How to lessen the gap between you and your character
Ever work on a role that you feel super far away from? Like you can’t understand their motivations or their actions? It’s soooo frustrating!! A lot of students tell me they just want to “get lost in a role” – which I’m not sure really happens? Like in a totally lose your whole “self” kind of way.
If you’re feeling stuck, I invite you to shift how you’re thinking about the role. What if, instead of being a completely different person, they were just you…in a temporary situational self. If your character is a hitman: what would that feel like for you? If your character is going through a devastating breakup, it’s your breakup. This doesn’t mean you’re always playing yourself…but you can’t not bring yourself to a role, so take the pressure off to be a completely new person who has nothing to do with the core and essence of you.
CLASS CLIP TRANSCRIPTION
Sarah: I do think it’s really helpful to think about, to try to close the gap between you and this role you’re playing, so that you can think of yourself…it’s a temporary situational self. So that you don’t feel like you have to become someone else. So you don’t feel like you have to lose yourself in this role. I think what’s really helpful and something we’ve also been doing a lot lately in class has been creating a palette for yourself. We work on creating our own palettes, like the things that we are doing in our lives and the actions we play all the time in our own world, you know, like how we get what we want, and then starting to look at the similarities in the roles we play, and the extreme differences. So that it helps you shift, it helps you feel less like, I’m trying to get this person, I’m going to go and get my needs met in a slightly different way as myself in this temporary situation.
Student: I see, yeah, I get what you’re saying. Because I used to think of it in terms of, I’ve gotta be this other person, and then I realized, oh, my best acting is gonna be my version of that. You know what I’m saying? Whatever it takes for me to kill a guy, I need to know what that is, you know what I’m saying?
Sarah: Yeah!
