What Is an Obstacle in Acting, and How Do You Play It?

You’ve done the homework. You know what your character wants, you’ve written the objective at the top of the scene, and you’re playing it hard. And still the scene feels thin. Your teacher says, “I can see what you want. I just don’t see what it costs you.”

What’s missing is the other half of the equation. An objective with nothing in the way is a character walking through an open door. The scene needs a reason the door is shut.

The short version: an obstacle is anything that stands between your character and what they want, inside them or outside them. Find it in the script, make it specific and personal, and let it shape how you go after your objective. Many of the interesting choices in a scene come from the fight with the obstacle, not from the want itself.

What an obstacle is

Backstage’s guide to what an obstacle is in acting points out that obstacles get discussed less often than objectives. It quotes acting teacher Ivana Chubbuck’s definition: anything that gets in the way of your objective. That’s deliberately broad. A locked door is an obstacle. So is another character who says no, a rule you can’t break, a secret you can’t tell, or your own fear.

Other teachers land on the same pairing. In Backstage’s piece “And, Action!”, acting teacher Larry Moss is described as calling objective, obstacle, and intention the triad of all acting: what you want, what’s in the way, and what you actively do to get past it.

Uta Hagen built it into her questions too. Backstage’s guide to Uta Hagen’s technique sets out the six steps from her book A Challenge for the Actor, and one of them asks what stands in the way. Our guide to Uta Hagen’s nine questions covers the earlier version, where it’s “What is in my way?”

Inner and outer obstacles

Chubbuck divides obstacles by where they come from. In the Backstage article, she says they exist both internally (the character’s psychological makeup, and the actor’s) and externally (the other characters, the environment).

• Outer obstacles are in the world of the play: the other person’s refusal, a parent in the next room, a deadline, a law, a locked gate, a crowded room where you can’t speak freely.
• Inner obstacles are inside the character: fear, pride, guilt, shame, loyalty, a promise they made, a part of them that doesn’t want what the rest of them wants.

The strongest scenes usually have both. Hamlet’s uncle is an outer obstacle. Hamlet’s own doubt is the inner one, and arguably the one the play keeps returning to. Chubbuck, in the same article, points to the fatal flaw in Greek tragedy as the ultimate inner obstacle.

A worked example: Viola can’t say it

In Act 2, Scene 4 of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Viola is disguised as a young man, Cesario, and serving Duke Orsino. She has fallen in love with him. He is in love with Olivia and keeps sending Cesario to woo her for him. Here Orsino has just claimed that no woman could love as deeply as he loves Olivia. From the Standard Ebooks text:

VIOLA: Ay, but I know—

ORSINO: What dost thou know?

VIOLA: Too well what love women to men may owe:
In faith, they are as true of heart as we.
My father had a daughter loved a man,
As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman,
I should your lordship.

ORSINO: And what’s her history?

VIOLA: A blank, my lord. She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i’ the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek…

What does Viola want from Orsino? One strong reading: for him to see that a woman’s love can be as deep as his, and, under that, for him to see her. What’s in the way? Almost everything. The outer obstacle is the disguise: as far as Orsino knows, she’s a boy, and telling him the truth could cost her her place in his house. The inner obstacles are just as strong: her pride, her fear of his reaction, and her loyalty, since she’s doing his wooing for him.

Now watch what the obstacle does to the lines. “Ay, but I know—“ breaks off. She nearly says it, and stops. Then she finds a way around the obstacle: she invents a sister, “My father had a daughter loved a man,” and tells her own story as if it were someone else’s. “As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman” is as close to the truth as she can go without saying it.

That’s the point. Without the obstacle, this is a woman telling a man she loves him. With it, every line is a tactic for getting around something. You can read the whole scene in our play library.

How to find the obstacle in the script

The Backstage article lays out a simple order: find your objective scene by scene, then look in the script for what you’d have to overcome to get it, then personalize it with your own experience and imagination. In practice, that means asking a few questions and writing the answers in pencil:

1. What does my character want from the other person in this scene? (If that’s not clear yet, start with our guide to finding your objective.)
2. Why don’t they just ask for it, or just take it? Whatever stops them is an obstacle.
3. What does the other character want? If it conflicts with what I want, they’re my obstacle.
4. What’s in the room, the time, or the situation that makes this harder? Our guide to given circumstances shows where those facts hide.
5. What inside my character is working against the want: a fear, a promise, a pride?

Question three does a lot of the work. Doug Warhit makes this point in the Backstage piece: if you look at what the other character wants and it conflicts with your want, the obstacles are already built in. Two strong objectives that can’t both be met give you a scene almost by themselves.

If you’re unsure what’s under a line like “Ay, but I know—“, Offbook’s script assistant, Genie, can talk you through your character’s motivation and the context of the scene, and you can highlight that single line to ask about it.

How obstacles change your tactics

An obstacle is what makes you change what you’re doing. When your first tactic hits the obstacle and fails, you try another. That’s the line-by-line life of a scene. If nothing is in the way, the first tactic works and the scene is over.

So play the obstacle actively. Don’t play “being blocked.” Play the attempt to get past it. Viola doesn’t sit in her obstacle and suffer; she tries to hint, to test, to tell the truth in disguise. Each line is a new way around the wall. Our list of acting action verbs is useful here: when you know the obstacle, choose a verb for what you’re doing to get past it on each line (for example probe, test, tease, or bait) and notice how the verbs change as the obstacle shifts.

Choose obstacles the script supports

Warhit, in the Backstage article, is happy with plenty of obstacles, as long as they serve the material and fit the character. That condition is the part to hold on to. Piling on random ones (the character is tired, and nervous, and has a headache) doesn’t serve anything, and an obstacle the script doesn’t support pulls the scene somewhere it isn’t going.

A good test: does this obstacle make me fight harder for the objective? If it does, keep it. If it just gives you something to suffer about, cut it.

Don’t play the obstacle instead of the want

The opposite mistake is common too. An actor finds a strong inner obstacle, such as fear or grief, and plays only that. The result is a scene full of feeling with nobody trying to get anything. The audience can see you’re upset, but not why it matters.

Keep both in play at once. The objective pulls you forward; the obstacle pulls back. The tension between them is what the audience watches. Our guide to raising the stakes covers the same idea from the other side: a strong want with nothing in its way isn’t interesting. Neither is an obstacle with no want pushing against it.

When you rehearse, try a pass where you play only the objective and ignore the obstacle, then a pass where you let the obstacle win a little more on each line. Somewhere between the two is the scene. Our free run lines online tool lets you try passes like that on classic scenes without an account.

Questions actors ask

What is an obstacle in acting?

An obstacle is anything that stands between your character and their objective. It can be outside them, like another character, a rule, or the situation, or inside them, like fear, pride, or guilt. The obstacle is what forces the character to try different tactics, which is where much of a scene’s life comes from.

How do objectives and obstacles work together?

The objective is what you want from the other person; the obstacle is what makes it hard to get. You need both. An objective with no obstacle ends the scene at once, and an obstacle with no objective is just a mood. Play the want, and let the obstacle shape how you go after it.

What is the difference between an inner and outer obstacle?

An outer obstacle comes from the world of the play: another character, a place, a deadline, a law. An inner obstacle comes from inside the character: a fear, a belief, a loyalty, a part of them that doesn’t want what they want. Strong scenes usually have both at once.

Can my scene partner be my obstacle?

Very often, yes. If their character wants something that conflicts with what yours wants, they’re the obstacle, and so are their tactics. That’s why listening matters: the obstacle changes every time they say something new, and your next tactic should answer it.