What the Big Bad Wolf Teaches Us About Character Motivation

If you were in class with me this week, you would have heard me speaking about the story of the 3 Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf. For those of you unfortunate enough not to be in our classes, I want to explain how this story can help us to learn why specificity in choosing the character’s want is so important. So we’re going to start off with the question that we call ‘The Want’, you can find reference to this and lots of discussion of it all over the blog, so if you want to find out more, please do a search for ‘The Want’ in the wee search window after you’ve read this blog.

The WANT is also known in lots of other approaches to acting as a want, a desire, a need, an objective, a goal – some way of expressing the motivational desire of the character.  It’s my belief that most actually does this wrongly, or perhaps mistakenly by attempting to force a personalisation of the want onto the actor, so if the character wants the girl to kiss him, then they say that the actor should say ‘I want the girl to kiss me’. We say that we think this is a mistake because it’s asking the actor to be delusional, he may or may not want to kiss the actress playing that role, but that’s hardly the point and forcing the poor boy to believe he wants to kiss her in spite of his common sense is pure nonsense, but there you go, that’s what they teach. Confusing character with self leads to pretending and most of us aren’t very good pretending, not really, not convincingly, some perhaps, very few, and for us mere mortals, we need to go about it a different way. If you want to find out more about that, you can look into that further here on the blog by searching for TASK or ESSENTIAL ACTION.

So these other approaches, they ask that question ‘What is my character’s want?’, ‘what is my character’s goal?’, ‘what is my character’s objective?’.  And the trouble with that question is that it’s too broad, it doesn’t lead to action. Anything we do when we analyse a scene must lead directly to the actor become active, taking action. That’s why we analyse a scene, to learn to take from page to stage or page to studio/set. And all of our analysis is aimed at taking the actor towards action, towards acting, not forcing them back into the realms of thoughts, ideas, in other words, back into their head.

Instead of this broad question, we ask a more specific question:What does my character want the other character to DO (now)

The NOW part is particularly important because it needs to be achievable within this scene. If you want to borrow money, but there’s no money in the room, then you need to get the promise of money or the agreement. If you want commitment to do a specific thing, then you need the commitment here in the room, you don’t want to focus on the thing that needs doing itself. It has to happen in the HERE and NOW, if it happens outside the scene, in the THERE and THEN, it doesn’t have the same power over the character and it often leads to the actor overlooking important elements in the scene.

So what does the character to DO, emphasis on DO and then NOW.

Again, if you’ve read this blog or paid attention in class, then you’ve heard myself or Ian or Karli or Meli talk about this before and it won’t be news to you in itself. But let’s explain the difference and why it’s important.

I give a lot of examples from tv, film and theatre, but finally I realise people haven’t got my taste in plays, television and movies and so I’ll choose something fairly universal. And I’ve chosen the story of the Three Little Pigs.

All you need to know is that we’re following this from the perspective of the ANTAGONIST, not the porky PROTAGONISTS, so we’re the actor playing the character of the WOLF, the BIG, BAD, WOLF in this show. Any of you could be playing the WOLF in a piece of children’s theatre or whatever and what have you. You still need to do an analysis.

Let’s look at how the BROAD approach works with this role and let’s ask the question; WHAT DOES THE CHARACTER WANT? or WHAT DOES MY CHARACTER WANT? And we can probably come up with something like ‘food’ or ‘to eat the pigs’. I like to follow up the WANT QUESTION with something I learned from Bella Merlin’s book Beyond Stanislavsky, she attributes this to one of her teachers, but I cannot remember his name at this time and I’m not going to search through the book for a reference at 2am – you can take my word for it. Merlin says that we should ask the question ‘For What Reason?’ and it’s a good question and it forces us to dig down a little into the answer and ensure that we’re satisfied. Again, you can look back a few blogs and look at the blog on Mining the Want for more about that important question ‘For What Reason? or Why? – if you want to ask it like that instead. Once you come up with the WANT, you ask this question.

For what reason does the Big Bad Wolf want to eat the pigs, because he’s fucking hungry of course. And so, we know he’s going after the pigs, but when we then turn our attention to the scripts, and this isn’t Labute or anything, it’s not Shakespeare, the wolf has like the same line repeated over and again. “Little Pig, Little Pig, Let Me In’. Then we’ve got to work out whether we’re playing the hungry, or the desire to eat the pigs. Well, neither, it’s too broad, it’s not actable, it doesn’t lead to action, to acting, it will make you play it too overtly if anything.

Instead, let’s ask the alternative question WHAT DOES MY CHARACTER WANT THE OTHER CHARACTER TO DO NOW? ‘Little Pig, Little Pig, Let Me In’ – it’s fairly obvious. Let him In. He’s trying to get the pig to open the door, cos then he can eat them and then I won’t be hungry any more. If you use that answer ‘let me in’, we’ve created a situation of wolf and pig, the actor playing the wolf and the pig. The actor playing the wolf will attempt through all of his tactics to get the actor playing the pigs to open the door and let them in, and the character playing the pig will resist, or whatever it says in the script. And the wolf’s success doesn’t depend on the actors, but on whatever the playwright has laid out for them. The script determines this, but that doesn’t stop you trying.

So the open WANT question is too broad and it doesn’t lead to action. It leads us into our heads, which doesn’t help the actor. We need much more than just the motivating desire, it doesn’t hurt to know that he’s hungry, that’s not a bad question to ask, but more specifically, what does my character want the other character to do NOW. Right NOW, let me in. There’s lots of choices for tasks and tactics here, unlike the answer ‘eat the pigs’, which has a very very shallow pool of tactics and probably quite a lot of hungry acting.

So that’s the difference between a simple WANT and the WANT/DO/NOW that we teach. So whether you’re in class or you’re part of our extended studio throughout the world, I hope that helps you to understand your character’s motivation desire, but also to act upon it.