I had worked as a professional actor for nearly twenty years before enrolling in the Introduction to Cinema Studies course at the University of Toronto. As I flipped through the syllabus, I remember wondering where the lecture on acting would be: there were weeks on cinematography and mise-en-scène, a month on various genres, a week on experimental filmmaking, but where was the class on acting? The main discussion of acting came during the mise-en-scène week, where we discussed how everything put in front of the camera—including the actors—was part of a greater formal and narrational scheme. Needless to say, I was somewhat confused as to why everything I had learned as a professional storyteller was suddenly a glorified footnote in the study of a medium where stories are told (at least in part) through performances.

Later in my film studies career, we learned other ways of talking about actors and acting, especially in terms of what performances can signify in greater historical, cultural, theoretical, or industrial contexts. Even still, these new ways of talking about acting always felt distant from the acting work I had grown up doing: was all that time and energy I had spent acting actually just part of a catalyst for reawakening for the Lacanian mirror phases of my pacified consumer audiences? Were my professional performances of white North American Anglophonic heteronormative masculinity actually just another normalization of discursive tensions within late capitalist ideology under some dubious pretext of making art? Even though I am personally and politically sympathetic to those critiques, how was I to reconcile my experiences as a professional storyteller with the academic stories being told about my profession? After all, as cognitive theater scholar Rick Kemp notes, an actor’s performance does not simply appear out of thin air: actors do an extensive amount of training, rehearsal, behind-the-scenes preparation, and creative experimentations of trial and error to make the verisimilitude of their final performances appear seamless. Why didn’t film studies appear to understand that?

In graduate school, I worked as a seminar leader on Introduction to Film Studies courses similar to the one I had taken. These courses inevitably omitted an analysis of film acting in favor of other important and accessible topics.