BECOMING A CHARACTER

You exist. Characterisation is a collaboration.

In my work with actors in workshops and in preparation for film and TV projects, the question that has come up recently is the tension between authenticity and transformation.

We all want to be able to shift or change our own energy to achieve characterisation. I think the pathway to doing this is to first know yourself so that you can change. How to do that?

Well, Meryl Streep says:

Acting is not about being someone different. It’s finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.

She considers herself to be the clay, the ground zero, the core element. Here is what the philosopher Heraclitus has to say.

The unlike is joined together, and from differences results the most beautiful harmony.

His philosophy was about the underlying connection between opposites. For example, health and disease define each other. Good and evil, hot and cold. His world of contrast was unified by the element of fire.

Your Hamlet or…