As far as I know, the standard way to write a rule that applies to any actor—player or not—is to use “an actor”.
Instead of an actor taking a container…
This is nicely documented in WI 12.14:
[With this syntax] the rule applies to anyone who tries taking a container, player or not.
However, the implementation of action patterns disagrees. Section 8 specifically delegates any syntax involving “an actor” to a phrase helpfully named “Anyone except the player”.
The behavior doesn’t seem to have changed in version 10; indeed, the Standard Rules still use the “an actor” syntax to have rules apply to everyone. So I have to wonder—are the phrase names and comments in the implementation just outdated, or misleading? Or am I just horribly misreading this?