What’s your first step when it comes to building a character, especially for a role you’ve never played before? What’s the first thing you do when you pick up a script for the first time? Do you read through the entire play from cover to cover or do you flip through to find your scenes before reading anything else? I would guess most of us zero in on our scenes out of curiosity if nothing else. When you’ve finished looking over your scenes, then what? Is that when you read through the entire script?
I doubt very much if I’m the only one who does this but here’s what I do. I go to my scenes, first and immediately start making choices and jotting down notes. Once I’ve done that with all of my scenes, I go back and do it again. And again. I’ll even start learning my lines before I read the whole script. Crazy, I know. There’s a whole lot of information in the rest of the play that is bound to inform my character choices so I really should work within the context of the story. But frequently I’ve found I make my strongest choices that way. I never allow myself to become totally committed to these early impulses because I know they’re going to be shaded or changed during rehearsals. It’s surprising, though, how often I’ve ended up returning to those first ideas and using them in performance. Here’s my reasoning behind the idea:
In real life, by the time we’ve reached adolescence, our personalities are pretty well set. The basic wiring in our brains isn’t going to fundamentally change all that much. We’ll learn new things, become wiser and our interests will change and mature but we’ll still perceive the world around us and interact with it in basically the same ways. If one is shy at the age of sixteen, odds are that he/she will still be shy at the age of thirty. How he/she deals with shyness will evolve over time but the fact of foundational shyness will stay (I learned all that stuff working in a psychiatric outpatient clinic for three years). Since as actors we’re in the business of inventing new people and personalities, can’t we come closer to the character’s truth by shaping the personality outside of the circumstances of the play?
I’m not the type of guy who produces profound revelations so others must work this way, too.
What about you? Please share your thoughts. Thanks!
ActorPro 
I was trained as an actor to read a play all the way through at least 10 times before I even audition for a character. And I did it… and it worked! HeeHee! Over time I also learned to write down (yeah, I have to write them down) who the character likes and doesn’t like and who they trust and don’t trust. I also try to write down what obstacles the character begins the play with and what happen during the course of the play. I have found that I can then do almost any scene in the play as an audition.
In rehearsal, if table work is done, I have to work at talking directly to (ie looking at) the characters I am talking with in a specific scene. But what I get up to block, I can’t seem to stand still. I try to warn directors that I have a tendency to “dance” through the rehearsals attempting to discovery what physicality and movement can assist me as an actor and assist the character. After a while the director can’t stand it anymore and tells me to sit or stand and move very little. It is often at this point, that I find out so much about where the tensions and needs and actions and relationships of my character.
Also the week before tech, I can’t remember a single word of the script. I get everything wrong. I warn the director that this is going to happen and that I will not ruin the show, but will be like a rock during tech because of it. I don’t exactly know what it happens. My theory is that my character is fully dropping in to me and that their language and experiences are little by little taking over mine – at least for the length of the play.
Each actor has their own process – some of it from their training, some of it from their own ways of looking at the world and some of it from what they get out of the script.
Making sure you know your process from the beginning of rehearsal to the opening of a play can so help you and your director.
There is a real joy in working on a script, a play, a film and television show, a voice-over, a book-on-tape that works with your own principles. That makes life richer and fuller.
Love to hear what everyone else has been trained to do and how they have adapted that training to their own process.
PAX, BA