Excellent news: the half is yours! The director cherished your tape—filled with these concepts you used to face out from the pack and seize their consideration. However now that the contract is signed and the script is in your arms, the true work begins. How do you go about discovering your interpretation of a personality within the context of a bigger story, the performances of your co-stars and the director’s imaginative and prescient for the whole manufacturing? Is it a widely known position, which carries its personal baggage and expectations? Or one thing recent begging in your private stamp?
Whether or not it’s an iconic position within the theatrical canon or a personality from a model new work, discovering your interpretation of a personality is an exhilarating job for an actor. It requires an excessive amount of analysis into the position and the story world, and rewards warning as a lot because it does daring, surprising decisions. No matter your interpretation could also be, it must be plausible inside the context of the story; if the viewers doesn’t purchase your take, the artifice of your work will shine by means of.
On this article, we’ll take you step-by-step by means of the method of discovering your interpretation of a personality. However earlier than we do, allow us to kick issues off with some recommendation. Decoding a personality is by no means about you, the actor. You’ll be able to’t modify a task to go well with you as a result of it’s simpler, or tougher, or extra fascinating so that you can play. As an actor, your job is to serve the position and the story.
Set up the Details
All of it begins with the script. Your first step to find your interpretation of a personality is to determine firmly what’s already there on the web page and what the boundaries of your exploration of that character is perhaps. This comes from studying the script again and again, being attentive to what and the way it has been written. Solely then can you identify the query of why.
In our article on script evaluation, we define the method of unlocking the that means by intently and thoroughly parsing every line—and every phrase inside that line—for doable that means. Hold your eye on vocabulary and phrase selection, punctuation, model; even the way in which a script is structured on the web page itself (though that is extra inside the context of theatre than movie.)
No matter you discover there’s what the author meant. These are the info, associates: the constructing blocks on which all information within the story world is created. In case you chip away at one in every of them, you’ll finally invite the entire construction to crumble into rubble.
And take our phrase for it that working this manner with a script isn’t as limiting because it sounds. Some actors reject this course of, fearing that their creativity can be stifled by a sequence of guidelines and restrictions positioned by the author. Good actors, nevertheless, study to embrace the info—as a result of they perceive {that a} really impressed interpretation comes from filling the gaps in between.
Something the author didn’t specify is truthful sport. And there’s at all times extra white than black on the web page.
Discover the Gaps
What sort of automobile does your character drive? When did they begin working their present job? Who was their finest buddy in highschool? How do they unwind after an extended day? What drove them to make a pun earlier than they threw that dangerous man off that zeppelin?
With the info stowed away, you can begin to ask the questions that inform your character’s actions and phrases—the questions not merely answered by what’s written within the script.
That is the place your interpretation of a personality will get fascinating. Though the info of a narrative won’t ever change, your solutions to the questions round these info is perhaps radically completely different to the following actor to say the very same phrases. What’s extra, contemplating these questions within the first place will can help you create a much more advanced, three-dimensional efficiency.
Say your character enters a scene by stepping out of a rain storm. That’s all the author provides you: “[CHARACTER] enters the [LOCATION] on a wet night time.” What questions may you ask?
- Are they moist from the rain?
- If not, what stored them dry?
- Did they stash an umbrella exterior the door earlier than they got here in?
- Is the umbrella theirs, or did they take it from someone else?
- In the event that they stole it, what does that say about their persona?
And so forth. From a easy line on the high of a script, we will begin to paint an image of a personality ill-prepared, unscrupulous, probably with thieving tendencies. Are we studying into this an excessive amount of? Maybe! However instantly there’s much more to work with when crafting the previously-ambiguous second earlier than.
A Fast Word: When Questions Turn out to be Details
When asking questions on a script, there’ll inevitably come a time when your ideas are answered by the reveal of knowledge at a later level within the story. That is nothing to fret about, merely modify your interpretation to incorporate any new-found info.
The other will be true as nicely. A personality’s much-reported private historical past could grow to be an entire fabrication. Immediately, it’s good to return and re-examine all of the stuff you beforehand believed to be true. Enjoyable!
How A lot is Too A lot?
If discovering your interpretation of a personality is so simple as respecting the info and asking a complete heap of questions, how are you going to inform when to cease asking? How a lot is an excessive amount of with regards to scorching takes and hypothesis? How far is simply too far?
It’s really essential to find the road between an interpretation that’s dynamic and completely excessive. It’s a wholesome boundary to push in your exploration of a personality or scene, as you typically discover essentially the most fascinating issues on this liminal area between insipid and impressed.
The trick is to think about your course of as experimentation: an opportunity to discover, think about and even fail. Nothing you attempt goes to work instantly; if it does, it’s most likely value exploring just a little additional past that time.
And when you’ve experimented? Be taught when to step issues again. This comes from expertise, from the suggestions of your friends and the steering of your director on a manufacturing–who is certain to have opinions as to your character creation with an outsider’s eye. Examine again in together with your interpretation of the script to see in case your decisions ‘match’ into the story world.
Do they really feel like they could possibly be a sensible a part of that panorama?
Residing within the Story World
One of the best take a look at of your characterisation of a task is how nicely they match inside the story world. Attempt your interpretation out for a scene or two, and ask your self in what you’re doing feels constant and actual.
The story world is the ecosystem by which the narrative takes place: the residing, respiration area created by the author that grounds the story and makes it really feel plausible. Even when your character is an entire, one-of-a-kind, fish-out-of-water loner, they must be a loner inside that specific context.
That is particularly essential if you’re growing smaller, bit-part chartacters. For audiences, small roles are custodians of the story world. They assist set up the ‘regular’ of the narrative, because the