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One of my actresses answered the question what do you
believe makes someone a good actor with the following:
they have to be thinking their character's thoughts. Sadly, this kind of exercise is practiced casually in too many
professionally and academic settings. It comes with no
thought of how to reach the same sort of acting breakthough
without the often resulting emotional breakdown. I think there's a couple of things that I
think are issues with that. The first one is there are some characters out there
who are really harmful
and bad people. The idea of immersing yourself into the mind of
someone who is like that
is not healthy for someone. You can still play that
character with dignity and with a wonderful performance without trying to
think to yourself what would it be like to be this kind of person. The
second thing that i think in the emotionally damaging for that is if
someone tries from their own personal experiences in trying to create a
character. This especially happens for character has gone through something traumatic like
a death,
abuse, some sort of assault, etc.
If an actor has ever gone through something like that, some actors actually
will think "well I'll just tap into how I felt for that experience." That can be
extremely harmful to the person and can
make them relive the experience which many people do. Many method actors
actually trying to relive in their mind what it felt like to go through the
traumatic experience in order to connect with the character. That is completely
damaging. By doing more training and having people respect to the training that is
necessary to be really really good actor which we have many examples of that
will help people approach acting in a more healthy way. I
think it will also be better.