A complete 12-step system for actors — developed by Hollywood coach Ivana Chubbuck. A repeatable tool you will use for the rest of your career.
"An actor must learn to use emotions not as an end result, but as a tool to provide the passion to overcome the conflict of the script."— Ivana Chubbuck, The Power of the Actor
Most actors focus their energy on trying to feel — to be sad, to be angry, to cry. The Chubbuck Technique completely rejects this approach. Your energy doesn't go into feeling. It goes into winning.
Instead, it asks: what does your character need to accomplish? Before the scene, the actor makes precise decisions — the preparation. Within the performance, the focus is entirely on pursuing what is essential to the character's basic human need, their survival. Emotions are never the goal. They are the result — of getting, or not getting, what your character needs.
A complete map from the character's deepest need to the living truth of a performance.
Your character's supreme, lifelong driving need — the engine beneath everything they do. The foundation of the entire performance.
What your character needs to get from the other person in this scene. It must prompt a response — making the scene a real exchange, not a monologue.
The physical, emotional and mental hurdles that make it difficult for your character to achieve their Overall and Scene Objective.
Endowing the other actor with a person from your real life who makes your need urgent and real. Not pretending — using what's already true in you.
The personal images and associations the actor creates to give meaning to the words they speak and hear. Starting from what those words mean to the character — then finding your own memories that make you feel something similar. Without them, dialogue is hollow.
Breaking the scene into units of intention. Each beat is a new attempt, a new tactic, a new way to win. The living architecture of the scene.
The event that happens before you begin the scene, which gives you a place to move from, both physically and emotionally. It gives you the urgency to get your Scene Objective.
Endowing your character's physical reality with attributes from a place in your real life. It creates privacy, intimacy, history, meaning, safety and reality — and must support all the other choices you've made.
The handling of props, which produces behavior. Words can lie — behavior never does.
The dialogue going on inside your head that you don't speak out loud — because it's too revealing, vulgar, or would defeat your objective.
Your character's history. The accumulation of life experiences that determines why and how they operate in the world — personalized to your own so you can truly become and live the role.
While the Chubbuck Technique does use an actor's intellect, it is not a set of intellectual exercises. This technique is the way to create human behavior so real that it produces the grittiness and rawness of really living a role. In order for you to duplicate the natural flow of life and be spontaneous, you have to get out of your head. To achieve this you have to trust the work you've done with the previous eleven tools and LET IT GO.
Psychological realism. Live truthfully in imaginary circumstances.
Affective memory. Drawing on personal emotional history.
Use your pain not to feel — but to win. The 12-step system.
"I created 12 easy steps to follow based in these sciences: behavioural science, psychology, and cultural anthropology. Since the 12-Step Chubbuck Technique is based in the science of how we live and behave on a daily basis, it is easy to understand and utilise." — Ivana Chubbuck
Understanding the psyche of the character — how and why they think, feel and behave.
Going to the source of what motivates human behavior — how and why people really behave.
Understanding the cultural and social forces that shape who a person is and how they move through the world.
The definitive guide to the Chubbuck Technique — written by Ivana Chubbuck herself. This revised and updated edition includes new stories from the actors she has worked with and fresh exercises to upgrade the 12-step process.
Translated into over 20 languages. A must-have for any serious actor.
"Ivana has been one of my acting teachers for 2 decades who has inspired me to constantly challenge myself, be fearless in my choices and to strive to reach higher than I ever thought I could. It's her brilliance and our work together that led me to my historic Oscar win."
— Halle Berry
Ivana Chubbuck is one of the most influential acting coaches in the world. Over a career spanning more than three decades, she developed the 12-step Chubbuck Technique — a system that transforms personal pain into the driving force behind a character's objective.
She runs the Ivana Chubbuck Studio in Los Angeles, where she has coached some of the most celebrated actors in the industry — guiding performances that have earned Oscars, Golden Globes and worldwide recognition.
Her book, The Power of the Actor, has become an industry standard, translated into more than twenty languages and used by actors at every level around the world.
Halle Berry · Brad Pitt · Charlize Theron · Jim Carrey · Aubrey Plaza · Travis Fimmel · Beyoncé Knowles · Judith Light · Sylvester Stallone · Eva Mendes · Jake Gyllenhaal · Ryan Gosling · Gal Gadot
I trained directly with Ivana Chubbuck in Los Angeles and am one of her accredited Chubbuck Technique teachers for Spain and Albania — bringing the same technique to every actor I coach in Barcelona and online.