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Director WC Fields is known for famously saying "Never work with animals or children."
But why? For the most part, we love the children and animals in our real lives, so why wouldn't we want to see them reflected in our stories, on stage, film and television? Other than the fact that Fields was known for being relatively curmudgeonly, is there a truth to the idea that children do not belong on stage? Are they just bad actors?
One possibility, of course, is that children and animals are somehow threatening to adult, professional directors and actors because they are so natural and not self conscious, and therefore are more interesting to watch. Audiences can't help but be attracted to watching someone simply be, rather than someone who is obviously performing. (Perhaps this is part of the idea behind the interest in reality television, even though it is often more performed than many sitcoms).
However, another possibility is that children (and animals) are simply bad actors (except Lassie, of course).
What it means to be a good actor is a question I've tried to answer in several different blog posts, but for now, let's focus on the emotional aspects of acting. There are many definitions of emotions, and many researchers who think of emotion as undefinable, but right now I am teaching a class on emotion in psychology and theater—and we’re using a fairly intricate definition of emotion (Plutchik, 1982). In non technical terms, emotion is a complex, inferred (i.e. non-perceivable) reaction to a stimulus that can be broken down as four constructs: subjective feeling (literally, how are you feeling), cognition (what are you thinking about the stimulus), physiological response (what is your body doing), and action (what is your outward behavior and reaction). Let's take each of these in turn, both for the adult actor and for the possibilities for child actors. And let's assume that a talented actor is one who can move an audience through the portrayal of emotional truth in a character's staged experiences.
Subjective feelings: If emotion is subjective feeling—does the subject feeling change as we get older? Do actors have more subjective feelings than other people? In some of the earliest writings on actors, they are discussed as having too much emotion or feeling, and therefore must be kept away from non actors. In my own work, I have found actors to report themselves as more expressive than nonactors, but not feeling as though their emotions are more intense than nonactors' emotions.
The role of subjective feeling in the portrayal of characters is one of the central debates over acting—some theorists believe that only through feeling emotions can you portray them effectively (although this may lead to problems distinguishing between real and portrayed emotions, as discussed in this piece from Atlantic Health). Children and adults obviously feel emotions, and can report feeling those emotions. But as many actors trained in the British tradition would attest, having subjective feelings seems to be unrelated to how well you can portray a character. So let's assume this is not what actors, child or adult, have to do in order to be considered talented.
Cognitions: Are adult actors better able understand the reaction to a full and varied set of stimuli, and really react to each component of it? I've found in my research that actors are better at theory of mind and cognitive empathy than non actors—they are better able to recognize and understand emotional and mental states.
If emotional knowledge is cognition—children obviously don’t have the ability to think about emotions in the same way that adults do. And this is part of acting which raises an interesting juxtaposition. Actors are asked to be as free with their emotional expression as children—to be able to tap into and access the intensity of emotional expression as children may have, while also being asked to regulate it strictly to the demands of the script. I would argue that this is one area where adults have a clear advantage over children. Through lived experience, higher levels of vocabulary, and ideas about how the world works, adults are able to think about emotions with more complexity and reaction with more subtlety than children. Although it could work in the opposite way—the more you think about an emotional reaction, the more controlled and regulated it is going to be. So children's lack of thought—their automatic reactions—is both what makes them interesting to watch, and what makes them difficult to work with.
Physiological Responses: This juxtaposition does raise the question: are children simply able to tap into emotions more easily than adults? Are they able to access their physiological reactions? If emotion is physiological reaction—does our physiology change as we get older? Do actors have an ability to change their physiology? Do they want to? Or can they just tap into the physiology of their experiences more than others? Understanding how you are feeling can be a difficult task. Often we have a vague or general sense of how our bodies are reacting to something, but it takes cognition and language to figure out what we are feeling (this is the basic James-Lange theory of emotion). Children often become overwhelmed by their emotions, and gain in emotional control as they develop (and involvement in pretend and role play may be associated with increased emotional control, as some of my work has found).
Actions: In all of these areas/ components of emotion, the larger theme seems to be not how children and adults vary in their initial reactions and actions, but how adults are almost certainly better able to regulate their emotions than children. Perhaps this is what makes them better actors, and why children can't be outstanding actors most of the time. In some of my work, I've found that particularly when it comes to having to regulate emotions on stage, actors are more focused on up-regulating both positive and negative emotions, especially compared to nonactors trying to regulate their emotions for a variety of scenarios.
Actors are often thought of as deregulated, or emotionally unstable. But, instead it may be that actors are able to choose to de-regulate and regulate their emotions more than nonactors. I would argue that actors must walk a strange balance—they must deeply understand emotions, they must be able to tap into the outward expression of those emotions (either through physical or subjective feeling means), but then they must be able to regulate those emotions strictly, both when performing a character for an audience, but also when they come offstage and must engage in their real lives once again. These are all very adult tasks. Yet at the same time, they must have the creativity, sense and play and imagination to be able to think about emotions broadly and deeply. How might someone react to a strange situation? How would the given circumstances of the world change reactions?
It is this complexity, these juxtapositions that make acting hard for adults, and even harder for children. For other art forms, particularly music, we often hear of child prodigies. Yet as Ellen Winner, expert on gifted children, explains in her writings, a music prodigy is often someone who can play very complex pieces, quickly and without mistakes. The technical abilities there are most important- emotional interpretation and understanding less so. As musical prodigies age, it becomes difficult to transition into adult levels of mastery, as emotional interpretation and depth become more important. With acting, we begin with expectation of emotional interpretation and depth. Young child actors are often very good mimics, and famous "child actors" are often almost adolescents by the time they begin to be nominated for awards (with a few, very few, outstanding exceptions, of course).
So why should you never work with children or animals? Perhaps because they will steal your focus—they are not controlled or contained in the way an adult actor must be. But perhaps too because creating acting is complex enough that it becomes difficult for a director to get the level of performance out of a child that he or she needs. It's simply too difficult a task!
