Method Acting Explained: What Strasberg Actually Taught

Someone in your class says they’re “going Method” for the spring show. That apparently means answering only to the character’s name for six weeks and refusing to eat lunch with the cast. Another friend says the Method is dangerous, that it makes you relive the worst day of your life on cue. You’re about to sign up for a Method class, and you have no idea which of them is right.

Probably neither. Much of what people call method acting today is a mix of film-set legend and half-remembered history. The actual teaching, the one Lee Strasberg ran for decades, is quieter, more technical, and a lot more useful.

The short version: Strasberg’s Method is a training system built on three tools. You learn to relax. You train your senses with everyday objects. And, with care, you use emotional memory from your own life, which at Strasberg’s school today comes in a separate elective rather than the core class. Staying in character offstage was never part of it. You can try the first two tonight, safely, at home.

What the Method actually is

The Method is the American approach to acting that Lee Strasberg built out of Stanislavski’s system. In 1931 he, Harold Clurman, and Cheryl Crawford gathered 28 actors to form the Group Theatre, and Strasberg taught that company Stanislavski’s ideas, as the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute’s history sets out.

Later he became the teacher most tied to the Actors Studio in New York, founded in 1947 by Elia Kazan and Robert Lewis, with administrative help from Cheryl Crawford. The Institute’s history says he was named its artistic director in 1951 and stayed until his death in 1982. In 1969 he and his wife Anna opened the school that still carries his name.

Strasberg himself refused to make it sound exotic. His own definition, quoted on the Institute’s history page: “Method acting is what all actors have always done whenever they acted well.” It’s a way of training the skills good actors already use, so you can use them on purpose instead of by luck.

What makes his version distinctive is where it points. Isaac Butler, who wrote a history of the Method, put it plainly in a Los Angeles Review of Books interview: “Strasberg’s real emphasis was on the actor’s psychology and emotion.” The Method trains the actor’s inner instrument: what you can feel, sense, and believe.

Stanislavski’s system and Strasberg’s Method are not the same thing

People use the two names as if they meant one thing. They don’t. Stanislavski built a system over a long career and kept changing it. Strasberg took one part of it, the actor’s own emotional life, and made it the center.

The key tool was affective memory, also called emotional memory: recalling the details of a moment from your own life so that the feeling comes back and can be lent to the character. The Institute’s page on what method acting is says affective memory was at the heart of Strasberg’s work with the Group. For him, recreating an emotion wasn’t enough; one had to relive it.

That emphasis split the Group. In the mid-1930s, Stella Adler worked with Stanislavski in Paris and came back with a different account of his teaching. Butler sums up her challenge to Strasberg this way: “It’s about action and textual analysis and imagination.” Our guide to the Stella Adler technique covers what she taught instead, and the magic if shows the Stanislavski tool that keeps you in the play’s situation rather than your own past.

Sanford Meisner, another Group member, also broke with Strasberg and built his own approach; our guide to his repetition exercise shows where it starts. So when someone says “Stanislavski” and “the Method” in one breath, the useful question is which part of the tradition they mean.

The stay-in-character myth

The habit of living as the character for months, on set and off, is what the public now thinks method acting is. It isn’t what Strasberg taught.

Butler said so directly on NPR’s Fresh Air. He described film actors trained in the Method wondering how to turn the work on, on command, and some deciding the answer was never to break character. Then: “That is not what Strasberg taught.” He added that Strasberg was strongly opposed to it.

Eric Hetzler, a senior lecturer in media and performance at the University of Huddersfield, makes the same point in The Conversation. The famous advice to “live the part” comes from Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares, and in context it means living the part every moment you are playing it. Hetzler writes that Strasberg never expected a Method actor to carry the work outside the theater or the sound stage.

The Strasberg school is blunter still. In the Institute’s post on Method myths, David Lee Strasberg, Lee’s son and the Institute’s creative director, says the technique is meant to be engaged and then stopped: “you don’t continue the reality.” Staying in character all day, he says, is “an anxious act.”

The three tools Strasberg actually taught

Look at how the Strasberg Institute describes its core class today. Its New York class descriptions say relaxation is practiced in every class, and that sense memory work begins with simple objects and sensations through the five senses. Each class splits into “work on the self and work on the character.”

1. Relaxation

Everything starts here. Hetzler summarizes Strasberg’s reasoning: tension makes it hard for thought, sensation, and emotion to come through. A tight jaw or locked shoulders block the very things you’re trying to feel. The Los Angeles campus opens every Method class with Strasberg’s relaxation technique for exactly that reason.

2. Sense memory

Next, you train your senses to respond to things that aren’t there: the weight of a cup, the heat of the sun, the smell of coffee. You start with everyday objects and move to harder ones slowly. We cover this step by step, including the classic breakfast-drink exercise, in our guide to sense memory in acting.

3. Affective memory

Then there’s emotional recall. Notice where the New York school puts it: the Emotional Memory Exercise and the Private Moment are listed in a separate character elective rather than the core Method class. Even in Strasberg’s own school, it isn’t the whole of the training.

Exercises you can try safely this week

You don’t need a studio to start, and you don’t need to touch anything painful.

A ten-minute relaxation in a chair

This is our own simple version of the chair relaxation many Method classes begin with.

1. Sit in a chair with a back, in a position you could almost fall asleep in.
2. Move slowly through your body from the feet up, and wherever you find tension, move that part gently until it lets go.
3. Spend extra time on the forehead, temples, eyes, and jaw. Let the jaw hang a little.
4. If you feel tension in your chest or throat, let out a long, easy “ah” on the breath.
5. When you feel loose, stay there for a minute, and then start your scene work from that state.

One object, every day

Pick one ordinary thing you handle daily, such as a mug, a toothbrush, or your keys. Handle it for real and notice its weight, temperature, texture, and smell, one sense at a time. Then put it away and recreate it with nothing in your hands, letting your body answer the same questions. Go back to the real object and check what you missed.

Set your limits before any memory work

The Strasberg Institute has its own rule for emotional memory: the myths post says students should use an affective memory only if it is more than seven years old. It says this is about predictability, not safety. Your response to a recent memory is hard to predict and may change from one night to the next, while an older one that still works tends to stay reliable.

Safety is a separate question, and it’s yours to decide. If a class asks for emotional memory, choose what’s off limits before you walk in. Keep painful events out, whatever their age, and you never have to say why.

Then close the work. David Lee Strasberg compares feeling to a light bulb that only stays hot while you keep giving it energy. Stop feeding it: stand up, shake out, change clothes, and talk about something ordinary. If a memory stays with you after class, talk to someone you trust, your teacher, or a mental health professional. If you’d rather not use your own past at all, imagination does the same job; our guide to emotional preparation shows how.

Try it on a scene: Masha and the sultry air

Here’s a moment from the opening of Chekhov’s The Sea-Gull, in the English translation on Project Gutenberg. The schoolmaster Medviedenko has just told Masha he loves her.

MASHA: It is not that. [She takes snuff] I am touched by your affection, but I cannot return it, that is all. [She offers him the snuff-box] Will you take some?

MEDVIEDENKO: No, thank you. [A pause.]

MASHA: The air is sultry; a storm is brewing for to-night. …

Anton Chekhov, The Sea-Gull, Act I

A few lines earlier Masha has told him she is unhappy. The tempting move is to hunt for your own unhappiest memory and pour it into her. You don’t need to. Chekhov has handed you sensations instead: the sharp hit of snuff, the small box passed between two hands, and air so heavy it feels like a storm is coming.

Relax first. Then work the snuff as a sense memory: the pinch between your fingers, the sting, the way it gives you something to do instead of looking at him. Then the air: damp heat on your neck, the pressure before rain. You imagine the snuff; you don’t need real snuff, and an empty tin works if you want something real in your hands. Play the scene with those two things. Often the sadness shows up through the heat and the habit, and you never had to visit your own past to find it. You can read the whole play in our plays library.

Get the words solid, then do the inner work

All of this needs spare attention. You can’t feel the heat on your neck while you’re groping for the next line. Sensory work goes better once the words are solid, because your attention is free.

One way to get there: in Offbook, realistic voices read every other character and the next cue plays when you finish your line. The video below shows how to hide your lines and recall each one from its cue, or use first-letter cues as a step on the way. Once the words come on their own, run the relaxation, add the snuff and the storm, and run the scene again.

To start on a speech tonight, our free line memorizer turns your lines into first-letter cues, with no account needed.

Questions actors ask

What is method acting, in one sentence?

It’s Lee Strasberg’s training system, built on Stanislavski’s ideas, in which actors learn to relax, train their senses to respond to imaginary objects, and use their own emotional memories to give a role real inner life.

What is the difference between Stanislavski and the Method?

Stanislavski’s system is the broader, older body of work, and he kept revising it; Adler came back from Paris saying Strasberg had misread him: the system was about action and imagination. Strasberg’s Method put the actor’s own psychology and emotional memory at the center. Adler and Meisner, who also came out of the Group Theatre, broke with Strasberg and built their own approaches.

Do you have to stay in character for method acting?

No. Strasberg did not teach it, and the Strasberg Institute calls it a myth: the work is meant to be switched on for the scene and then stopped. Some film actors stay in character on set by choice, but that’s their own practice, not the Method.

Is method acting dangerous?

Relaxation and sense memory with everyday objects are low risk and useful for any actor. Emotional memory is the part to handle with care. The Strasberg Institute’s seven-year rule is about predictability, not safety, so set your own limits: keep painful events off limits, close each session with a clear ending, and use imagination instead whenever a memory would hurt. If a memory stays with you, talk to someone you trust, your teacher, or a mental health professional.

Was Marlon Brando a method actor?

Not in the strict sense. In his Los Angeles Review of Books interview, Isaac Butler points out that Brando studied with Stella Adler and did not like Strasberg, even though Brando’s style became linked with the Method in the public mind.

Did Strasberg write a book about the Method?

Yes. A Dream of Passion: The Development of the Method is his own account of what the Method is and how it developed. Little, Brown published it in 1987, five years after his death.