How to Develop a Character for an Acting Monologue

Video Transcript

"This is Dr. Charles Grimes. I'm speaking on behalf of Expert Village about analyzing a text and beginning to rehearse your monologue. Now I'm going to speak to you about discovering the character that you're about to play. I'm going to elaborate on something I touched on about discovering who the character is. Let's think about you and the character you're about to become. So I like to have people do an exercise where you split a piece of paper into four quadrants and think, first, about how you would describe yourself and have a list of traits, adjectives, characteristics, and then ask people that you know, what they think about you, what they think your traits are, your descriptors, and write those down too. It's quite possible that you think you're a driven person, and all your friends think you're bossy. That's fine as long as you know it. Now the next step is to look at the character you're about to become, and do the same kind of descriptions. What is the character in the play think about himself? How do you tell? From how she behaves in circumstances, what kind of traits in a general sense that person has. Then you can compare that to yourself, both who you think you are and who other people think you are and you can begin to get a sense of how much you're going to change and how much you're going to expand yourself as you become this other character. And don't forget the last step, again, which is to look at your character and to see how other people think about that character. And you can do this by your own research reading the play and also by looking at criticism and summary and other versions of the play if it's on film so that you get a sense of how this character comes across to other people. As an actor you inhabit the character from inside, and you also control how other people see that character. So if you do this personality analysis, and we haven't got to acting the words out, but if you do this, what you have is a firm foundation for knowing who that person is when you get on stage, and being able to perform that part for an actor."