What does character actor mean




















Zira US English. Oliver British. Wendy British. Fred US English. Tessa South African. How to say character actor in sign language? Numerology Chaldean Numerology The numerical value of character actor in Chaldean Numerology is: 7 Pythagorean Numerology The numerical value of character actor in Pythagorean Numerology is: 8. Select another language:. Please enter your email address: Subscribe. Discuss these character actor definitions with the community: 0 Comments.

Notify me of new comments via email. Cancel Report. Create a new account. Most people don't walk around with all these memories on their shoulders like baggage. They've seeped into our being, our muscles, our subconscious, allowing us just to be, to exist. When you play a character in theatre, TV or film, you should know your character as well as you know yourself, so you can just exist and live.

Of course that doesn't just magically happen, nor does it evolve just from rehearsals. As an actor you have to plant those memories, anecdotes and backstory. So how do you build a character?

Well, first a good script should give you some initial information about your character, and also what other characters say or think about your character can be very revealing. All this should be extracted and written down in a separate notebook.

The next stage is research. You need to find out through detailed research what the history, economics, politics, music, art, literature, theatre, film, foods, fashion, religion might have been at the time the play was written, in order to know how you would have lived and what and who your influences were, just as you know these things in real life.

Possible sources include the internet, films of the era and finding images of landscape, as well as going to museums, art and photographic galleries. Fill your mind with images - not facts and figures. The more visceral your understanding, the better. The final stage in building a character, once you've filleted the script and completed your research, is to use your imagination to flesh out the details you've gathered and bring them alive.

Don't underestimate the power and the necessity of your imagination in the acting process. You can't use your imagination without the backup of research and reading. Nor can you use your imagination alone. You might find in the script a description of the room you're supposed to be in, including details such as the style and period of the furniture.

What does it mean to you though? Is your character supposed to be familiar with the surroundings? Is it the first time you've entered this room? Is it a cosy cottage? A freezing barn? A familiar street? We usually behave differently depending on our surroundings. You need to establish your relationship with your environment because this affects the way you use yourself.

For example, you wouldn't start walking around, touching ornaments and putting your feet up if it wasn't your home. The geography will have an impact too: playing someone from very cold northern climates such as Norway or Russia will be different to playing someone in a baking Mediterranean climate such as Italy or Spain.

We need to know what season it is, what year, what time of day. We tend to carry ourselves differently in the colder months than we do on hot, muggy summer days.

We would also hold ourselves differently if the piece was set at the turn of the century. We must be aware that we can't bring our modern physicality to a play that is of another period. People expressed themselves differently then and didn't slouch or use modern gestures. You need to work out what your character has been doing, where they've been.

When you make an entrance on stage it shouldn't look as if you've just stepped on stage from behind the curtain. Even if that's true, you should have worked out during rehearsal where you would be coming from - the bathroom, having just brushed your teeth?

The kitchen in the middle of baking an apple pie? The car after being stuck in traffic? What is your state of being supposed to be on your entrance? Another break came when Sean Penn cast her as a cop in his psychological thriller The Pledge , a virtual cavalcade of notable character turns.

Or her appearance as the weary but compassionate owner of a trailer park who helps the protagonists get back on their feet in Leave No Trace , also directed by Granik. When Dale Dickey is onscreen, anything seems possible. First role: Around the Fire In these early roles, he was a vocal chameleon, a high-energy ham.

But as Domingo got into his 40s, his energy slowed down, smoothed out. And he found his calling card: a voice that was earthy and rich, the sound of cigars and good whiskey. First Role: Murder in Mississippi Walton Goggins is not an actor who disappears into a character.

But any role Goggins plays carries with it some element of his distinctive physical presence. Goggins has said that his first role was for the Billy Crystal film Mr. Saturday Night , in which he played a Confederate soldier who was eventually edited out of the movie. His first IMDb credit, though, is for a TV movie in called Murder in Mississippi , in which he plays a racist mob member who shouts obscenities at civil-rights activists.

For a glimpse of his range, though, and how potent he can be in an ensemble, there is no better Goggins platform than The Righteous Gemstones , in which he plays Baby Billy Freeman. The same things that work so well in other roles are at play again there: a character whose public persona is a shield for lurking subterranean motives, someone who draws in people almost incidentally, as a mere side effect of being alive.

Gemstones adds something else, too. In that role, Goggins is intense and self-absorbed but also loose-limbed. First role: BJ and the Bear Julie Newmar. Such is the price of being as good as Grant is at making the smallest roles utterly indelible. Everything we know about a Beth Grant character made it perfectly logical for her to chase those blow-up angels into the path of oncoming traffic Dorothy Sheedy, — , a tragic yet perfect end for a woman played by the patron saint of Middle American hysteria.

First role: Early Edition What is left for her to do if not coach her friends on their love lives? The bit is funny, though also painfully real as a reflection of a career full of thinly written roles that exist only to support the protagonist. Films like The Wedding Planner and 13 Going on 30 solidified her as the early-aughts go-to, must-book bubbly sidekick.

But she also possesses a once-in-a-lifetime comedic timing that is singularly and innately unhinged. See every time she stole a scene in Arrested Development as a boob-flashing personal assistant. More recently, she has been repeatedly cast as a housewife, or a grumpy ex-wife, or a mother who doubles as an exposition dump. And yet for all the typecasting, these are not just a homogeneous string of roles but distinctive characters that are a testament to her versatility.

First role: Short Eyes He has a precise comic timing and a unique intensity that he can amplify or attenuate given the needs of a scene. Be Sure to Check Out: Devs. In his dramas, Wilson often wrote Virgil-in-Inferno figures, men who serve as quasi-mystical guides and foils for his troubled main characters, wise and clear-eyed, but not necessarily fated for grace themselves. It may have been there that national audiences first realized that they wanted him as their companion-in-trouble too.

McKinley Henderson is a presence deserving of center stage. He is Tony nominated for Fences , and Stephen Adly Guirgis wrote him the complex role of a lifetime in Between Riverside and Crazy , in which his retired-cop character loses his claim to moral certainty.

One of his first film credits is as Bobo in an American Playhouse production of A Raisin in the Sun , a sly little performance, one of his rare chances to be wicked.

Usually television has taken his weightiness and turned it into authority, casting him as a judge or a psychiatrist. Finally, film has started to capitalize on his other abilities, like the way his eyes can shift, suddenly, from kindness into untrustworthiness. A grenade? The moment brims with a frightening tension. And in so doing, it gives Beale Street its most haunting scene. That these series are so wildly different in tone and scope underscores how Lee can thrive in just about any environment, from horror to comedy to drama, immersing herself into whatever the role calls for her to do.

Her charisma steals scenes both small and large, which is saying something when paired with an actor as captivating as Lyonne. First role: Grumpy Old Men The binary that distinguishes John Carroll Lynch is probably best expressed in two of his greatest performances.

He wraps his arm lovingly around Marge as she takes dead-of-night calls, smiles with a pleasure in life that recalls a benevolent moon, and moves with the steady purpose of a man who is simply where he knows he ought to be.

Lynch looks, at the end of the day, like any guy you might pass on the street, a big but ordinary fellow who perches on a barstool or is a partner at a law firm. But his long career in film, TV, and the theater is a testament to his ability to harness an ordinary physicality into something extraordinary, pulling together these poles — the menacing and the comforting, the goofy and the deadly serious.

Something very interesting is about to happen when Lynch enters. Character actor takes its meaning from the specific actor it is supposed to describe. Definition 1: A supporting actor who plays one distinctive persona. This definition comes closest to the The Stage definition and probably was the primal meaning in Hollywood. The studios of Golden Hollywood were elaborate versions of the theater stock company, each maintaining in-house actors, screenwriters, directors, etc.

Central casting hired scores of actors with personas best suited for typecasting. Screenwriters wrote to the personas of the contract actors.

Definition 2: A supporting actor who plays different distinctive personas.



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