Crying on command is a difficult skill, but it’s one that can be learned and mastered.
Acting coach Amy Lyndon can not only shed tears on camera whenever needed, she has a whole process she imparts to actors wanting to learn for themselves. It involves emotional triggers and finding personal experiences an actor can use for the scenes in question, and harnessing that emotion for when the cameras roll.
It’s at least as much about staying in the scene as it is about imagining the loss that gets you to tears. Lyndon talks about it on her podcast, as well.
Key Insights
- Crying on cue is a learnable acting skill built around understanding your personal emotional triggers and how to access them consistently.
- Emotional memory and substitution can help generate genuine emotion, but the goal is to channel that feeling into the character’s circumstances rather than leave the scene mentally.
- Regular emotional practice, relaxation and preparation can make emotional responses more accessible and repeatable when the cameras are rolling.
Where can an actor start if they’re new to learning crying on cue?
The [real] question is, can you do it while the cameras are rolling? That, in fact, is very much a skill, one that is built on time.
“An actor needs to know their emotional facility,” Lyndon explains. “I talk to a lot of actors, and they always know action words, and I tell them, ‘You keep talking [about] what you’re doing, but you’re not telling me how you’re feeling.’ So I think a lot of actors need to figure out where the trigger is.”
Say you lost a friend in a tragic way. Recalling that loss, and the effect it had on you, is the trigger. It’s something to work with, as you make your way through a scene, knowing the tears need to spill at the end.
“A lot of actors start prepping at the beginning of the scene,” Lyndon says. “It’s cooking on the stove. If you think about any time you’ve ever cried, it’s not instantaneous. You pretty much feed the beast until it breaks.”
In other words, find the thing that broke you, something that maybe took a while to process, and hold onto it. You then reverse engineer it for the scene.
Emotional memory: the technique some acting teachers start with
Some acting teachers use this technique, but not all. Lyndon does not, though what she teaches is not unrelated. Some coaches will have you focus on something specific. Stanislavski and Strasberg methods, for instance, would have you peg your emotions on the event that led to the loss, whereas Meisner will have you focus on the loss itself.
It’s an exchange of energy that you feel from other people, behavior and environment. Lyndon is a big believer in the latter, while also using the former as fuel.
“I believe that if you’re fully in [the] story, then by the time you get to that part, it will have added on, added on, added on, and then been released,” she says. “You’ve got to really know who the person is, or what the loss is, and if you don’t have that person who got hit by a car or [or something similar], then you’ll never cry because you don’t have that person.”
Lyndon acknowledges that emotional memory works for some people, but she also points out that if you’re on set and need to do [the scene] 20 times, you need to focus on the trigger, not the memory. If you think about something that happened 20 years ago, you run the risk of thinking only about what happened 20 years ago, and not with what’s happening in front of you.
“If you really are there, and the person who you put there was somebody that you loved that’s in trouble, you will cry. If you’re not crying, then you don’t have the person that you love.”
Sense memory and substitution: getting there without going dark
What if you haven’t lost anyone? What if you don’t have that moment of despair in your past? Well, lots of people have lost pets, which certainly counts. The grief of an animal hurt or dying, or being scared when taken to the vet, is real. The thing to do is to find the event itself, then remember the emotion that comes out of the event.
“The emotion is loss. Did you lose something that you cared about? Did someone steal a piece of jewelry from you? That’s loss. Understanding what comes with that is loss, and then find where loss is for you.”
The issue with substitution is that if you go too far into it, you move away from what’s directly in front of you. What is the script asking you to do? It’s asking you to cry on page three. What is it asking you to cry about? “My best friend was just killed.” Do you have a best friend? Close your eyes and think about never talking to them again.
You’re never going to get a text from them again. You’re never going to get a call. You’re never going to go drinking with them again. None of this is ever going to happen to you again. What would that feel like? And then you’re crying.
Rather than focusing on this other thing, you’re taking the emotion of that thing and building it into what you’re supposed to feel for the scene. It’s designed to help you focus on the scene at hand.
Physical and breathing techniques that support emotional release
For some, these are important, but not for everyone. An actor needs to understand their own body, how it functions, and how to reach the places necessary to extract the proper emotions for the moment and the scene. Lyndon refers to it as being “well-oiled.”
“You have to be well-oiled as an actor,” she says. “You have to be able to push different buttons on yourself and be able to get there. Like, if I feel my grandmother, she’s right here. I’m starting to cry thinking about it, because I can feel it right away. So I’m extremely well-oiled, and that’s your job as an actor, to know where all the emotions are in your body. Not to act from your head, but from your heart, so you’ll get to crying faster if you know your emotional vehicle.”
In that vein, make sure that your body is so completely relaxed in order to release tension. The more relaxed you are, the more in tune with your emotions you’ll be, because you’ll know where they are, and they won’t be, as Lyndon puts it, “gunked up with stress and whatever was going on with your day.”
How to practice crying on cue between auditions and jobs
There are different schools of thought on this one, but Lyndon is a big believer in the emotional journal. It’s as simple as once a week, every week, picking an emotion, then just taking a walk or having a bath or going on a hike, doing some shopping, something to take your mind away, then sit and marinate on where loss is for you.
“Then, all of a sudden, it will hit you,” Lyndon says, “and you write down what that trigger is. An actor is a walking, talking, emotional vehicle for the writer. You are a conduit. You are a channel. Their stuff needs to funnel through you, and your funnel needs to be clean, so you need to know where everything is for you emotionally, so you can give it to the writer. There’s a discipline.”
Lyndon tells the story of when she was on a soap opera and talking to somebody casually before a scene started, and then, the moment they called “Action,” her scene partner dissolved into tears and was bawling.
“She knew where things are in her body,” she recalls. “As an actor, that’s your job. So you’re not going to be free enough to get to the emotions if you are not practicing your emotions. It’s not going to just happen.”
As for a repeatable practice and rehearsal structure, it’s less about working with your coach or a scene partner, and more about working on yourself. “The coach is not going to get you,” Lyndon warns. “Your partner is not going to get you. It’s about your own emotional transitions. The loss, there’s the realization of it, then the shock of it, and then the acceptance, and that’s where the emotion really hits. You hold onto this thing, and you’re holding, you’re holding, you’re holding, and then you release. That’s life. You’re recreating life.”
What to do when nothing comes: staying in the scene without real tears
For starters, don’t force it. If you’re dry when you cry, don’t try. What to do instead is to take a moment, because what’s clear is that you almost certainly didn’t prep properly. If you had, it would be there for you.
Lyndon observes, “If it’s not there for you, then it was never there for you. It was just a superficial response. You need to really go deep, and if it hits really deep, then not being able to do it is never going to happen.”
Don’t pressure yourself, but take a moment to yourself and try rebuilding the emotional world around you, and reclaim your trigger. “If you want to be there every time, then your world has to be built, and that includes the emotions and the environment and all the people in that world,” she says. “So, if you’re not crying, then your world’s not built enough. But then, you might be one of those people who can’t just jump into an emotion. You need some time, and that time should be spent right before you walk on set.”
Learning to cry on cue comes down to preparation, emotional awareness and practice. Understanding your triggers and learning to access them while staying present in the scene can make emotional performances more natural and repeatable. Tears are only one portion of the performance. Remember, the goal is to stay connected to the character, the circumstances and the story.
