Acting exercises for beginners and working actors: warm-ups, partner drills and script work, step by step

Acting exercises are drills that train one part of the craft at a time: a relaxed body, a clear voice, concentration, listening to a partner, imagination and work on a script. For beginners, the most useful set is a 15-minute body and voice warm-up, a sensory exercise, the repetition exercise with a partner, a two-minute "daily life" exercise and a scene-analysis routine you can run on any script.

Each exercise below is described the way a theater, school or teacher publishes it, with what it trains, how to do it alone or with a partner and the mistake that most often turns it into wasted time.

Exercises support training; they do not replace feedback. Almost every drill here is easier to do badly than well on your own, so pair a home routine with a class or a scene partner who will tell you what they saw.

San Luis Obispo Repertory Theatre's actor warm-up handout names three kinds of warm-up, physical, vocal and mental, and says all three together should take "no more than 15 minutes". The physical part should move briefly through the whole body to reduce tension, because tension "can stop you from breathing, thinking, feeling, and responding", and because the voice is housed in the body (SLO REP). The mental part is not a separate drill: you keep your attention on your breath and your muscles while you move, and bring it back when it wanders.

The Geffen Playhouse's at-home warm-up sheet gives a sequence you can follow word for word. Each exercise takes up to five minutes and the full set about 30 (Geffen Playhouse):

1. Actor's neutral. Feet flat, standing tall, a slight bend in the knees, hands resting at your sides. Most of the other exercises start here.
2. Lemon / Lion. Scrunch your whole face as if you bit a sour lemon for 3 seconds, then open it wide like a roaring lion for 3 seconds, tongue out. Switch 5 times, tighter and wider each time.
3. Deep breath. Breathe in through the nose for 3 seconds, hold for 2, breathe out gently through the mouth for 3. Repeat 3 to 5 times.
4. Body shake. Shake your left arm 10 times while counting down aloud from 10, then the right arm, right leg and left leg. Repeat from 9, then 8, down to 1.

The counting in the body shake is the point: it puts breath and voice into the movement, so you finish loose and already speaking.

The goal of a vocal warm-up, in SLO REP's words, is to release tension, prepare the voice and work your range (SLO REP). Three drills cover most of it.

• Lip flaps and tongue stretches. Breathe in through the nose and let the lips flap like a horse's on the way out, making each exhale last longer than the one before. Then stretch the tongue toward your nose, chin and each ear for 3 seconds apiece (Geffen Playhouse).
• Tongue twisters. Say each phrase slowly first, stressing the consonants, then three times fast without stopping. The Geffen list includes "Red leather, yellow leather", "Unique New York", "Toy boat, toy boat" and "Where are all our oars?". Note which ones trip you up and drill those until you can say them without thinking (Geffen Playhouse).
• Straw phonation. Voice scientist Ingo Titze recommends vocalizing into a thin stirring straw for 2 to 5 minutes, several times a day, if you talk for hours and your voice tires. Glide from your lowest pitch to your highest, then add swells of pitch and loudness, then hum a song through the straw. No air should escape around the straw or through your nose (pinching your nose should not change the sound). Lip trills, hums and /u/ and /o/ vowels work on the same principle (Titze, NCVS).

Titze's handout ends with advice worth repeating: if your voice keeps tiring or hurting, see a speech-language pathologist who specializes in voice rather than pushing through (Titze, NCVS). For long sessions in a booth, our voice acting guide covers the rest of the setup.

The Lee Strasberg Institute's Los Angeles method class still "begins with Lee Strasberg's relaxation technique", repeated every week to reduce tension in body and mind, followed by "his sequence of sensory exercises which train the actor's concentration" (Strasberg Institute). You can practice the sensory part at home:

1. Sit somewhere quiet and let your body relax.
2. Pick one simple sensation from life, such as the taste of a lemon or a toothache, two examples the Institute uses.
3. Recreate it through specific details (where you feel it, how it changes) and pay attention to how the sensation affects you, not to showing it. Working on extreme cold, for example, means attending to the cold itself rather than making faces or shivering (Strasberg Institute).
4. Work on one sensation at a time until it comes easily. The Institute quotes Strasberg: "The mind can think of only one thing at a time, consciously" (Strasberg Institute).

Emotional (affective) memory is the advanced version: you recreate the sensory details of an event that made a strong impression on you, and "make no effort to capture the emotion itself, but only the object and event that caused it". The Institute says a seven-year rule applies to which memories to use (Strasberg Institute). This is work to do with a teacher, not alone; our method acting guide explains the rule and what research says about the risks.

Repetition (Meisner). Two actors sit facing each other. One makes a simple observation about the other ("You're wearing a red shirt"), the other repeats it, and the phrase goes back and forth. Over time the observations move from physical details to what is happening between you ("You look unhappy with me right now"), and the same words change in tone and intensity with each person's behavior. The aim is to respond to your partner instead of planning a line reading (Wikipedia). Schools teach it as the first of a sequence: the Ruskin School of Acting lists repetition, independent activities, emotional preparation and scene work as Meisner's foundational exercises (Ruskin School). The Meisner technique guide walks through each stage.

Mirroring. One person moves and the other copies them as if they were a mirror, then you swap. The Geffen sheet suggests it for focus and for finding a character's expressions and gestures; it also works on a video call, taking turns with facial expressions (Geffen Playhouse).

If you have a group rather than a partner, our improv games guide has warm-ups and scene games with full rules, and most of them train the same reflex: accept what the other person gives you and react.

Uta Hagen's most substantial contribution to actor training was a series of "object exercises" that built on Stanislavski and Vakhtangov (Wikipedia). The first is about recreating two minutes of your own life, and teacher Stephanie Merriman's lesson for the NSW Department of Education's Arts Unit shows how to run it (The Arts Unit):

1. Choose an ordinary two-minute stretch of your day. It is about belief and authenticity, not drama.
2. Answer the basic questions: who you are, where you are, the circumstances, what you want right now and what is in your way.
3. Rehearse it alone, noticing what you do, what you are doing in the moment and what you will do next.
4. Change what happened just before (you walked home in the rain, say) and see how the same two minutes change.
5. For a variation, have someone hide an object somewhere not too obvious, search for it, note how it felt, then put it back and recreate the search. Filming both lets you compare which choices looked real.

Merriman sums up Hagen's view that a fine actor "forgets what's coming" because they are reacting in the moment (The Arts Unit); the second search is the test of that.

Two lighter imagination drills: the Geffen's Zoo Name, where you pick an animal or creature for each letter of your first name and give each one a gesture and a sound (Geffen Playhouse), and observation of animals for character, which the Strasberg Institute teaches as a full Animal Exercise that "builds observational skills and expressive habits through rigorous physical characterization", open to students after six months of study (Strasberg Institute).

Psychological gesture (Michael Chekhov). You physicalize a character's need or inner drive as an external gesture, then later suppress the outward movement and keep it inside while you play the scene (Wikipedia). The Michael Chekhov School calls it "at the heart of the Michael Chekhov Technique" (Michael Chekhov School). To try it, pick a character's want in a scene, find a gesture that expresses it, repeat it until it is clear and full, then say the lines while only remembering it.

Qualities of movement. Chekhov also trained movement qualities such as molding, floating, flying and radiating, which actors use to find a character's physical core (Wikipedia). Walk across the room in each quality, then speak a few lines of text in each and notice what changes.

Viewpoints. Mary Overlie developed six Viewpoints in the 1970s; Anne Bogart and Tina Landau later adapted them into nine physical ones, grouped under time (tempo, duration, kinesthetic response, repetition) and space (shape, gesture, architecture, spatial relationship, topography) (Wikipedia). A simple way to start in a group (our suggestion, not a fixed exercise) is to move through the room attending to one Viewpoint at a time, such as only changing tempo, or only responding to others' movement (kinesthetic response).

Our acting techniques guide compares Chekhov, Viewpoints and the other approaches if you want to know which one to study.

These come from Stanislavski's system and work on a scene, a monologue or a set of sides (Wikipedia):

1. List the given circumstances. Write down everything the writer gives you: who, where, when, what just happened, relationships.
2. Ask the magic if. If I were this person in this situation, what would I do? Stanislavski described it as the ability to imagine yourself in fictional circumstances and act on the consequences.
3. Name the task in each bit. Split the scene where the character's task (objective) changes and write each task as something you want from the other person.
4. Improvise it in your own words. In what Stanislavski called active analysis, actors improvise the scene's situations and conflicts in place of discussing them around a table. Play the scene without the script, then go back to the lines and see what stayed.

The Stanislavski system guide explains each term with examples. For practice text, use a scene from a play you are reading or find monologues on Offbook; our audition monologues guide explains how to choose them. To practice sight-reading new material, the cold reading guide has a 15-minute daily routine, and the self-tape guide shows how to record the result.

• Showing instead of experiencing. The Strasberg Institute's point about the cold applies to every exercise: attend to the sensation, the partner or the task, not to how it looks (Strasberg Institute).
• Chasing an emotion. Emotional memory works through the object and event, not the feeling, and the result can look different every time (Strasberg Institute). If you are squeezing for tears, see how to cry on command for safer routes.
• Planning the repetition. If you know what you will say before your partner finishes, you have stopped listening, which is the only thing the exercise trains (Wikipedia).
• Skipping the warm-up because you feel fine. SLO REP's handout lists the usual excuses (a young body that feels ready anyway, a character close to yourself, the idea that you can just start saying lines) and answers that warming up will make your work better (SLO REP).
• Practicing only alone. Exercises build habits; a teacher or partner tells you whether they are good habits. If stage fright is what keeps you practicing alone, a low-stakes class is the fix.

Most of these exercises are the backbone of a technique class, so the class type tells you which ones you will drill: Meisner classes for repetition, method acting classes for relaxation and sense memory, Uta Hagen classes for object exercises, Michael Chekhov classes for psychological gesture, improv classes for partner games and scene study classes for script work. Voice work is part of voiceover classes.

Many LA studios let you audit a class before you pay, which is the quickest way to see whether a teacher's exercises suit you. The LA Acting Class Price Index shows what classes cost, and our beginner classes guide explains where to start.