We all have an innate ability to connect with characters on stage or on screen. It is the job of the actor to bring these characters to life and create a believable connection between them and the audience. But how do you do that? How can you take a character off the page, internalize it, and make it real? Here are three steps to help you build a connection with any character you may be portraying.
- Understand Your Character’s Backstory
The first step towards connecting with any character is understanding their backstory. What happened before they came onto your stage or appeared in your scene? How did past experiences shape who they are today? Answering questions like these will help you develop a better understanding of who this person is and why they act the way they do. Knowing your character’s backstory will also give you insight into their motivations, which is an essential part of creating believable characters.
- Explore Your Character’s Emotions
Once you know who your character is, start exploring their emotions. How do they feel about themselves? How do other people around them make them feel? Are there any events from their past that still affect them today? By exploring how your character feels in different situations, you can get a clearer picture of what makes them tick and how their emotions shape the way they act. This will help bring depth and realism to your performance as well as make it more engaging for audiences.
- Create A Physicality for Your Character
Finally, create a physicality for your character that reflects their inner emotional state. Establishing physical habits such as posture, gestures, and facial expressions helps bring life to your performance by providing visual cues for audiences to latch onto and relate with on an emotional level. Not only does this create more memorable performances but it can also be used to convey subtle hints about your character’s backstory or motivations without having to spell it out in dialogue or action explicitly.
Acting is all about creating believable characters that audiences can connect with emotionally on some level or another. To accomplish this, actors must internalize their characters and understand who they are on both an emotional and physical level so that they can create realistic performances that resonate with viewers long after the curtain has closed or the credits have rolled. Hopefully, these three steps will help any actor take their performances from good to great by developing more meaningful connections with their characters!