In high school, I spent a lot of time watching actors. My Walden friends were constantly rehearsing or performing, and I loved to be a peripheral part of it. It’s a completely different experience watching someone you know perform. For most of my friends, talented though they were, I could never quite remove what I knew of them from the role they were trying to portray. They might have been the best actors on stage, but what I saw were my friends acting like characters, not the characters themselves. The best actors are the ones that completely immerse me in the character, the story, the moment. When all their past roles and history fade away, the “acting” stops becoming apparent. There’s almost nothing that brings me out of a play faster than the impression that the person on stage is just saying their lines.

I say almost, because there’s one other reliable phenomenon I’ve discovered that always reminds me of the reality, the humanity of the person on stage or film. Hands. It’s in the way they hold and move their hands. I can’t explain it, really. At least not very articulately. But there’s something about a person’s hands that is brutally honest and cannot be faked. The wrinkles, the veins, the motion of bones under skin. Sometimes I stop watching an actor’s face and instead just watch his hands.
People say so much with their bodies, particularly from elbow to fingertip. When you stop listening to the words, stop watching the facial expressions, and just look at someone’s hands, it’s like focusing a narrow beam on a single, simple, uncluttered thought. Hands are remarkable tools, and watching someone flex and manipulate all the tendons, nerves, and bones without a second thought can be breathtaking. For me, at least. Something about the complexity of the machinery and the simplicity of the output gets me every time.