How to Play A Character You Don’t Relate To

Don’t judge people until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes (or about a kilometre and a half if you use the metric system.) Not only is this a good—albeit cliché—piece of wisdom for everyday life, it’s also invaluable for us actors. Just about every director or mentor I’ve worked with has repeated this maxim in some abbreviated form or another, and while I’ve been rather frugal with the advice I’ve kept hold of in my career, ‘never judge your character’ is something I’ll live and die by. Why? Because it’s the key to learning how to play a character you don’t relate to: an acting challenge for any performer.

If you’re wondering how to play a charater you don’t relate to, maintain a level of empathy for them. Seek to study and evaluate their personality and deeds, rather than passing judgement: this is not your job as the person responsible for making them seem real. Once you’ve identified the ‘gaps’ between yourself and the character, build them carefully to reflect these differences. You will end up with a characterisation informed by who they are, rather than how you feel about them. 

One last little thing before our character deep-dive. Everything I talk about in this article has to come from careful script analysis: your instincts are valuable as an actor, but they’re the first thing clouded by personal judgement. Start with what’s there on the page, the nitty-gritty of the text itself. Then you can start to put your personal spin on things.

Don’t Judge: Evaluate

Why shouldn’t we judge characters we don’t relate to? What if they’re absolutely garbage human beings—or literal monsters with nothing but carnage on the brain, presuming they have one? Because it severely limits our capacity for empathy.

A few years ago, I played Kostya in a production of The Seagull by Anton Chekhov and, spoilers if you haven’t read the play, Kostya is hard to like. He’s overly-dramatic, desperate for other peoples’ approval, has frighteningly low self-esteem and can’t communicate to save his life. Quite literally. If I’d gone into that production thinking nasty thoughts about Kostya like ‘what a loser, I’m nothing like that’, chances are my portrayal would be coloured by my own judgement.

If you aren’t enjoying playing a character or, worse yet, are trying to demonstrate how unlike that character you are, it will show. When we pass judgement on people, we set up subconscious blocks that prevent us from connecting with them. The same is true with our characters. Judge them and you put a distance between you and them that is very difficult to close. Instead, evaluate: who they are, what they want, why they make the moves they do. You might not agree with them, but you’re not meant to. You’re meant to understand them so you can bring them to life.

Identify the Gaps

Alright, we’ve levelled up our empathy. Now it’s time to put it into practice. The first thing to do is to identify where you and your character differ. These points of difference can vary in severity: perhaps it’s a simple as “they don’t like apples” or extreme as “they’re unashamedly racist”.

It’s important to identify where you and your character don’t see eye-to-eye for two reasons. Firstly, it helps you maintain separation between you and your character. Even if you love method acting and going as far as treating people terribly in your day-to-day life, that’s hopefully not who you really are. Acting isn’t real. Even if you’re playing a character based on a real person, you’re not that person, no matter how deep you wade into method.

The second reason for knowing the gaps is that it informs your research. People don’t believe things for no reason. Our views are informed by the people, society and culture we are surrounded by. In order to avoid judgement, you need to ask yourself the million-dollar question of why? Why does my character believe in or reject God? Why does my character behave so nastily towards women? Remember, especially if the point of difference is extreme, you’re not excusing these behaviours in real life. You’re not trying to justify why your character hates women to excuse them, you’re instead trying to place them in the broader social context of the story to give a more embodied and sincere performance.

Down the line, this kind of research will also inform your playing of individual scenes—particularly if your character does something so, well, out of character with the way you might act. You’re not doing your performance any favours by bringing your own sensibilities or tactics to a story. How does the character act: and differently from you?

Start with the Body

There’s an interesting phenomenon that occurs when we act. When we embody an emotion, particularly extreme ones like terror, rage or ecstasy, our bodies sometimes fail to realise that the feeling is manufactured. This is why a lot of actors will shake and jump around after a gnarly scene: their bodies are still holding onto the tension. So, using this insight, we can create separation between us and our characters that will enhance our performance rather than detract from it.

Find a space where you won’t be disturbed and start by standing in one place. Don’t change anything about your posture, just find the most comfortable position to stand in and remember, don’t judge! Then, with your feet firmly on the ground, hinge at the waist and drop into a good ol’ fashioned spinal roll. If you’ve done any sort of training, you know the spinal roll very well. Slowly roll up through your spine, vertebrae by vertebrae until you’re upright, then rinse and repeat a couple of times. What you’re aiming for here is awareness and neutral alignment. It’s a great place to start building a character from.

Now, do a full body scan. Start at the feet and introduce your body to your character. How do their feet make contact with the ground? Is the weight more towards their ankles or the balls of their feet? What about their knees? Are they relaxed or locked? What about their buttocks and lower back? Fingers? Hands? Neck? And so on.

Play around with this for a while; take your adjustments to the absolute extreme then dial them back so much that you barely notice them. What we’re doing here is creating a physicality for our character whom we simply cannot relate to that is distinct from our own. This is an added measure to remind our bodies that we are not this character whilst simultaneously getting a feel for what it’s like to walk around as them. Pretty cool, right?

Habits: Good and Bad

You can also make contact with your character through habits. These should be as mundane as possible. What time do you wake up in the morning? Is it plausible that your character would wake up at the same time? Do you pick your nose? Does your character? Are you a clean or messy person? Which one is your character?

Notice that these little interrogations, as well as larger things like your physicality, are all about connecting you to what makes your character human. Once you do this, you can make choices about their existence that feel real, truthful and grounded. Forget the larger plot of the story they inhabit for a moment. What does a day in their life look like? What does normal feel like to them?

An exercise I like to do with tricky characters is something called “A Day in the Life”. Basically, I start by lying down on the ground in the rehearsal room (or my living room, to the confusion of my housemates) and ‘wake up’ as the character. I take them through their day, improvising and observing how they do the little things such as brush their teeth, look in the bathroom mirror, have their breakfast. It can take nearly an hour to do properly, but is a great way of getting you in tune with the character and living in their shoes. It also helps to have a killer playlist to get you in the zone.

Bless this Mess

Contradictory traits are some of the juiciest things to play with when we act. They’re also profoundly human. Your character might be compassionate, but self-righteous. They could be cruel, but shy; brave, but insecure: the list goes on and on. As an exercise, for each character trait you can identify, try assigning a contradictory one. If you’re playing a character who is hateful, what if they’re also affectionate? How could that manifest in your performance?

Human beings are gloriously complicated creatures. The more layers we give our characters, regardless of how different from ourselves they might be, the more real they’ll feel. Audiences may hate them but they’ll love to hate them (or, even better, they’ll hate to hate them.0 What a gift it is to play a character who is so complex that no one can make up their minds about what they really think of them.

Conclusion

Playing characters who are nasty, self-centred, pathetic, out-of-touch, arrogant, and so on, is a big deal. I won’t pretend that this article is the only thing you’ll need to put your worries to rest. Consider Jack Gleeson who played one of television’s most hated characters, Joffrey Baratheon, in Game of Thrones. Gleeson seems to have taken the response to Joffrey very gracefully—which is an almost superhuman feat.

Hate is very difficult to take, especially when it is directed at you, the actor, rather than the character. Another case of this is Laura Bailey who played the contentious role of Abby in original videogame of The Last of Us: Part II. Bailey has been very candid about the backlash she received after playing that role; the abuse that was hurled at her was mindboggling. This is not to scare you off playing difficult characters; they can be a gift and can be fertile ground for growth as a performer. But it is always worth considering your own wellbeing when taking on such roles.

In any case, don’t judge: evaluate. Your job is to make that character feel real and human. I’ll leave you with this quote from Mary Wollstonecraft: “No man chooses evil, because it is evil; he (sic) only mistakes it for happiness, the good he (sic) seeks.” 

Hope this helped. See you around the traps!