This book argues that the screen actor’s solicitation of three simultaneous empathetic relationships creates the verisimilar illusion before the camera upon which realist film and television acting depends. These solicitations take place within a diverse community of collaborative targets: from the situational center of intentionality in the sides who is attributed to all of the eventual actor-as-character’s dialogue and actions; to the community of actors who often meet for the first time hours before shooting scenes in which the actors-as-characters have known each other their entire lives; to the audience of one that transcribes the performed actor-as-character into a diegetic center of intentionality to be reconstructed by an anticipated spectator—not to mention all the casting directors, producers, acting coaches, DOPs, audition readers, screenwriters, and directorial teams encountered along the way. That the actor is able to make these solicitations at all is predicated on the bodymind’s capacity to link action to imagination in an iterative loop of self-organizing action and reaction. Even if empathy is more of an ideal than a guaranteed relationship for some actors in some roles, empathy as a framework provides a constructive place for discussing and comparing actorly creative processes.

My initial draw to theorizing the practice of screen acting as soliciting empathy was the ubiquity of the motif of “connections” in how actors talk about their work. I extend this motif to the various connections solicited by the actor while she works, and also the prospect of connecting actors and scholars through a potential common critical vocabulary for the actor’s creative process. This concluding chapter proposes three potential further connections that this research could make between various researchers, critical fields, actors, and other screen media production personnel. First, I sketch the possibilities for connecting my model of screen acting as empathetic solicitations to star studies as a companion to historical performance analysis, using Jared Leto’s performance in Suicide Squad (David Ayer, 2016) and Diane Keaton’s Oscar-winning performance in Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977) as case studies. Second, I suggest that actorly empathy could be a starting point for productively incorporating distributed cognition, imagination, and improvisation into production studies and broader notions of collective authorship on set. Third, I propose that screen acting’s ever-changing physical presence in its performance space prompts an examination of how modern filmmaking technologies re-contextualize the actor’s empathetic solicitations in terms of collaborative cognition and computable geometry.