STAY TUNED: On Characterization

Q: Where is the line when I rely on my personality too much for a character? I’ve gotten feedback for a certain archetype that has my own personality traits, but I want to broaden my abilities. How do I try out different personality trait?

Personalities are a social construct, and an interesting way to look at your character’s behavior. All human beings have a public persona, or what Carl Jung calls the “The Persona,” and the “conformity” archetype. This is the public face or role a person presents to others. As you become aware of your characters “social mask,” you also become aware of what she doesn’t want to reveal to the world. This creates a duality in your character, an immediate struggle and complexity. In my work with actors, we investigate what I label the ‘social persona’ along with the ‘intimacy’ of each character. We look at the personality of a character to understand the relationship between what they truly need and their behavior.

Your character’s personality is different than yours. You can’t just play her from your personality. She created her personality to survive her circumstances, just like you did to adapt to yours. Her background, her relationships, her needs, are written specifically, and it’s up to you the actor to gain insight and then integrate them into your own personal understanding. There will be details that you don’t understand until you research them. Personality in part derives from where you were raised. So you need to understand the environment where your character grew up, and question how her behavior is informed by that. Class and education are other important influences. As are family dynamics and religion.

Personality traits develop to survive, to fit in, or to serve as defense mechanisms. Let’s take Maggie the Cat, for example, since most actors are aware of Maggie in CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF. Her personality is that of a confident “siren”; she is verbal, strong, tough, extroverted, seductive, won’t stand down and won’t take no for an answer. She presents her beauty at its very best, and strives to be the epitome of female mystique. That is her social persona. But inside, she doesn’t feel like enough of a woman at all. Her husband Brick won’t sleep with her, and she always feels inadequate. Her personality is informed by her need, but doesn’t obviously reflect it. Why does the character you’re working on behave the way she does? If you were in her shoes, how would you behave?

We have to study human nature, including our own, in order to create characters with real humanity. Acting is at it’s best when you understand your character’s behavior intimately. You find a way to integrate yourself into the imaginary circumstances and make them your own. You could just step into an imaginary world as yourself and listen and respond. This will create something. But the writer didn’t take the time to create a character so that all of her biography and proclivities would be ignored. Plus the fun part is to turn parts of yourself up, turn parts of yourself down, and discover new parts each time.

“You’ll never see any two good actors approach a role in the same way.” -Stanislavski

“Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought.”- Albert Szent-Gyorgyi