I know what your thinking, “Here we go Again!”. When it comes to acting you’ve heard the cliche advice so many times before, “don’t judge your character” right?.
Is it just something acting teachers and Directors say because they learn’t it when they were training or is it still relevant?
Judging a Character is offering your own personal opinion about any given character’s behaviour and / or personality. If you were judging your character you might say, This character “is just a bitch” or “I don’t like him- hes a douche” or ” what a soft touch this character is’ etc etc.
It’s natural human behaviour to criticize others. It makes us feel good about ourselves and covers up our own feelings of inadequacy.
This is totally irrelevant to actors , and actually acts as an obstacle to the actor doing his/her work.
An actor is primarily concerned with playing their role in a truthful & honest way. Actors should find a way to not just sympathize with their character but empathize no matter what they play. The sooner you get closer to the character the sooner you can utilize all the parts of you that are relevant to the character your playing
We all know the saying, “You never really know another person until you’ve walked in their shoes”, well the same thing goes when your exploring your characters. Ask yourself why is my character behaving that way? What happened to my character that’s made them so anti- authority? Why is my character angry at the world? etc etc etc. Keep asking Why, why why then you will find reasons and explanations for your character’s behaviour. Once you’ve done that you can find a way to access those parts of you that are relevant to the playing of the character.
Think about it, the moment you make a judgement call on your character is the moment you get further away from connecting to them. Empathy, empathy empathy.
By Paul Winchester
