What Is Indicating in Acting, and How Do You Stop?

You finish the scene feeling like you worked hard. You found the anger, you let it show, you hit every beat you planned. Then the teacher says, kindly, “You’re indicating.” Or the director says, “I don’t believe you.” And you’re left wondering how something that felt so full could look so empty.

It’s a common note, and rarely explained. Knowing the word doesn’t fix the habit, because indicating feels like acting from the inside. That’s why it’s hard to catch.

The short version: indicating is showing the audience what your character feels instead of doing what your character does. You stop it by changing the question you ask yourself. Not “how should this look?” but “what am I trying to get from this person, and how?” Then you put your attention on them, make the circumstances specific enough to push you, and let the feeling be a side effect.

What indicating actually means

Indicating is playing the label instead of the life. The script says the character is furious, so you frown, clench, and raise your voice. The character is sad, so your face falls and your voice drops. You’re demonstrating an emotion so nobody misses it.

Acting teachers have several names for the same thing. Diana Frankhauser of the Houde School of Acting lists three of them in a piece on playing the part, not the result: playing a feeling, indicating an emotion, and playing a result. Her example is an actor who reads “She jumps up and down in excitement,” and does exactly that, smiling, with no idea why the character is excited.

Two Columbia University researchers, Frank Enos and Julia Hirschberg, put the difference neatly in a 2006 paper on eliciting emotional speech from actors. When you play the result, they write, you ask “what would I sound like?” instead of “what would I do?” Then you work your face, body, and voice to match a picture you already had.

The opposite isn’t “feel it more.” It’s playing an action: pursuing something from the other person, here and now, with the words you’ve been given. The emotion still shows up. It just shows up as a byproduct of trying, the way it does in life.

Why good actors fall into it

Nobody indicates on purpose. It usually comes from one of four honest places.

• The script describes results. Frankhauser points out that when a writer puts “she cries” in the script, that’s what the audience is expected to see. The writer is describing the end, not the road to it. Read it as an instruction and you’ll play the end.
• The note was a result. “Angrier.” “More hurt.” Judith Weston, author of Directing Actors, calls this result direction: telling the actor what effect you want them to have on the audience. A result note invites a result performance.
• Your preparation stopped at adjectives. If your script notes say “bitter,” “nervous,” “in love,” you’ve decided what the character feels and nothing about what they want. On the night, the adjective is all you have to play.
• You’re afraid they won’t get it. In an audition especially, there’s a pull to make sure the casting director sees the emotion. So you underline it. The underlining is the indicating.

None of these makes you a bad actor. As Frankhauser notes, producing honest emotion is a skill that has to be trained over time.

How to spot it in your face, hands, and voice

You can’t fix what you can’t see, and indicating is hard to see from inside. Record a run of your scene on your phone and watch for these:

• The stock gesture. A fist for rage, a hand to the chest for heartbreak, a finger to the chin for thinking. If a stranger could guess the emotion with the sound off and the face covered, the gesture is probably doing a job your intention should do.
• The pre-loaded face. Your expression changes before the other character finishes speaking, because you knew what was coming. In life, you react to what you just heard.
• The emotional tune. Sad lines go down and slow, angry lines go up and hard, every time. Listen back with your eyes closed. If you can hear the adjective, you’re playing it.
• The held moment. You finish a line and stay in the expression, as if posing for it to land. The scene stops while you wait.

The voice is worth checking too. In a 2015 study in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, researchers compared emotional speech that was acted, by professional actors and by non-actors, with real emotional speech. Both acted versions had more variable pitch than the real recordings. Listeners also judged the non-actors’ versions authentic more often than the professionals’.

That doesn’t mean training hurts. It’s a warning: performed emotion tends to push the tune around more than real feeling does. Shakespeare had a note for the hands, too. Hamlet tells the visiting players, Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently.

What Hamlet tells the players

Hamlet’s advice to the players in Act III, Scene 2 still works as an acting note. Here’s the start of his second speech, from the Project Gutenberg text:

HAMLET. Be not too tame neither; but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature; for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.

Notice the first sentence. Hamlet has just warned against overdoing it, and now he says don’t be tame either. The cure for indicating isn’t a blank face. It’s behavior that fits what’s actually happening, as big as the moment needs and no bigger. “O’erstep not the modesty of nature” is a good test to keep in your pocket: would a person really do this, here, for this reason?

Replace every adjective with a verb

This is the most useful fix. Find every word in your script notes that names a feeling or a quality, and replace it with something your character is trying to do to the other person. A verb you can aim at someone is playable. An adjective isn’t.

• “Angry” becomes to make him admit it, to shut her down, to win the argument before the others arrive.
• “Sad” becomes to get him to stay, to make her see what she’s losing, to make him feel what he’s done.
• “Nervous” becomes to convince them you’re ready, to win their approval, to get them to move on.
• “In love” becomes to make her laugh, to get him to look at you, to keep the conversation going.

Carmichael Phillip makes the same point in Acting Magazine: in an angry scene, don’t play anger. Play confronting someone, or defending yourself, or trying to regain control, and let the anger come from that. Our working list of acting verbs has dozens more to choose from, and our guide to finding your objective in a scene shows how to pick the want those verbs serve.

Make the circumstances do the work

Verbs tell you what to do. Circumstances tell you why it matters, and that’s where real feeling comes from. Enos and Hirschberg describe emotion as arising from the meeting of goals, context, and obstacles, which become believable to the actor through rehearsal. Once they’re believable, you don’t need to manufacture the display.

Their sample scenario is worth stealing. June comes home at midnight to find her husband Bill, who walked out a year ago, in the living room playing with the kids. Her goal is to make him leave. Her line is “Don’t even speak to me!”

If the result isn’t angry enough, they suggest raising the stakes rather than asking for more anger: imagine Bill has been gone for three years. For a colder anger, ten. The actor’s focus stays on what June is doing, and the anger takes care of itself.

Frankhauser makes a similar point about tears: crying can come from relief, anger, happy memories, or regret, and each behaves differently. “She cries” doesn’t tell you which. The circumstances do. Our guide to finding the given circumstances in a script walks through pulling them out of the text.

If you’re stuck on what a character wants or why a moment matters, Offbook’s script assistant, Genie, can help you think it through. Ask it about a character’s motivation or the context of a scene, or highlight a single line and ask what’s going on underneath it.

Put your attention on the other person

Indicating points out toward the audience: your attention is on how you’re coming across. The fastest way to break it is to turn your attention onto your scene partner and make your job about changing them.

Shaky lines make it worse. If half your mind is fetching the next sentence, there’s no attention left for listening, so you fill the gap with a face. Know the words well enough to forget about them, and your reactions can come from what you just heard.

Rehearsing alone makes this harder, because there’s nobody to react to. In Offbook, you upload your script, choose your role, and realistic voices read every other character out loud and wait for your line. That gives you real words to listen to and answer, run after run. You can try the same thing with classic scenes in our free run lines tool. Our guide on listening instead of waiting for your cue has exercises for the listening itself.

Translate result notes and stage directions

You’ll keep getting result notes, because “angrier” is quick to say. Your job is to translate the note into something playable before you try again, silently, in a few seconds.

Weston’s alternatives to result direction make a good translation kit. She names verbs, facts or emotional history, imagery, and physical life and events. So when you hear “more hurt,” ask yourself one of these:

• Verb: what am I trying to make them do now? (To make him take it back.)
• Fact: what do I know about our history that makes this line cut? (He promised he’d never say that again.)
• Image: what do I see when I say this? (The empty chair at the table.)
• Physical life: what am I doing with my body, and what gets in the way? (Packing the bag, and the zipper keeps sticking.)

Treat parentheticals and stage directions the same way. “(Angrily)” or “she cries” tells you what the writer hopes the audience sees. Find the want and the circumstance that would produce it, play those, and let the result arrive or not. If it doesn’t, try raising the stakes, the way Enos and Hirschberg suggest.

Don’t fix it by going blank

A common overcorrection is to stop doing anything at all: flat, still, mumbling the lines with a careful neutral face. That isn’t truthful either. It’s just indicating “subtle.”

Remember “be not too tame neither.” People in real trouble raise their voices, cry, laugh at the wrong moment. Big behavior isn’t the problem; behavior with no reason is. Fight for something that matters, and the size will come from the fight.

A quick check after any run: for each moment you’re unsure of, can you say what you were trying to do to the other person? If you can, you were probably acting. If all you can say is how you wanted to look, that’s the moment to rework.

Questions actors ask

What does indicating mean in acting?

It means showing the audience a feeling or quality, through a face, gesture, or vocal tone, instead of doing what the character is trying to do. Teachers also call it playing the result or playing a feeling.

Is indicating ever okay?

Some styles, like broad farce, clowning, or melodrama, play with showing openly, and the audience is in on it. Even there, the showing is a choice you make on purpose, not a cover for not knowing what you want. In most scene work, a note that you’re indicating means the reason behind the behavior has gone missing.

How do I know if I’m indicating?

Record yourself and watch it twice, once with the sound off and once with your eyes closed. Look for stock gestures, expressions that arrive before you’ve heard the line, and a vocal tune that announces the emotion. If you can’t name what you were trying to do in a moment, look there first.

What’s the difference between indicating and overacting?

Overacting is about size: more than the moment or the frame needs. Indicating is about direction: showing instead of doing. You can indicate in a tiny, quiet performance, and you can play a huge moment truthfully. They often travel together. For screen-size drills, see our guide on acting on camera without overacting.