Creating a Character

After many years and a heavy heart, I can honestly say that character building as an activity of the actor is an unnecessary waste of time.

I don’t say this lightly, I spent years studying the best way to do it, I spent years training actors to do it, forcing actors to do it in rehearsal.

It’s fun, it fills up time but it doesn’t actually help you do your job.

The character is a facet of the written script and the fumbling actor’s attempts at gaining parity of esteem by ‘filling in’ the bits that the writer missed out is insulting to the writer.

But what of the weak writer? Well, abundance of character never made up for paucity of plot.

It’s a matter of ego. The actor doesn’t enjoy being down low on the creative pecking order and ‘character’ is a way of bringing a ‘useful’ contribution to the table.

The trouble is that the more the actor focuses on their character, the more little nuances they insist must be added. Then they further insist that these flourishes make it to the screen or performance by indicating such characteristics, winking at the audience, as if to say ‘hey look at my clever contribution’.

It’s unnecessary.

It doesn’t help the actor to play the scene, it only encourages self consciousness. To play a scene doesn’t require the creation of a role, but the authentic revelation of the truth of each moment.

In school they ask, can you step in and out of character? It really just reveals that they know less about acting than their students, there is nothing to step into, and so nothing to step out of…

This obsession with character is part of a myth that pervades the acting profession, and actors wastes so much of their time and energy on it.

And yet when an actor reads of their favourite actors, or see them interviewed, they find they talk character character character. Why is this?

I do not wish to be rude, but I suspect it is because they don’t have a clue how they do what they are doing and good chat about character usually suffices instead of common sense.

In my acting classes in Glasgow, we have never done a single character exercise, and the acting is leagues better than the over self conscious crowd busy transforming themselves.

Acting is not about transformation of self, it is revelation of self, if you want to change who you are, I suggest life coaching.