I Don't Need an Acting Class

Gustavo Dudamel and Acting

What can actors learn from Gustavo Dudamel? After hearing him conduct Mahler’s Fifth Symphony with the New York Philharmonic, Milton explores what made the performance ex

The Character Is Not You

How do you respond to the circumstances as the character? This week, we explore how script analysis helps us discover the character’s nature—and turn that understanding i

Working With A Partner

What happens when an actor really looks at the person they’re speaking to? This week, I use Edgar Degas’s painting L’Absinthe to help the class build a relationship with

The Play Is Not in the Words

This week’s episode is a little different. Using the opening monologue from Jack Heifner’s A Wide Place in the Road, Milton invites the class into the kind of conversatio

The Scene Starts Before You Speak

Recorded while working with an actress in a class in Paris, this episode explores one of the most common problems in acting: actors don’t start acting until they start ta

Don't Talk Away Your Talent

This week, we explore the actor’s preparation: how to get beyond vague ideas and find something specific that actually feeds you; why we need to shop more widely for choi

It's Enough

This week's episode is about learning to trust that acting can be built a little at a time – and recognizing when what you've built is already enough.

More Kick Ass Choices

Picking up where last week’s episode left off, we dig a little deeper into what it actually takes to make a great acting choice. What makes a choice come alive? In this

Kick Ass Choices

What does it mean to make a great acting choice? This week, we challenge the current obsession with being “authentic” and look instead at what Stella Adler demanded: choi

Trust Your Preparation

Actors often do wonderful preparation—and then abandon it the moment they begin speaking. This episode explores how to trust your work, stop explaining the plot, and let

Slow The F••• Down

Rushing to make choices means we miss great acting opportunities. In this episode Milton works with one of his students who's going into rehearsals for a play soon.

Simplify Your Choices

There's a tendency to complicate our choices by inventing elaborate plots, when simplifying to something specific will bring us to life. Also being more specific allows y

Living Off Your Partner

Building a solid relationship with the partner gives you grounding. Knowing who I'm talking to and what my attitude is towards them opens up what's going on in a scene.

Talking Out a Preparation

In this video Milton works with Rashaud as he prepares a monologue from The Laramie Project.

Specificity • a Key

Not just unexperienced facts can deaden our work as actors, the need to explain or report the facts can get in the way of our most creative work. Digging down specificall

Getting to Depth

It's not just enough to be functional or accurate or good enough. There's a road in to our actor work that helps us find extraordinary choices and frees us up to do our b

Before the First Line

If you think of the play as a continuation of what has already happened, it gives you a sense of how much work you have to do in order to earn the play. Excerpted from my

The Human Being Behind the Character

Continuing work on the Frank Gilroy play, The Subject Was Roses, this expert from Milton's in-person class begins to explore the road in to building a character with more

Working on Text

Working on a play begins to give actors the foundation of working on any text they get. These are excerpts from my Script Analysis class at The Actor Lab in New York.

The Partner and their Behavior

We're combining two exercises in this class. (1) Seeing someone 'on the street' and being able to make decisions about who they are, based on their behavio and (2) buildi