11 Things Actors Should Know About Building a Character From Life
Drawn from what is actually said on camera, so you can decide whether to
spend the 10:09 watching it.
Start from what you will actually be sent up for
At nineteen you are not going to be cast as the mother of a teenager. The exercise begins with an honest look at the roles that make sense for you now, because the point is preparing for work rather than for a fantasy of it.
Breakdown blurbs describe the person in a line or two: nineteen to twenty-two, the most popular girl in school; forty-five, recently retired from the Marines. Read enough of yours and the repeats appear. Those repeats are your working list.
Medical, police and legal dramas mean doctors, nurses, detectives, lawyers and victims in enormous quantity. Deciding which of those you plausibly are tells you which real-world lives are worth researching properly.
If you keep going up for police roles, go and find a police officer. Match age, race and gender where you can, because a sixty-year-old white male doctor and a twenty-five-year-old Asian woman doing the same job have had entirely different experiences of it.
Work through a character autobiography with them, question by question, in the first person. Some of it is intimate and you may hesitate to ask. Ask anyway: people share far more than you expect.
The single best question in the video. People answer it immediately and specifically. Someone in the Navy named chain of command being ignored. A chef will tell you about knife handling. That is a list of errors you now cannot make.
Anybody can invent a backstory. What she wants is one physical thing this person does, performed properly: patting down an arrest, fitting a wig, taking a blood pressure reading, conjugating a verb for a class. Behavior is where a character actually becomes real.
Play a Marine who cannot assemble a rifle and the audience is told something untrue about the character before a line is spoken. If your character carries a gun daily and you never have, get used to that weight at home with a prop.
How somebody deals with their laundry says an enormous amount. Someone very wealthy who has always had staff may have no idea how clothes get washed. Someone else is doing it on a rock outdoors. Both are playable and neither is in the script.
The studio will connect students with a nurse. It will not connect them with a serial killer. As characters get further from anything you can interview, research replaces access, and any real-world introduction should come through a production.
Spend an evening being the character among other people in character, asking questions as them. The goal is that nobody can tell what you think of the person you are playing. No judgment, no telegraphing, no visible effort. The difficulty lives in the preparation.
Where can you see a nun, a stripper, an influencer, uh, Marine, uh, stay-at-home dad, all mingling and chatting, [Music] a character party at Visor Sturgis. Let me tell you what that is. At the culmination of our 9-week technique class, we have what's called a character party. When I'd shorten the technique class from 12 weeks to nine weeks to make it more affordable for people, I was trying to decide which ones I was going to combine and which ones maybe I should let go. And I originally thought, well, maybe I'll get rid of the character party. every student, every person who gone through it, teachers, no, no, you can't get rid of the character party. It's the best. So, the character party lives on. And if you study with me online or in person, you will get a character party. And let me tell you what that is. I want you first to start thinking about who do you play? What are those roles that are going to make sense for you to be booking and auditioning and your agent or manager to be sending you out on?
If you're 19 years old, I don't want you playing uh a mother of a teenager. That doesn't make any sense. Those aren't the roles you're going to go up for. So, there's a thing called breakdowns. when roles that are being cast go out to break down services and they sort of have a blurb about whatever the person is. 19 to 22, young most popular girl in school, something like that. 45, recent retiree from the Marine Corps. Whatever it might be, it'll kind of give you a little blurb about what that person is. So you might start seeing if you're going out and seeing breakdowns repetitive things that you are going up on college student, mom, dad. A lot of times it might be in professions. If you think about movies or more often television shows, there's all the medical dramas. So you've got doctors and nurses, victims of things.
You've got police dramas, lawyers, detectives. Looking at those things, where do I fit in? What could I be doing? Then I want you to find somebody in real life that is close to that person as possible. If you notice that you're getting lots of auditions for cops, I want you to go and find a cop. What's amazing is at our studio, we can connect you to almost anybody if you don't know that person in your real life. You want to find that person as close to you as possible. So, around your age, your race, your gender, because a 60-year-old white male doctor is going to have a different experience than a 25year-old Asian girl. It's just going to be a different experience. So, you want to get as close to what you are as possible. And then we have a character autobiography in our studio binder that's going to ask all kinds of things about who you are as a person. And by you, it's the character.
You're going to want to feel like the character. So, I want you to ask that person all of those questions. Some of them are very intimate. If you're very uncomfortable asking them those questions, you can start figuring out how to answer them that would make sense for the character. I would still ask them because people want to share more than you would expect. You're going to go through that that biography. You're going to write it all up and then you're going to find a demonstration as that character. It's so important because this is where you can start creating behavior. It's one thing to understand how to say your lines, but another, how do you pat down somebody that you've just arrested? How do you fix your hair if you're putting on a wig every day? How what are these things that are part of your behavior as your character? We won't do this in uh in class, but if you're playing a marine and you don't know how to put together a rifle, a lie is created.
So what I want you to do is probably in your research you will find that demonstration that you will be able to do. You will talk to a nurse and you will they will tell you sometimes what I like to do is I like to ask a person what is the thing that bothers you the most when you see your character your profession portrayed on screen. People will tell you all the time, "Oh, I hate when they do this." Or when there's I asked this of somebody who was in the Navy and there was the lack of chain of command, how somebody would go to somebody that they wouldn't necessarily go to. The way somebody handles a knife if you're a chef. So, I want you to find a demonstration and then you're going to do that in class, whatever that is, as long as it's safe. No weapons, no drugs. I don't even want you to do weapons or drugs if you're online and doing it in the safety of your own home. A hair stylist, maybe you get an inexpensive wig and you start cutting that wig so that you know how to carry yourself, use any props that you might have believably as that person. If you don't carry a gun on you in your regular life and you're playing a cop who carries a gun all the time, you're going to want to get used to that feeling in your own home with a prop. But there's so many examples of things that you will find that might be your demonstration as the character. Anybody can make up story and give biography. I want you to be able to do that.
But then I want you to find that demonstration How is it that maybe you might clean something? Very meticulous person. You're playing a a a serial killer. And let me just give you a little caveat. We're not going to connect you to any serial killers at the studio. Our first is first person, these easier characters. And then as you move up and you start ma creating these more difficult characters that you might not be able to connect to, that's where research sometimes people can put you in touch, but I would have a production do that. So always keeping you safe. How you deal with your laundry says a lot. If you're very very wealthy and you have lots of servants or people who wait on you, you might have no idea how to take care of clothes. How do you wash a clo your clothes? Do you have a washing machine or are you going outside and doing it on a rock?
How are you dealing with your dayto-day exercises? So something might be very different, might be very specific. You might be taking somebody's blood pressure because you're a nurse. You might be giving somebody a shot. Or you might be teaching your class a sto um how to conjugate a verb in another language. So for the character party, I like I have pizza and food. If you're playing somebody who's a vegan, you might ask me to provide vegan pizza or bring your own pizza. You might find that you don't want to talk to somebody if that person is very different than your character. Would your character want to go up and talk to that person or would your character keep their distance? I want you to introduce yourself as your character. I want you to ask the other students questions as your character. When you're asking them questions, it really gets you in the skin because the goal is to have it seem effortless.
I don't want to see you acting. I don't want to tell what if it's Shannon doing the character of the nurse. I don't want you to be able to tell what I think of the nurse. I am the nurse. I admire them or I think she's, you know, been doing it too long and really cranky. No, I just want you to see that person. I don't want you to be judging your character or trying to telegraph in any way that you're different than the character or that this was hard work. Do all of your prep and then let it be easy. When you have a good work ethic, that's one of those things that's very difficult. It is hard to let it be really easy. And the difficulty is in your preparation. And then when you're on set, allow it to be as easy it is it is when you and I are talking, when you're doing something alone, it's not a lot of effort hopefully to be you.
So let you being that character be just as difficult. I like to say if somebody who didn't know the people in class came on character day, they wouldn't really understand it. Oh, I'm meeting a choreographer. I'm meeting Okay, so what of it? Let it be easy. So, speaking of technique and character parties, I hope that I will see you in one of my technique classes, whether that is in person or online, when you are ready to do what you came here for. [Music]
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