Character development is my favorite thing about acting. I love getting a script, reading it and meeting my character for the first time. For my current character, Elinor Dashwood, I have gotten to meet her three different ways. Through a script, a book and a movie. What a wealth of knowledge I have about her at my fingertips! Creating a character that is completely your own when pulling from a script, a book and sometimes a movie is tricky. I don't want to copy what Emma Thompson did (although she was excellent), and I don’t want to create her exactly how she is in Jane Austen's novel. I want to make her my own. For the past two months I have been pulling from these resources to get to know Elinor better, but I am also making her unique to me. The way I started was finding the similarities between Elinor and I, a few examples are: we have both suffered great losses in our lives, we both love to draw and read, we both would do anything for our families, and we are both very responsible. Just finding these few similarities helped me create her unique and specific to me, the actor. I also always start with the physicality of my characters, this helps me tremendously in moving forward in rehearsals. Elinor tends to move through the world with a little more care and time than I do as the actor.
Something else that I have leaned is, you have to fall in love with your character, this was very easy with Elinor. Creating characters takes time, focus and research, but once you find them it opens a whole new world.
Something else that I have leaned is, you have to fall in love with your character, this was very easy with Elinor. Creating characters takes time, focus and research, but once you find them it opens a whole new world.