Tips to help you get into character

When it comes to novel writing, a writer might take 10 or more years to find his or her voice. This means that the writer is no longer mimicking anyone and has found their own unspeakable quality, as if the writer is talking directly to the reader like a close friend. When it comes to acting, the equivalent to ‘finding your voice’ is ‘how to get into character.’

It does not matter how much acting craft and learning you have developed as an actor, nor does it matter that your look is exactly as if depicted from the screenwriter and the script itself. These things do matter collectively, of course, but they do not affect the viewer of the film in that magical way that a good story, good acting, and good producing can create that amnesia in the audience so to forget that they are watching something that has been created for screen. That the story before their eyes merely happened in the world, and that you are watching it unfold as if someone just had a camera hanging around the actual events as they happened.

In other words, ‘being in character, — that ingredient an actor needs is what puts the story inside the actor’s veins. It boils the blood of the actor with the details of the story and the character’s backstory, personality, origin story and even such seemingly banal things as hobbies and obsessions that might not even be revealed in the film themselves but just as much inform the character in how she moves, speaks, talks and breathes on screen.

But how does one get into character? And is there a right way to do such a seemingly spiritual and impossible feat? Below I have provided many different strategies to fall into the vacuum of your character — where anything and everything which flows out of your performance is a product of the true reality for which you have ingested and understood to be your own:

1. Knowing what’s in the top drawer of the dresser of your character?
2. What is your character’s favorite food?
3. What food did your character eat last? / What was the last meal you had?
4. If you know the nose of your character, then you know you are getting close to getting into the character.
5. How does your character laugh? / When was the last time you cried?
6. When was the last time you cried? / Was it 10 minutes or 10 years ago?
7. This is me and this is the character. How am I like this character and how am I unlike this character? / Try and reconcile these differences. Sometimes it’s the combination of these things that make for an interesting three dimensional performance.
8. What cologne or aroma does your character use?
9. Does your character wear shoes too small?
10. Having a personal object and carry it in the pocket that the character would have. For example, carrying around the rosary of the character’s mom.

The list goes on and there is no rule to what does and does not work for an actor to get into character swiftly and efficiently. The key in this is to do what works for you. And if you are having trouble finding a strategy that helps you do this, begin by experimenting and drawing out props and objects that seem as a connection to the script itself. Before long you will be finding that place quicker than before. Until you will know your character so well, you will not need to use any tool or object at all. And the rest will be all downhill from there.