.  Ask yourself:

• What does it do for you ? 
• What does it give you?  
• How does it align with your needs and wants?
• Weigh up whether it’s worth it to you.

If it is then make a conscious decision to choose it. Say to yourself, (aloud or silently),

“ I’m choosing this experience“

A Case Study

A acting client of mine who we shall call Jude knew they wanted to get experience in Shakespeare. They got a role as Puck in a Midsummer Nights Dream production for a local theatre company. The director was a jerk. However Jude wants this experience to build up his acting CV. So he actively chooses to commit even though he feels like he hates the director.

When we actively choose an experience it takes us out of victim mode and helps us to take more ownership. We feel more control. Jude thinks to himself,

”I’m choosing this experience because this role stretches me and I love working with the rest of the team. Therefore I’m choosing to working with this jerk too and will see them as a challenge that I can overcome. Maybe I can learn something from them about myself”

Scan your body. Notice how it feels when you say that to yourself. Now tell yourself,

“I’ve got no choice but to work with this person”

Scan your body again. Notice how the difference feels when we actively choose as opposed to seeing ourselves as the helpless victim.

2. Maintain Clear Boundaries

Figure out what your boundaries are.

Boundaries, according to Gestalt Therapy, are supposed to keep you feeling safe enough so that you can stay in relationship to the other person. When clients come to see me for acting coaching and therapy, they sometimes judge boundaries negatively, thinking they will shut down communication. 

Healthy boundaries open up communication.

Boundaries can include ways we wish to be spoken to and ways we want others to behave with us. They are what we need in order to keep ourselves feeling safe and grounded. 

Jude identified what he needed as opposed to what he wished for. He wished the director could be friendly and encouraging rather than micro-managing and hyper-critical. He knew that was likely never going to happen.

He also identified that he needed to be finishing rehearsals by 10pm at night in order to get enough sleep and feel rested for the next day. He recognised that he needed to have a break half-way through to eat something to balance his blood sugar. 

He knew that it was important for him to tell the director what he didn’t like, even if it didn’t change anything. It would at least help him feel more empowered, like he’d done his best to assert himself. 

So he did. And below is how he did it.

3. Communicate In A Relational, Non-Blaming Way

As a therapist-coach for actors I supported Jude with how to speak to the director. He stuck to using I-Statements. This meant he didn’t come across as blaming the director. This would only put the director into defensive mode.

He stressed that he wanted the production to work and that what he was asking for (the break,10pm curfew and less criticism) would help him be more engaged in the production. The conversation went something like this:

The therapy-coaching for actors session

Jude: I really want this production to be as good as possible. Can I talk to you about some things I need so that I can give my best?

Director: Yeah I’m busy mate so make it quick but go on…

Jude: I need to leave the set by 10pm. I also need to have a proper break half-way through to eat something. If not my blood sugar levels drop and I can’t perform as well. So I’ll be doing that from now on.

Director. Ok…….

Jude: Also, I know when you are giving me critical feedback it’s because you want to improve my acting. And I want to improve my acting too. In fact I act even better when I’m being told something positive about what I did too. So I wonder if you could bear that in mind.

Director: Err, I’ll try….

Jude: Thanks for understanding and trying. I also find it easier to take on feedback once I’ve finished my lines. Being interrupted a lot throws me off kilter. I want us to be able to work together as effectively as possible to get the best outcome for us all.

Director: I see. Thanks

Ok so I’m not saying these are the magic words that will change a grizzly bear director into a sweetheart. But hopefully by at least saying it like this, it  won’t add more fuel to the fire.

4. Listen Actively and Paraphrase

Another tip from a coach for actors is to help diffuse an angry person is to practice active listening. This means paraphrasing what they say after they’ve said it to convey to them that they’ve been understood. 

What people need most is to feel understood. Feeling understood goes a long way towards calming most folk down.

This doesn’t mean you should robotically parrot back to them everything they say. Find a way to summarise it but include a few of their own words.

The therapy coaching for actors session

Director: You can’t go on bl**dy break till I tell you to. We’re in the middle of a really important scene and we’re behind the play schedule and I’m going to lose my reputation if we open and it’s all a shambles.

Actor: Ok, I hear you when you say you don’t want me to go on break now. You’re worried we’re running out of time to rehearse this play before opening night. And this is an important scene….

After para-phrasing you might go on to say:

“And I want to give it my best shot and to do so I need to take a short break to eat something. I’ll come back fresher and ready to give it the full 100% it deserves.“

5. Ground Yourself

If you get activated find ways to ground yourself.

What does grounding yourself mean?

Think about times when you’ve felt grounded, whatever that means to you.

Jude knows he’s grounded when his feet feel warm and  he has a sense of the ground beneath them. His body feels solid and his are shoulders relaxed. His breathing feels free and deep. He feels balanced and in control.

Notice how you feel the next time you are grounded.

I asked Jude when was the last time he felt very grounded He remembered coming home after a day walking in a pine wood. I used an EMDR resourcing technique to ‘install’ this. This means to embed the experience in his nervous system so that he can re-visit it whenever her needs.

EMDR resourcing technique to feel more grounded

I invited him to close his eyes and bring back the smells, sounds, sensations and sights as he sat in the pine wood. He recalled the sunshine on his face, the warm breeze, the smell of the pine trees.

He remembered the open yet settled feeling in his chest. His shoulders relaxing and opening. He tapped alternately with his right and left hand on his right and left thighs as he focussed on this image. 

I told him to recall this imagery before he started the rehearsal. He also evaluated how grounded he felt from time to time during the rehearsal.

When he noticed that he no longer felt grounded, he took a breath in and imagined his image. It instantly helped him to feel calmer and safer. 

Now of course this was not the magic trick that would solve everything. But it did help a bit and Jude felt less at the mercy of his situation.

Other ways you might ground yourself are stretching, taking deep breaths, walking or whatever you do already that works for you.

6. De-Role Afterwards

Be sure to shake off the difficult character you’ve been working alongside with ( as well as the character you’re acting)  after the rehearsal.

Create some kind of ritual to embody this. It might be as simple as swishing your arms around in the air, to taking a shower or lying in an Epsom salt bath.

Doing this ritual consistently quickly sends your nervous system a message to disconnect from what you’ve just experienced. This helps you to stop stewing over any difficult or frustrating encounters you had.

It puts a boundary on them so they don’t seep into your personal life.

7. Make Sure You’re Not “Projecting”

By projecting I mean imagining some of your own qualities in another person. This is a process that happens out of awareness. Often it needs an coach-therapist for actors to help you see it. Sejal had a very self-critical voice. This voice would say things like:

“you’re a fraud, you shouldn’t be here”

or,

“you’re not connecting emotionally with the words”

or, 

“you idiot, why are you so slow learning the lines?”

Sejal became aware she was projecting her critical voice onto her acting tutor. She was convinced her tutor hated her because she gave her direct and honest feedback.

Sejal evaluated how the tutor interacted with others. She imagined which students the tutor thought were ‘good’ and which students the tutor thought were ‘bad’. She hated that she did this and she hated that it affected her morale. 

It was only later in a 1-1 chat with her tutor outside of the training that she experienced her tutor as a very warm and generous person. She realised the tutor had been less warm due to the boundaried context of the training.

It was nothing to do with Sejal. In therapy she recognised she’d projected her own critical voice onto the tutor.

What Sejal learned in therapy for actors

Sejal’s own critical voice had originated from her critical mother. Sejal had imagined the tutor disliked her, just as her mother often appeared to dislike her  when she was a child.

Having this awareness helped her feel less impacted by how tutors were with her in the future. She recognised that she could not ‘read’ whether they liked her or not. Therefore there was no point trying to figure out what they thought of her.

This freed her up to  focus and engage more with her character. Learning to give less of a f**k meant she became a better actress.

8. Challenge Your Negative Beliefs

Sejal’s critical voice was connected to a negative belief embedded within her psyche. We don’t normally walk around knowing about our negative beliefs. They only show up through our actions. That’s when we can start to identify them, either by ourselves or with a therapist for actors.

Negative beliefs fit into four categories. These are:

1. Powerlessness e.g I’m powerless, I’m not in control, I’im helpless
2. Worth e.g I’m worthless, I’m not good enough, I don’t matter
3. Fault e.g It’s my fault, I’m too blame
4. Safety e.g. I’m unsafe, I’m in danger

Sejal had picked up an erroneous belief of being unworthy from her overly critical mother. I asked her to challenge this belief. 

How the coaching for actors session went

Acting coach: What are you unworthy of?

Actress: Err……I don’t know, of being a successful actress

Acting coach: Is that really true? What is it that you do or say that makes you unworthy of that?

Actress: I dunno, I’m still overacting, I’m not connecting with emotions enough.

Acting coach: So how does that make you unworthy of being an actress? Is there a way you could re-frame that?

Actress: Ok, I guess at this current point I have more to practice but I am as worthy of being an actress as anyone else.

9. Don’t Transfer Another Relationship

Us therapists get trained in the concept of transference and countertransference. These are pscycho-analytic terms to explain how we can ‘transfer’ an old relationship onto a new person. This is how we end up repeating relationship patterns.

You know when find yourself finding the same old faults with your current partner as you did with your five exes?

Or when you always tend to pick certain female friends and then end up feeling used?

It seems strange that we create relational patterns that don’t serve us. However we do it out of awareness. The emotional part of our brains craves familiarity. It gets attracted to people that feel familiar to us.

And who are those people?

You guessed it, our parents or primary caregivers.

Does it matter if those very people were not actually good for us and we didn’t get the relationship we needed with them?

Nope, not to that part of our brain. It craves the same-same anyway.  

So much so that it will even try and change the way people behave towards us so that they fit the pattern. This is of course not to say that it’s our fault when someone is abusive towards us.

But we might lose our power around these people because we get triggered into feeling as young as we were in the original relationship. So we no longer interact with them in an assertive adult way.

This is what happened with Jude. 

The jerk director represented his jerk father. Until he he’d received some therapy from me, he felt too scared to challenge the director even though he was a grown-ass man.

The director was genuinely insensitive and cranky however that didn’t stop other members of the production challenging him. This was because they weren’t transferring a past negative relationship experience onto him.

How do we know when we’re transferring a past relationship?

We know because we feel triggered. This means we’re having a disproportionate response to the person. It is proportionate to feel pissed off with the annoying director.

However feeling petrified of the director and getting clammy hands and a churning stomach is a disproportionate response. It means our fight or flight response has got triggered as if the director were a sabre tooth tiger.

Which he is not.

As a therapist-coach for actors I was able to help Jude see the connection between dad and the director. We then did some 2-chair work where I got him to put dad in the chair and say everything he wanted to say to dad about his childhood.

I then got him to put the director in the chair and say everything he wanted to him. As he did so he felt relieved and recognised not just mentally but physically and emotionally that he was no longer a helpless child.

He could now defend himself from his father and the director.

10. Picture The Difficult Person As A Child

Talking of children, one way to work with difficult irksome people is to imagine them as children.

Shouty angry people are often scared. They feel very powerless.

People that constantly want attention and talk a lot about themselves, were starved of attention as kids.

People that are very showy or come across as better than others, were kids that felt very unworthy.

Of course I’m generalising here but still…..

EMDR Technique to Defuse Difficult Directors

I used an EMDR technique with one of my trainee acting clients called Niels. I asked him to imagine the actress he was struggling with. She was his co-lead and talked a lot about herself and didn’t listen to him.  

How was he feeling I asked.

Angry, he said.

How triggered did he feel on a 0-10? 

8 out of 10, he said.

Where did he feel it in his body?

In his stomach. 

What was a negative belief for his current state?

“I’m unsafe and unworthy’

I started to play bilateral sounds in his ears. Once he had a good image of her, I asked him to see her as a cartoon character. He shrank her down and turned her into Rumpelstilzchen stomping his feet and then going off to cry in a corner because he was being ignored. 

I asked how he felt now. He felt calmer. 

He said that on a 0-10 scale he was now at a 0 in terms of being triggered. 

I asked him to find a positive belief for his state now.

“I’m safe and worthy” he said.

He played this image back a few times on his own without the bilateral sounds to practice it. Next time when he saw the actress he also saw the small Rumpelstiltzchen creature.

The outcome of the EMDR for actors

He felt softer towards her, somehow she didn’t trigger him so much. He even felt some empathy for her.

 Since he was less triggered by her he was able to access the creative part of his brain. When he next spoke with his scene partner he playfully alluded to the fact she talks a lot about herself and doesn’t do much listening.

Because he did it in a light-hearted way ( as he wasn’t triggered) and his empathy came across, she took on board what he said.

This didn’t instantly cure her but it did mean he felt less resentful that he had to ‘put up’ with her . He was more able to engage with her, knowing that he could point out when he wanted her to listen to him.