If the part asks you to be devastated, one method to achieve a “real” sense of devastation is to imagine times in your past when you’ve been devastated. This is typically called method acting. The actress recalls times she felt devastated, such as when a family member died or when a love ended. She then uses this devastation to fuel the hurt and sadness the character she’s portraying is feeling.
A large part of acting is imagining you’re someone else. That’s why imagining the emotion, which is part of the Meisner technique, is a technique many actors use to achieve a sense of realness. If the part calls for your character to be enraged, the actor imagines situations that would enrage him, helping him understand the rage the character must be feeling, and how he would act if that happened to him.
Other actors in the scene help fuel the emotions a character feels. They can also do so off-camera or outside of a performance through taunts and jabs at the actor. While this can be cruel, it can also rile up the actor with genuine emotion. This technique was used during the filming of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Dracula,” where he and Keanu Reeves genuinely taunted Winona Ryder, which caused her to cry, working well as the part called for her to have a nervous breakdown.
Running a scene over and over again can create genuine emotions in the actors. They get tired, annoyed, saddened, discouraged and angry. This works well if one of those emotions is called for in the scene. By the 20th take, the anger on film may be genuine anger, as the actor is mad and agitated from running the scene multiple times.