I argue throughout this book that the actor’s role within acting’s distributed cognition network is to solicit the empathetic connections upon which screen acting’s verisimilar illusion depends, all the while adapting to the cognitive ecologies in which the acting in question takes place, such as the audition process or the actual filming on set. The goal of this chapter is to bridge the previous chapter’s ideas from television studies and cognitive theater studies to the kinds of empathetic connections that screen actors make while acting, which is the focus of the next chapter and the overarching critical framework for the ensuing analyses various phases of acting work. To build this bridge, this chapter expands on the notions of fluid and situational selfhood to create conceptual space for the actor’s many selves to create characters within the ever-shifting nature of screen acting’s distributed cognition networks. This chapter concludes by synthesizing interdisciplinary research on empathy among flesh-and-blood humans and for fictional characters alike, to show how those situational selves can create empathetic relationships within acting’s cognitive ecologies.

Empathy has become a subject of great interdisciplinary interest across the humanities, social sciences, and life sciences. In the absence of a universally accepted definition of empathy grounded in one critical domain, the hope here is to establish a common ground between some neuroscientific, anthropological, philosophical, and literary notions of empathy to contextualize how screen acting works as a dynamic system. In particular, Amy Coplan’s interdisciplinary review of underlying criteria for empathetic relationships provides a valuable framework for assessing how screen acting practices solicit empathetic relationships through acting’s creative strategies and tactics. Coplan’s criteria shape the sprawling concept of phenomenological empathy into a pragmatic checklist for naming what various aspects of the empathetic solicitation actively do.

Situational and Selfless Selfhood

The core tenet of neurophenomenology is that cognitive science and phenomenological philosophy can be mutually informing discourses in a critical model of self, imagination, and intention which views the body and mind as inextricably interconnected. The self which emerges is a constantly fluctuating reorganization of our bodymind resources in response to the iterative exchange between our intentions, motivations, and actions and the lived world in which they occur.

The key role of intentionality in our bodymind self-organization is the cornerstone of what cognitive theorist Francisco Varela calls the “selfless self.