Tom Todoroff series, article 2 of 4
In the first article in this series, I wrote about how I discovered Tom Todoroff through Elite Casting and why his way of approaching text caught my attention so strongly. This second part goes into the heart of Text Analysis: the fifteen Shurtleff-Todoroff Guideposts, tools that help an actor look beyond the first reading of a scene.
Michael Shurtleff presents twelve in Audition. The framework used by the Tom Todoroff Studio includes fifteen, with Mischief, Vulnerability and Architecture completing the list taught in class. I think it is important to see them not as fifteen obligations, but as fifteen possible questions. A scene does not become better because I managed to check every box. It becomes more alive when some of those questions reveal a relationship, an event or a behaviour I had not seen at first.
1. Relationship
This is probably the most fundamental Guidepost. “He’s my father,” “she’s my boss” or “she’s my wife” are factual pieces of information, but they are not yet a dramatic relationship. The real question is: what does this person represent to me? Is he the man whose approval I have been waiting for for thirty years? The woman I want to impress? The person I love so much that I resent the fact that she can hurt me? The one person in front of whom I refuse to lose face?
When I prepare an audition, one question helps me a lot: why is this particular person capable of affecting me so deeply? As soon as the answer becomes specific, the text often begins to change colour. The Studio frequently returns to ideas such as “Life is a series of relationships” or “My response is in the other actor!” It reminds me that my work never exists completely in a vacuum. Even a conflict scene is first of all a scene with someone who matters enough to move me.
2. Conflict: what am I fighting for?
The second Guidepost forces me out of emotion and into action. What am I fighting for? asks what I am actually trying to get from the other person. There is a considerable difference between playing “I’m angry because she wants to leave” and “I have to convince her to stay.” In the first case, I am trying to produce a state. In the second, I have something to do: convince, seduce, humiliate, reassure, provoke, make laugh, make guilty, impress or protect.
Todoroff also adds the question How am I meddling? I like something about the word meddling: it implies that I am getting into your business, trying to change your behaviour, your opinion or your decision. Conflict suddenly becomes very concrete. “Always have a clear want!” and “Intentional action produces emotion” sum up the logic well: I want something, I act to get it, and whatever happens to me emotionally can grow out of that struggle.
3. The Moment Before
A scene does not begin when someone says “action.” The character existed one second earlier, and something has just happened. Maybe they have received a call, run down a hallway, lied to someone, been waiting three weeks for this meeting, or just learned something they are still trying to absorb. That immediate past gives the entrance momentum and helps avoid those beginnings where the actor seems to be slowly starting the engine during the first few lines.
The Moment Before does not have to be huge or melodramatic. It simply has to be specific. I especially like the phrase “The moment before is an event!” It forces me to look for something that has genuinely shifted the character rather than inventing a decorative little backstory just to fill a box. It also shows how the Guideposts begin to connect, because the moment before becomes an Event in itself.
4. Humor
One of the easiest mistakes is to assume that humour belongs only in comedy. For Shurtleff, it is much more fundamental than that. People joke in emergency rooms, laugh at funerals and make absurd comments when they are terrified. They use humour to seduce, breathe, attack, deflect attention or simply survive a situation that has become too heavy.
Looking for Humor in a tragic scene does not mean trying to be funny. It means asking where there is still air, irony or some part of the character that refuses to be completely crushed by the circumstances. That search can keep a dramatic scene from becoming heavily “dramatic,” because it brings back something deeply human: even at the worst moment, we are rarely made of a single colour.
5. Opposites
We are rarely only one thing at a time. I love someone and want to strangle them. I am terrified and pretend the situation is ridiculous. I want to leave and secretly hope someone will stop me. I am proud of my son and jealous of his success. Opposites keep the actor from underlining exactly what the text is already saying.
If a scene clearly says “I hate you,” it may be more interesting to look for where love still survives. If the character insists they are completely calm, I can look for what they are fighting to contain. “Life is ironic, not sentimental” speaks to me here. Acting often gains depth when two contradictory truths can exist at the same time instead of reducing the character to one official emotion.
6. Discovery
Here is a very particular problem in acting: I have read the scene, but my character has not. I know what my scene partner is going to say, I already know the revelation, I know the phone will ring and exactly which line will make my character understand the truth. The character does not. Discovery is about giving events the possibility of happening now.
It is not about pretending to be surprised or adding a little jolt to every new piece of information. It is about listening enough to allow what was just said to change what I am doing. After fifteen rehearsals or thirty takes, that is an enormous challenge: knowing the text perfectly while allowing the character to remain unaware of what comes next. “What is predictable is preventable!” is a useful reminder for me here. The better I know the scene, the more I have to protect the possibility that it can still happen to me.
7. Communication & Competition
Speaking is not necessarily communicating. A scene becomes much more active when I am genuinely trying to reach the other person and constantly checking whether I am succeeding. Is my argument working? Did I score a point? Did I just lose ground? Do I need to change tactics? Communication means that my words are being thrown toward someone and that their effect matters to me.
Competition adds another very concrete dimension. Even a tender scene can contain competition: who will give in, who will say “I love you” first, who will admit they were wrong, who can make the other person laugh, or who can protect their secret more successfully? Listening becomes essential because I cannot know my next tactic until I have seen the effect of the previous one. This is also where “My response is in the other actor!” becomes especially clear.
8. Importance: why today?
Why does this conversation have to happen now? Why is it important enough to deserve a scene? In real life, we exchange thousands of sentences that would never become part of a script. If this conversation was chosen, something is at stake or something has the possibility of shifting.
I look for what I might lose if I do not get what I want: a relationship, a job, an opportunity, an image of myself, my safety, my status or a belief I am attached to. Importance does not necessarily mean playing louder. A scene can carry enormous stakes and remain almost still. The difference is that the actor knows why every word matters today rather than on some other day.
9. Find the Events
A scene is not simply a succession of lines. Something changes: information appears, a character understands something, power shifts, a lie is exposed, someone makes a decision, or new hope appears and then disappears. Those changes are the Events of the scene.
Identifying them keeps the text from being played in one colour from beginning to end. Before an event, I may still believe I am going to win; afterward, the world may have changed. The Studio likes the phrase “You must create events!” I understand it as an invitation not to let the text become a uniform river. Something has to happen, and what happens has to affect what comes next.
10. Place
Place is not neutral background. An argument in a bedroom is not the same as the same argument in a crowded restaurant. A declaration of love in an elevator does not create the same behaviour as one in a kitchen at three in the morning. Place affects what I can do, what I have to hide, the way I move and even the way I speak.
Even in a self-tape in front of a neutral backdrop, the character is somewhere. Is it my territory? Yours? A dangerous place? Somewhere people might hear us? A place with a memory? When the location becomes real in the imagination, behaviour begins to change with it. The technical frame of an audition should not erase the world in which the scene is supposed to exist.
11. Game Playing & Role Playing
We all play roles in life. I am not exactly the same man with my child, my boss, my partner, a police officer or someone I am trying to seduce. We adopt masks: the competent professional, the victim, the rescuer, the tough guy, the clown, the person who does not care. Game Playing & Role Playing asks us to look at what the character does to control how other people see them.
The character can therefore be playing a character of their own. What becomes fascinating is the moment the mask cracks. I can want to appear calm while being terrified, play the victim to get something, or adopt the tough-guy role because the last thing I want is to reveal my fragility. This Guidepost creates a useful distance between what the character feels and the image they choose to present.
12. Mystery & Secret
An actor does not have to explain everything happening inside them. In fact, part of the audience’s pleasure comes precisely from what it does not know. What am I hiding? What do I know that the other person does not? What am I refusing to say? And sometimes: what do I not even understand about myself? Mystery & Secret creates space behind the words.
For the camera, that can become particularly powerful. A close-up does not necessarily ask for more expression. It can make the fight not to reveal something fascinating. If I play my secret directly, it stops being a secret. If I struggle to protect it while still needing the other person, the audience can begin to sense something beneath the surface without being given a lecture.
13. Mischief
I like this one a lot because it puts pleasure back into the work. Mischief is the part of us that enjoys provoking. I know this comment is going to annoy you, and maybe part of me enjoys that. I test you, push you, play with you, know something you do not, or enjoy shifting the balance of the room just slightly.
It can be charming, seductive, childish, cruel or dangerous. In many scenes, especially when we are searching very seriously for “the right emotion,” we end up removing that unpredictability. Mischief puts it back in the room. The fact that Tom can simply use a number such as #13 in the middle of the work also shows how much the concept is meant as an immediately playable action rather than a dissertation about the character.
14. Vulnerability: reveal or conceal?
In the Todoroff material, Vulnerability is framed through a question I much prefer to the direction “be vulnerable”: Am I revealing or am I concealing? Another Studio formulation adds the heart to the question: “Am I revealing or am I concealing my heart?”
That distinction is enormous. “Playing vulnerability” can quickly become a demonstration of emotion, whereas concealing vulnerability creates a fight. I want to cry but refuse to let you see me cry. I am humiliated but want to convince you it means nothing to me. I love you but cannot give you that kind of power over me. Often, that struggle is far more interesting to watch than the emotion itself because it turns vulnerability into behaviour.
15. Architecture: build the journey
Finally, a scene has a shape. It begins somewhere, evolves, transforms, reaches certain peaks, breathes, then ends somewhere else. Architecture asks the actor to look at the whole rather than at each line separately. Where does my character begin? What is the first event? Where does the balance of power shift? Where is the point of no return? What is the final image I leave behind?
In an audition, this feels especially important to me. Sometimes you have two pages, but even within those two pages there has to be a journey. “Storytelling is structure” sums up the idea well. Architecture does not ask us to manufacture a crescendo on every line. It asks us to feel the trajectory so the audience can sense that the person at the end is not exactly in the same place as the person at the beginning.
The Guideposts speak to one another
The more I work with this framework, the less I want to see the Guideposts as fifteen separate compartments. The Moment Before can become an Event. Relationship feeds Communication. Vulnerability can collide with Role Playing when a character is trying to maintain a mask. Architecture can be built out of Events. Humor and Mischief can stop a serious scene from becoming predictable. That is when the list begins to look more like a network.
That way of thinking also feels closer to life. In a real conversation, we do not move neatly from one box to another. We want something, hide something else, the place constrains us, our partner surprises us, information changes the balance of power and we improvise a new tactic. The Guideposts are useful precisely because they can illuminate those movements without pretending to separate them artificially.
Do I need to use all fifteen in every audition?
Personally, I do not think that is the right way to understand the method. I do not necessarily sit down with every audition and a sheet containing fifteen boxes I absolutely have to fill. Some texts immediately demand Relationship. In another scene, the Moment Before may unlock everything. Somewhere else, I may realize I completely forgot Humor or Opposites, and that is exactly why the work has become too predictable.
The value of knowing all fifteen is that I have more doors to knock on when a scene is not working. It is a toolbox. And the more familiar that toolbox becomes, the less I should have to show that I am using it. “Be a text detective, then take the trip of that text” captures the paradox well: investigate with precision first, then stop explaining and begin living.
In the third part of this series, I leave the analysis of the Guideposts and move into the practical work of the Monday Workshop: the Technique Flashcards, becoming ready to work, prepared scenes, real auditions, the Audition Exercises, the Six Viewpoints, vocal work and the work ethic that frames all of it.
