How to Act a Texting Scene on Camera

The sides say She reads the text. Her face falls. On the day, the prop phone in your hand may be switched off. There’s nothing on the glass but your own reflection, the camera is a foot from your face, and the director wants the face to fall on take one.

Texting scenes look easy because nobody talks. The scene happens inside you, between reading a message and deciding what to send back, and the camera is close enough to see whether that happened or whether you just looked down and then looked sad.

The short version: know the text word for word, so your eyes can read it even on a dark screen. Type the real reply, at a real speed. Let the message land before you react, and let the reply be a decision. Hold the phone where the camera can see your eyes, and do it the same way every take, because someone may have to match your hands later.

Read the script the way the editor will

Start by finding out what the audience will see. Screenplays mark texts in a few ways. Final Draft’s guide to formatting text messages shows the common one: an action line saying a character reads or sends a text, then a label such as TEXT MESSAGE READS: on its own line, with the message below it. If the character reads it aloud, it goes in the dialogue as a V.O. cue instead.

Those labels tell you something useful. The message is a line in the scene, written by the writer, and someone else will put it on screen. Learn it the way you’d learn your partner’s dialogue, because it’s your cue.

Then find out how the production plans to show it. Some cut to a close-up of the phone. Others put the words in the frame next to your face. StudioBinder’s piece on making on-screen texting look good points to Sherlock and House of Cards, where text floats beside the character instead, and argues that the actors’ reactions matter more than the messages.

Tony Zhou’s 2014 video essay on texting in film made a related point. As the Christian Science Monitor summarized it, audiences had tired of cutting back and forth between the phone and the character. Either way, your face is the shot that carries the story. The phone is where the information lives; you’re where it lands.

How a texting scene is actually shot

Your phone may well be dark. In his Frame.io guide to screen replacement, Mark Christiansen recommends it: “keeping the screen turned off lets you add everything in post.” He suggests lighting the screen only when someone’s hand gets close enough that it would catch the glow. So expect black glass.

The close-up of the screen may be shot later, by other people. That shot is an insert: part of the scene from a different angle, often filmed separately by a second unit with stand-ins. The same article notes the hard part: props have to sit where they were in the main take, and the light has to match.

Sometimes the hand in the insert isn’t yours at all. Productions use a hand double for inserts where only a hand or arm is in the shot. So your job has two halves. Play the moment on your face, and keep your hands simple and repeatable, so the insert can match you.

• Hold the phone in the same hand, at the same height, every take.
• Type with the same thumbs. Two thumbs in the wide and one finger in the insert will not cut together.
• Ask whether the screen should face the camera, or stay angled away, so the replaced screen fits the shot.
• If the crew has put marks on the screen, keep your thumbs off them.
• Tell the script supervisor if you change any of it between takes.

What to actually type when the screen is blank

Type the real message. Not gibberish, not a fast flutter of thumbs. Spell out the words of the reply on the dark glass, letter by letter, roughly where the keys would be.

It changes how your hands move. Real words have a rhythm: a short word, a pause to find the next one, a correction. Fake typing is even and fast, and it reads as fake, even to people who couldn’t tell you why. It also helps you. When you type the actual words, you’re thinking them, and the thought shows on your face.

It also gives you the right length. A large study from Aalto University, reported by ScienceDaily, tested more than 37,000 volunteers. People who type with two thumbs averaged 38 words a minute. At that speed, a 12-word reply takes about 19 seconds. That’s a long time on screen, so the director may want it shorter. Decide that together. Don’t rush the typing and leave the editor with a two-second shot of a long message.

Use the typing as acting. The best texting beats often live in the edits: you type something, stop, delete it, and send something smaller. If the script gives you only the final message, it’s worth asking whether you can play the version you didn’t send.

Read it for real, even off a dark screen

Reading has a look. The eyes don’t glide along a line of text. Wikipedia’s summary of eye movement in reading describes short jumps of about 7 to 9 characters on average, with stops of about 200 to 250 milliseconds in between. Skilled readers also jump back to earlier words about 15 percent of the time.

So a fixed stare at the middle of the phone doesn’t look like reading. Neither does a smooth sweep. If you know the message by heart, you can read it off the glass in your mind’s eye, line by line, word by word, and your eyes will do the right thing on their own.

Use rereading on purpose. People reread messages that surprise them. A quick glance back to the start of a text is one of the clearest ways to show that something landed wrong. Plan where it happens, so it isn’t a random flick, and keep it in the same spot every take.

Play the reaction to a message you never see

Give the message time to travel. First you read it. Then you understand it. Then you react. On stage, those three can blur. In a close-up they can’t, because, as Nick Field of Acting Coach Scotland puts it, the camera “captures every flicker and shift.” If your face falls before your eyes reach the bad word, the audience will feel it.

Find the exact word where the message turns. Many messages do. “Can we talk later” turns on later. A text that starts friendly and ends cold turns near the end. Read up to that word as the character expected to; let the change start there. Our guide on how to react in a scene goes further into letting news land before you show it.

A letter scene is the same problem with older paper. Lady Macbeth enters reading one from her husband. Here’s the end of his letter, and the start of her answer, the one she’ll never send:

Enter Lady Macbeth, reading a letter.

LADY MACBETH: …Whiles I stood rapt in the wonder of it, came missives from the King, who all-hailed me, ‘Thane of Cawdor’; by which title, before, these Weird Sisters saluted me, and referred me to the coming on of time, with ‘Hail, king that shalt be!’ This have I thought good to deliver thee (my dearest partner of greatness) that thou might’st not lose the dues of rejoicing, by being ignorant of what greatness is promis’d thee. Lay it to thy heart, and farewell.

Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be
What thou art promis’d. Yet do I fear thy nature;
It is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way.

William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act I, Scene V

Try it as a texting beat. Where does the letter turn for her? Maybe at Hail, king that shalt be! Maybe earlier, at Thane of Cawdor, because one prophecy has already come true. Pick one. Then find the moment she stops reading and starts deciding, which is the first line of verse. That gap between the last word of a message and your first thought about it is where texting scenes are won. The speech that follows is one of our monologue guides, if you want to keep going.

Where your eyes go: phone, partner, and lens

The biggest technical trap is the phone at your waist. Look down at it in a close-up and your eyelids cover your eyes. The camera sees the top of your head and two closed-looking lids. Bring the phone up, around chest height, so the lens can still see your eyes while you read.

The look up from the phone is the next big moment. It’s often where the editor cuts, and it means something: to the person across the table, to the door, to nothing. Decide what you’re looking at when you look up, and keep that eyeline in the same place every take. Field warns that misaligned eyelines can break the illusion of a scene.

If the scene is two people texting from different places, each of you may shoot alone, maybe on different days. Know your partner’s messages as well as your own, because you’ll be reacting to a timing you have to supply yourself. The same skill you’d use acting to a tennis ball on a green screen applies here: build the thing in detail, then react to what you built.

The self-tape version

On a self-tape, there’s no insert and no text on screen. Casting sees only you. So the texting has to read from your face and your hands alone, inside a chest-up frame.

• Use your own phone as the prop, and switch it to Do Not Disturb so nothing lights up mid-take.
• Put the message on the screen, in a note or a draft to yourself, so you’re actually reading it. Keep the phone high enough that your eyes stay in frame.
• Hold the read long enough for casting to see it land, but trim it. A 19-second reply is a lot of tape, so type the first few words for real, then let the decision play.
• If the script gives the message as V.O., have your reader say it as you read. Otherwise, read silently and let your face tell them.
• When you look up, look to your reader’s eyeline beside the lens, not into it.
• Watch the take back with the sound off. You should be able to point to the word where the message turned.

Our guide on how to self-tape alone covers framing, eyeline tape, and sound when you have no reader at all.

Rehearse the beat, not just the lines

Texting scenes go wrong in rehearsal because people skip the silence. They read the message, nod, and say their next line. In the shot, that silence is the scene. Rehearse it with the real length of the read and the reply built in.

In Offbook, add a delay before the line that follows each message (Edit Scene, Delay before line) so the scene waits while you read and type. As the video below shows, you can set how fast the other voices speak and add a beat before any line, so the scene holds still while you read a message and type your answer, then carries on after the delay you set.

Put the text of each message in the script where it arrives, so you hear it at the right moment and learn it as a cue. Then practice the look up: last word of the message, the turn, the decision, eyes up, line.

Questions actors ask

What do you type on the phone when the screen is added in post?

Type the real message, word by word, on the dark screen, at a natural speed. Real words give your thumbs a believable rhythm, keep your thoughts on the message, and give the editor a shot long enough to fit the text that gets added later. Ask the director if they want it shorter.

How long should I look at the phone?

As long as it takes your character to read the message and decide what to do about it. Know the text by heart, read it in your head at a real reading pace, and look up only when the character has a thought about it. The director will tell you if the beat needs to be tighter.

How do I do a texting scene in a self-tape?

Use your own phone with the message on the screen and notifications off, keep it high enough that your eyes stay in frame, and trim the typing to a few real words. Let the reaction carry the scene, then look up to your reader’s eyeline beside the lens.