Research a Character for Acting

Video Transcript

"Alright, in order to develop this character, the first thing that we want to do is we want to find out all the factual information that already exists. And what I'm talking about is in the script, in the movie, in the book, whatever it is that your material came from. You first need to take a look at everything that has already been said about your character or what do you, the character yourself, say about yourself. So you have to go back through that script and you have to look for all of the elements that I'm getting ready to talk about. Perhaps another character says, "Well, she's just so tall." You want to write that down. That gives us a clue or a fact about your character that your character is tall. That's going to be very important later on. So we want to find out everything that we say about ourselves. You know, our character says, "I'm just so stupid. I just make such stupid mistakes." Write that down, that's very important to developing your character. First, find out everything you can that is fact, that has been spoken, so that makes it a fact. Everything else we're going to have to make up because none of the components that I'm going to give you can be left blank. So, all of the blanks, we'll have to fill in, but we're going to start with what we can find in the script."