How Dark Shadows Made Me Appreciate Acting Even More

Dark Shadows is a rare treasure, combining amazing talent with often only one take to film and limited rehearsal time. Yes, it is often campy, and, yes, there are often mistakes, but in a way, this unique situation gave me a whole new appreciation for acting as an art form.

How Dark Shadows Made Me Appreciate Acting Even More

Dark Shadows, in its rawness, gives us a mixture of an outsider and insider view of acting. We see things we don’t normally see, and it’s really pretty beautiful.

First off, I just want to say, I actually think the mistakes sometimes add to a scene. I wish they’d employ them more in movies and TV. We don’t say everything correctly, particularly when we’re emotional. This sort of error is next to impossible to write authentically, but an actor making a legitimate mistake can make it look very natural. It depends on the mistake and the scene.

More importantly, the rawness makes it seem real. This isn’t the prettied up version that took many shots to perfect and probably lost its passion a long time ago. This is the hit or miss, into the moment or not so into the moment, real deal we’re seeing. It shows us the mishaps, the tedium, the hard work, and the joy in acting.

The slate shots shown in The Beginning, are usually just the slate, but sometimes we see the actors themselves. Alexandra Moltke is holding it once, smiling before she’s about to deliver a pretty emotional, border of being trance-like description of David’s creepy experience with his dangerous mother. David Henesy is also holding it, grinning and being affectionately joked with, before he’s about to deliver one of his many creepy scenes.

We all know this is true about acting, but we don’t normally get to see it, and not in almost real time. Maybe a clip in a behind-the-scenes video, separate from the scene, maybe not even tied to a particular scene, but not, here’s the actor right before the scene.

I also sometimes really enjoy it when they re-film a scene from the previous day to show at the beginning of an episode. I say sometimes, because they’re often lackluster, which I think is interesting because they’ve already filmed it once so you’d think they’d do a “better” job this time, but it usually isn’t. Negative point aside, the differences interest me. The fact that they are lackluster for one, and the things that they do better or worse each time.

This isn’t exactly the same thing, but it is an example of seeing two versions of the same scene Dark Shadows style: Beth wanting to kill herself when she finds out Quentin is going to marry Angelique. The scene is shown in two separate episodes with two days between and is almost identical, shot slightly differently and with very slight action changes. But Terry Crawford delivers an interestingly different performance. Both are quite emotional, but her most powerful acting in the scenes occur at different times and, in the first, she seems more tense and jumpier and, in the second, she seems more resigned. It’s so similar and the differences are subtle, but it comes out being emotionally two separate things.

I could go into all the amazing acting talent on the show, but it’d be a whole different post and I don’t want to start making things personal, this person did this or that so well. On Dark Shadows, we can enjoy a wealth of talented and extremely talented actors putting their all into emotional scenes and selling the little moments that you may not always notice because they are so small. We can also witness amazing character acting, staggering variations from the same actor shown over the course of the show but filmed in one or limited takes and even on-screen personality changes with only subtle differences.

Acting is so complex, and we don’t usually get to see it fully, but we can get a very unique view of it with the wonderful cast in Dark Shadows.