Hollywood is filled with stereotypes. Here’s one: Writers are introverts who sweat when they’re nervous and hide behind the safety of their laptops and the precious characters they create. Actors, meanwhile, are extroverts who never sweat unless it’s called for in the script, love being in front of people, and are happy to vomit up all of their ugliest flaws for our close inspection.

Writers and actors, in other words, are entirely different animals. 

But Joe Lemieux – a television, stage, and film actor who teaches Meisner, Adler, Stanislavski, and other techniques at Michelle Danner Acting Studio, says this thinking leads to missed opportunities for career and personal growth.

“I think one of the biggest misconceptions about actors is that they’re extroverted,” says Lemieux, 47, who is also getting his Masters in Expressive Arts and Clinical Psychology. “But I think actors and writers have way more in common than they even know. 

“Most of the actors I know are very introverted,” he says, “and most of the writers I know are very introverted. And we both create our own little worlds. And what can establish a beautiful relationship is the writer stepping into the actor’s world.”

In other words: Any writer who wants to up their screenwriting game would do well to take an acting class – not just to possibly embarrass themselves on stage and understand the funny words that actors use, but to further engage in the storytelling process and get to know better their own emotions, artistic motivations, and even their ugliest flaws.

Here are five reasons why writers should take an acting class.

You Learn the Language of Actors

An intro class into any of the acting masters helps students understand the principle techniques and definitions that actors use to find the truest essences of their characters. And what they discover is that cultivating the imagination, delving into personal experiences, and engaging in physical exercises – even meditation and acting like an animal – is not just for actors. It can open creative pathways for writers.

Lemieux suggests two ground-floor books for writers who are curious about acting: An Actor Prepares by Constantin Stanislavsky, and Truth: Personas, Needs, and Flaws in the Art of Building Actors and Creating Characters by Susan Batson.

You Learn What Motivates Actors (and Their Characters

“As an actor, what you’re looking for in a script is the conflict,” Lemieux says. “You are constantly asking, ‘What does my character want? How is he gonna get it? … And why does this character do what they do?’”

Actors ask these questions not to be annoying but to zero in on the point of the story. Practicing this as an actor can transform the way a writer looks at – and rewrites – their own scripts. 

You Learn to Write Better Dialogue 

While many writers at some point in their career convince themselves that actors should just say the words exactly as they are written, the truth learned in acting class is that there is a distinct difference between delivering words out loud versus feeling them pass through their body as their own. The latter requires a bit more commitment to Truth. 

Take that scene in Birdman when fading superhero star Riggin Thomson (Michael Keaton) first runs a scene with method actor Mike Shiner (Edward Norton). Shiner tells Thomson to throw out the scene’s first three lines – redundant! – and just leap into their conversation. The results are impressive.  

“The way that human beings communicate with each other, it just gets messy,” Lemieux says, “in a really beautiful way.”

Learning how lines are delivered compared to how they're written will help you write much better dialogue.

You Learn Where You Can Help and  Collaborate with Actors

“I think some actors are really intimidated by words,” Lemieux says. “Some are afraid of not understanding what the writer means. Actors are very sensitive people, as we know. And so what we do – because we’re afraid of the word – is we take the word at face value. But there’s much more to it than that.”

An acting class allows writers to develop collaborative relationships with actors – to see how they interpret scripts and subtext and answer questions that arise.

“I remember doing a rehearsal for a play, and the writers were there,” Lemieux says. “Afterward, we got to talk to the writers. I said, ‘Hey, when you wrote this one thing, what did you mean?’ And their interpretation of it was completely different from how I had interpreted it. And it made so much sense.

“There’s such a beautiful collaboration that can happen between a writer and an actor,” Lemieux says. 

You Learn About Yourself on a New Level

Acting classes include therapeutic exercises that toss away the masks we all use in the everyday world. These techniques delve into memory/experience and imagination, and they train actors to gain agency over their emotions and use them to tell more meaningful stories that resonate fully with others. 

Which, as it happens, is also what writers are trying to do. 

“For me, acting is about, ‘How well do I know myself?’” Lemieux says. “‘And how deep do I want to go down my own personal rabbit hole?’”

This process includes what we might consider to be the ugliest parts of ourselves, Lemieux says.

“I look at this shadow work as touching with compassion the parts of us we may have put away because we thought they were ugly, and bringing them more into our awareness and using it in our work,” he says. “And through that, we go, ‘Oh, I can do that, and still I’m okay.’

“We’re all pulling from the same place,” Lemieux says of writers and actors. “The collective consciousness, that big slipstream. And when you take part in it, you get that symbiosis where an idea travels from the writer through the actor, and now the audience is getting to see it – and you get to experience catharsis.”