The Lyndon Technique takes actors from all disciplines and helps them use their training, or lack thereof, to nail their auditions.
Acting coach Amy Lydon is a classically trained performer who still acts. Lyndon’s technique is broken down into 15 guidelines, all of which are covered in her book, first published in 2009.
With actors having a natural angst around the audition process, Lyndon’s entire focus is not just on alleviating that anxiety, but also on helping actors create their own atmosphere to maximize their own potential in that audition.
She spoke to us from Los Angeles.
Key Insights
- Great acting alone is not enough to book television work. Actors must also understand tone, genre, pacing, and how to audition specifically for camera.
- The Lyndon Technique teaches actors to create an emotional “bubble” that blocks out outside energy and keeps them fully connected to the scene.
- Active listening, emotional discipline, and script breakdown skills help performers stay present frame-by-frame instead of relying on traditional rehearsal-heavy methods.
What’s the story behind the Lyndon Technique?
There are two parts to it. One is the philosophy of booking. Not a lot of people talk about the philosophy because they’re too busy working on you, the actor.
There’s the business aspect of it, understanding that you have to hold on to who you are as person, what are you contributing, and how to infuse that in your work.
Part of the reason that actors have a problem booking when they used to primarily go in the room was picking up the energy of everybody around them. Actors are sensitive, they sometimes pick it up as judgment. So rather than viewing this as being attentive and listening, they were seeing it as, I’m sitting here, judging you, and it cost people jobs.
So what you teach has nothing to do with craft?
Correct. You want to train in Meisner and all that stuff, that’s great. Then go do theater, but then train properly. If you want to book television, we’re not afforded the opportunity to sit around and rehearse or discuss. A lot of the times, the audition time is 48 hours, 24 hours turnaround. So these people that have been working on creating a character development over three months, they’re SOL.
What is the core of your technique?
This technique teaches you how to break down a script, how to create the world around you. One of the guidelines is the environment, but it’s not just the environment. It’s where are you in this environment? How do I hear?
The technique is all about staying in your lane, doing your point of view, which is life. When you have a fight, you don’t sit around going, “Oh, we’re having a conflict.” You try to beat the other person. It’s all about creating this world that you live in and having people come to you.
Where are you emotionally when the camera finds you, and where are you in the next frame, in the next frame, in the next frame, in the next frame? The more you can create the world where you are, it’s not moment to moment. It really is frame by frame.
A big part of this is getting yourself to a place as a performer where it doesn’t matter what is happening in the room around you. You are creating a bubble, let’s say, a three-foot radius around you, and anything outside of that should not affect in any way the thing that you’re doing?
Correct. And it’s all about your homework. So if you’re not marinating on where things are for you in a deep, emotional way, you’re not going to be fully invested, and you’re going to feel the energy of everybody else, right? That’s why one of the guidelines is, what am I feeling in the beginning, middle and end?
An actor is a walking, talking, emotional vehicle for the writer. How are you going to be that channel if you’re worried about all this other stuff that has nothing to do with the character? If you reconstruct a fight that you had with somebody, you will be clear on that.
You’re going to be actively listening so you could come back and and win that argument.
The secret to good acting is actively listening.
There you go, and that’s the construction of life. So this thing with beats and intention? I don’t deal with that at all. You have to understand, I trained with Stella Adler. I jumped on a train at 16 to study at the neighborhood playhouses in New York City.
I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Syracuse University. I studied Shakespeare in London. But none of that matters if you do not know how to book a job. It doesn’t matter where you’ve trained.
It matters how you can access your emotional vehicle and place it in the right place, in the script, and let go.
Are there exercises or drills you can give to people to work on these things? Or is it just as simple as “become a more active listener”?
I think you just need to practice it in your real life. Actors are so busy going after the prize, that they’ve missed the whole love of the process. One of the biggest compliments that I get from my students is them thanking me for bringing the love of acting and being an artist back to them.
Part of that is understanding behavior, starting with your own. That’s why I have people writing down next to the other person’s dialogue, “How am I hearing what this other person is saying?” It keeps you in the scene. It also helps you get off book, because your next line is absolutely going to be exactly what it is based on what you just heard.
I do have this great exercise. I call it the Walgreen’s Exercise. You start out in your car with a heavy, heavy emotion, you’re about to cry, but you have to hold it because you want to go to Walgreens and buy two things and talk to the cashier while you’re holding it the whole time.
You’re actively doing something, talking to somebody, buying something, and then you get to your car, close the door and break down. Now that is discipline, and you have to be disciplined enough to know how to hold on to your emotions.
Is that how an actor books work?
No, that’s how people take notice [of] you. You book work by understanding the genre and the tone of the show. You can’t expect to book television if you’re not watching television.
After a while you’ll understand, Okay, well, is this Mayor of Kingstown or is it Tracker? People don’t understand that so much of booking has nothing to do with acting. There’s tone and style and genre and network, there’s a pace and a formula.
There’s also the question you have to ask yourself: “Why am I there?”
Being a great actor is not good enough. Are you a great actor for that? It’s harder now because of self tapes and streaming and all that, but that just means you work harder, and get even more specific.
I would think that your technique would work for self tapes, because there’s nobody around, and you have to focus on the same space that you would if you were on television.
Absolutely. There’s this square, okay? I talk a lot about what you can do in this square. Before COVID, I was teaching in the theater for 25 years, and the last six years I’ve been on Zoom, and it’s been the best thing.
People are booking from Zoom, but also, as you say, this is the same square as your self tape. You can study Stella Adler, you can study Stanislavski, but it’s not necessarily going to help you book if you don’t understand this box right here.
I’m here to help you book and understand this square and what you can do with it, and how it’s going to get you hired.
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