I first met Réal Bossé in June 2023, during an intensive mime workshop at Omnibus. He came in to teach for part of the program. A few hours, at most. But there was already something in the way he talked about acting that felt different from many of the approaches I had encountered up to that point. Réal is not especially drawn to big abstract explanations. He likes tools. He likes trying something, doing it, looking at what it produces, then trying again another way. The body, the breath, the eyes, the voice, the rhythm: all of it can become an acting instruction.
I did not know yet that, a few months later, I would spend three full days with him exploring that way of working in much greater depth. On December 1, 2 and 3, 2023, I took an intensive on-camera acting workshop with Réal. Three dense days that challenged a few certainties, shifted a few others, and above all added a good number of tools to the way I approach the work myself.
Making instead of waiting
If there is one word I kept from those three days, it is probably this one: making.
Not making in the sense of faking. Not making in the sense of producing something false. Making in the craftsman’s sense of the word. An actor has an instrument. That instrument is made of a body, a face, a breath, a voice, a gaze, a thought, a rhythm. And all of it can be worked on.
The idea can sound obvious when stated that way, but it changes quite a lot once you really start applying it. At one point or another, most of us had learned to search for an emotion, to try to feel something, to reach into a memory or to place ourselves internally in the character’s state. Réal often invited us to take the opposite route. Do not necessarily look for anger. Make the conditions that will produce something the camera can read. Change your breath. Tighten something. Release something else. Change your rhythm. Decide what you are trying to get from your scene partner. Give yourself an extremely precise thought. Then see what happens.
That difference may sound subtle. To me, it was not. Suddenly, acting became less dependent on some mysterious state I had to manage to find again and more connected to a series of actions I could repeat, adjust or abandon. For an actor working on camera, that is not a small thing, because you have to do it again: one take, then another, then another in a tighter shot, then the same scene with a different note, then continuity to respect, then a take where someone is essentially telling you, “That was good. Do exactly that again, but with a little less of something.” At that point, having tools becomes fairly useful.
A “machine full of buttons”
Réal used an expression I immediately adopted in my head: the actor as a “machine à pitons” — basically, a machine full of buttons. The image is funny, but it is also extremely clear. The more buttons you have, the more possibilities you have.
One button can be physical. Another can be respiratory. Another vocal. Another mental. You can work on the eyes, the jaw, the speed of a response, the tension in the body, the amount of air you let through, what you are thinking while the other person speaks. And sometimes the result appears almost immediately.
I remember one moment in particular when Réal gave me a very simple thought to hold internally while my scene partner was speaking. He did not ask me to “play more anger.” He gave me something precise to think. That single instruction changed my face: my jaw, my eyes, my breathing, the amount of time I waited before answering.
That is where the idea of the “machine à pitons” becomes interesting. It does not remove the life from acting. It simply gives the actor ways of getting to it. The better you know your instrument, the more you can act on it. And paradoxically, the more you can eventually stop thinking about it.
“I like apple pie”
One of the simplest exercises in the workshop is also one of the ones I remember best. The sentence was: “I like apple pie.”
Nothing particularly Shakespearean about that. Exactly. We started by trying to say the sentence with no particular intention, almost flat. Which is already much harder than it sounds, because something always comes through: the desire to do well, a hesitation, a posture, an inflection, some tiny intention you did not even realize you had put there.
Then we started making. Change the breath. Change the throat. Play with air pressure, with rhythm, with the voice, with the body. Always the same words, but no longer the same thing at all. That is probably where I understood most clearly what Réal meant by making.
Words never carry a scene by themselves. The actor is constantly making meaning around them, with a breath, with tension, with the time taken before answering, with what is held back, with what slips through anyway.
Réal also had a vocabulary of his own for talking about breath and what happens inside this strange bit of human plumbing. He could talk about “la poumonnerie”, for example — his own kind of word for the whole lung apparatus — as if we were opening the hood of the machine to see what was happening underneath. It is an image, obviously, but you immediately understand what he means. Air goes in somewhere. It comes out differently. Something happened in between. And that something can become acting.
The inner garden
There was another idea in his teaching that interested me a lot. Réal made a fairly clear distinction between the actor and the “puppet” the actor creates. The character can go through something terrible. The person playing the character does not have to go through exactly the same thing.
That may sound almost obvious when put that way, but it is not always how the craft is taught. I had already encountered approaches that invited actors to return to a personal memory, look for real pain or wake up something deeply intimate in order to feed a scene. Réal could be fairly radical on that point.
He would talk about the “dead grandmother” or the “dead dog” you eventually end up reaching for every time you need to produce an emotion. The image is deliberately brutal, and pretty funny when he tells it, but behind it is a very serious question: do I really need to open that door every time someone says “action”?
Réal talked instead about protecting your inner garden. What belongs to the person can stay with the person. Meanwhile, the actor can learn to build what the character needs.
I never saw that as a denial of emotion. Quite the opposite. It was about finding other ways to make emotion exist. An emotion produced by an action, a breath, a thought or a relationship can be every bit as powerful on screen. And, importantly, the actor has a much better idea of how they got there.
Give the actor something to do
There is a huge difference between telling an actor, “Be angrier,” and giving them something to do. Stop her from leaving. Shut him up. Get an answer. Hide what you know. Convince him. Protect her. Suddenly, there is something you can actually play.
Emotion can become the consequence of the action rather than its objective. That way of working spoke to me because it keeps bringing the actor back to something concrete. It also prevents the actor, at least to some extent, from watching themselves act.
You stop asking, “Do I look upset enough?” You are genuinely trying to get something from the other person. And when an actor stops monitoring their own effect and starts dealing with their scene partner again, something interesting usually happens.
“We fight because we love each other”
Réal also insisted a lot on relationship. A conflict scene is not automatically interesting because two characters are yelling. Often, it is exactly the opposite. The more anger becomes the objective of the scene, the more the relationship disappears.
One of Réal’s formulations stayed with me: we fight because we love each other. Obviously, he was not necessarily talking about romantic love. He was talking about the bond. If I am fighting with you, why am I staying? Why does it matter that you understand? Why do I want to convince you? Why do I want to stop you from leaving? Why does your decision affect me?
As soon as the other person genuinely matters, the conflict takes on a completely different colour. Suddenly there is something to lose. And that is often far more interesting to watch than anger manufactured for its own sake.
I cannot help seeing something there that also connects to Réal’s years of improvisation. A scene cannot really live if everyone is working alone in their own corner. You have to receive what the other person is doing, react, let your partner change what you thought you were building. Technique should never cut that thread.
Then the camera shows up
After all that work on the body, breath, sound, thoughts and relationships, the camera becomes a kind of brutally simple judge. It knows nothing about our intentions. It does not know that we thought we were extraordinary. It does not even know that we were convinced we were feeling an enormous amount. It records. That is all.
A look. A tightening jaw. A breath that stops. A movement that is too large. A reaction time. Listening. Or the absence of listening.
During the final part of the workshop, everything we had been working on suddenly took on another dimension. We had to deal with marks, framing, light, the monitor, repeatability. What fascinated me was seeing how something that felt tiny to me could become enormous on screen. And, in the other direction, something I felt I was experiencing with considerable intensity could sometimes produce almost nothing visible.
The monitor took us out of the subjective impression. We did something. We watched it. We did it again. It is hard to get more concrete than that.
Technique as a way back to play
With all this talk of making, breathing, instructions and precision, you could think Réal’s teaching is about controlling every millimetre of a performance. That would miss the essential part.
In the end, it all comes back to pleasure. To play. In the simplest sense of the word.
The more tools you have, the less trapped you are by the first choice you made. You can try something, get it wrong, try again, take a note without feeling as though everything has just collapsed. You can change one “button,” then another, and see what happens.
Réal also connects this idea to a combination that feels pretty accurate to me for this profession: a lot of tenacity and a lot of humility. You have to be stubborn enough to keep going, and humble enough to accept that the idea you have been hanging on to for the last twenty minutes may simply not work.
You need both.
Finding Réal elsewhere
I worked with Réal again the following year, during my 2024 intensive workshop at Omnibus. This time, I received what he was teaching differently. After those three days in December, some things I had first understood as particular to his on-camera work now seemed much more clearly connected to the body, physical theatre, space, precision, and this idea of the actor as someone who is actually making something with their instrument.
I also had the chance to observe him in a completely different context when I worked backstage on a performance of The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi, presented at UQAM during a week devoted to physical theatre. Jean Asselin was playing Gaston Talbot. Sylvie Moreau was also part of it. Réal was directing with Sylvie.
I was backstage, so I was literally in a privileged position to observe: close enough to see how things were being built, but certainly not there to intervene in the artistic work. I like those places a lot. You learn an enormous amount by watching experienced artists work when they are not trying to teach you.
There is what a teacher explains. And then there is what that teacher does when they have to make something themselves. The two are not always as far apart as you might think.
What I kept
I do not have much faith in workshops that claim to offer a definitive answer to acting. The further I go in this profession, the less I feel such an answer exists.
I collect tools instead. Some stay. Others disappear. Some come back years later because a situation on set suddenly gives them a meaning I did not understand when they were first taught to me.
Several things stayed with me from my time with Réal: make instead of waiting, give an action instead of demanding an emotion, know your instrument well enough to be able to act on it, look at what the camera receives rather than what I think I gave it, do not tear open my inner garden every time a character suffers, understand that in a conflict the other person has to matter, be able to do it again, be able to change, and above all keep enough technique that I am not afraid to play.
I met him at Omnibus, then worked with him in front of the camera, then encountered his work again in the world of physical theatre, and finally in the context of a performance he was directing. Each time, the same thread came back in a different form: the actor’s craft is enormously complex, but the work itself can often return to something very concrete.
A breath, a thought, an action, a scene partner, a camera… and something to make.
