The Actor’s Belief: Where the Work Begins

One of the first things I tell actors—especially those new to the craft—is this: If you don’t believe in what you’re doing, no one else will. The work begins with you. The magic that eventually reaches the audience starts in the actor’s own belief. It is not manufactured through mimicry or emotional guesswork—it’s rooted in specificity, sensory truth, and imaginative rigor.

Uta Hagen, one of the most respected acting teachers of the 20th century, knew this well. Her endowment exercise remains one of the most powerful tools we have for training actors in the act of belief. It challenges the actor to endow objects onstage with personal significance—to make a simple scarf become your dying grandmother’s gift, to make a cold cup of coffee the last thing your partner ever touched. This isn’t “pretending” in the shallow sense. It’s an intentional deepening of attention, asking the actor to invest with genuine imagination and emotional clarity.

In our Foundations 1 course, I teach the endowment exercise. Some actors really resist it at first. It often feels "awkward"—or worse, it feels fake. But slowly, as they begin to really do the work—to concentrate, to connect, to personalize—the change is visible. An actor picks up a glass of water, and we watch as it becomes something fragile, precious, loaded. The room gets quieter. We’re leaning in. The actor believes. And now, so do we.

What’s remarkable is how this early discipline grows. By the time our actors move into Foundations 2 and 3, I begin seeing it everywhere—unconsciously folded into their work. A scene partner reaches for a prop, and it has weight. A line lands not as text, but as lived experience. These actors aren’t “acting”; they’re behaving truthfully in imaginary circumstances. Their belief is full-bodied. It’s no longer an exercise—it’s a habit of mind.

And what happens when an actor truly believes? The audience doesn’t need to be convinced. They get to join. The fourth wall doesn’t come crashing down—it becomes porous. We breathe with them. We remember things from our own lives. We feel empathy, suspense, relief. We’re watching someone who has done the quiet labor of creating meaning—and because they did, we get to receive it without effort.

That’s the gift of acting at its best. And it starts with believing it first.