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If you are keen on getting into acting, taking drama classes for adults is a great start. But if you do well and have the chance to progress into stage or screen roles, you may have some qualms about what might be asked of you.

That could involve taking on roles that clash with your own values, or might feel particularly uncomfortable with on a personal level. A prime example of that could be having to perform naked or partially naked.

For many actors, especially women, this can be a challenge but in the past has often been seen as an obligation. In an interview with the Guardian, Joanna Lumley revealed how this was a part of her career that she felt compelled to do even though she thoroughly disliked it.

Name-checking contemporaries like Diana Rigg and Julie Christie, she said: “We all had to take at least our tops off in something. It was standard and it was this, ‘You’re not a real actress unless you take your top off.”

She added that “nobody likes it” and described undertaking sex scenes as “ghastly stuff we have to pretend to do”.

While you may be unlikely to be asked to perform naked or part-naked at an early stage, one way you might develop your fledgling without this is voice acting. With the right tone of voice, you can work on radio, in advert voice-overs and in other recordings.

Speaking to Bang Showbiz, Game of Thrones actor Peter Dinklage highlighted how he loves voice acting. “I find not relying on other things as an actor, and just solely your voice, it really can be very liberating,” he said.

Part of the appeal, he noted, is that he can wear his own clothes instead of a costume, ensuring he is comfortable at all times.

Of course, it wasn’t his role as Tyrion Lannister that saw his body exposed for all to see, unlike many of his co-stars. But the fact remains that voice acting does provide a means of avoiding visual exposure. Whether that means you get to wear whatever you want or simply get to wear something, it could offer many opportunities.

Method acting has become one of the most well-known techniques in the industry, thanks to its world-famous supporters, including Marlon Brando and Robert DeNiro.

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If you are considering enrolling in acting courses for adults, you might think about issues like your body language, how to project your voice and even challenges like performing a stage or screen kiss.

However, an issue you might not have given so much thought to is how to keep your head when all about you are losing theirs. Sometimes you can be performing live when things start to go wrong, and being cool, keeping concentration and thinking clearly might help rescue the situation.

It is exactly this scenario that makes the Comedy ‘The Play That Goes Wrong’ so funny, as the whole plot is about a performance where everything goes haywire and the cast continually has to try to keep the show going as one mishap follows another.

However, there may be times you need to do this for real, like when props break, or one of your fellow actors makes an error by saying the wrong lines. How you respond will shape whether the performance sails on smoothly or sinks without a trace.

Nor is it just what is happening on the stage that could cause a problem. The issue of badly-behaved theatre audiences arose in April when some patrons were ejected from the Palace Theatre in Manchester during a musical for disrupting the performance by loudly (and badly) singing the words.

Speaking to the BBC, comedian Ben Elton said audiences “should apply good taste and good manners” in theatres to prevent such situations.

However, sometimes theatres themselves can be culpable; as the Norwich Evening News reported, the Norwich Theatre Group recently had to apologise for “encouraging poor theatre etiquette” by issuing an email about upcoming musicals describing them as “something to sing along to”.

The fact is that if you go on stage, you will need to be able to stay focused amid many distractions, some of which may come from the audience. And if it is a modern phenomenon for some people to behave as if a musical is a karaoke session, just consider that even Shakespeare had to deal with all sorts of hecklers and rowdy audiences in his day!

King Charles III might have been spending a lot of time on TV recently, but he definitely wasn’t acting; that business with the crown in Westminster Abbey was for real.

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There are some exceptional actors and actresses out there these days who put their heart and soul into playing a character. In fact, some admit they have been changed by the roles they played. 

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When we typically think of the greatest acting performances, many of us focus quite naturally on the best films ever made or films with breakout performances by actors that would go on to have great careers, with films that are commonly part of acting classes.

However, there are far more great actors out there than scripts that do them justice, and a hallmark of a truly great actor is to take a script that may not have the same renown, make do and mend, often with particularly personal reasons as to why.

Here are some great examples of fantastic acting performances found in somewhat unexpected films and the reasons why they appeared.

Mixing Up Directors

Fresh off of an Oscar nomination for the brilliant and subversive Lost In Translation and in the middle of working on the unique The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Bill Murray was sent a script that he read for, his curiosity sparked by its apparent author: Joel Coen of the Coen brothers.

Ultimately it turned out he had gotten the name mixed up. It was Joel Cohen and the script was for the somewhat infamous Garfield live-action adaptation. Bill Murray’s enthusiasm quickly waned, which was perfectly suited for the laconic cartoon cat.

Not Realising It Was A Video Game Adaptation

In 1992, Bob Hoskins was cast as Mario Mario for the film Super Mario Bros, one of the strangest and most troubled film productions of all time, and a film that throughout the rest of his life he said he regretted doing more than any other.

He was bombarded with script revisions until he finally agreed to be the star but did not realise the origins of the source material, leading to a somewhat infamous interview where Mr Hoskins turns to the camera, takes a pause and laments that he used to star in Shakespearean adaptations.