Actress Roundtable on Separating Self from Character

During a Hollywood Reporter Roundtable discussion, dramatic actresses Anya Taylor-Joy, Elizabeth Olsen, Cynthia Erivo, MJ Rodriguez, and Gillian Anderson had plenty to share about the challenges they’ve experienced when separating from their characters. Just because a director hollers, “Cut!” doesn’t mean it’s easy to switch off the characters they’re portraying and switch on their real selves—especially when they’re expected to inhabit their characters for extended periods.

MJ Rodriguez

Pose actress MJ Rodriguez is able to move from playing the strong-willed ball performer Bianca to her fun loving self with relative ease.

She says, “I definitely take 20 minutes out of my time to really center myself, and like just wash off all of the process and the work that I had to put into her making sure she was this realistic person, and also the many women that I’ve emulated through this character. I try my best to take 20 minutes to release myself from that. And sometimes I do it before I even get home so that I don’t even have to bring that to my family.”

Anya Taylor-Joy

Anya Taylor-Joy, however, finds it more of a challenge to break away from her characters. “I wish I had as much control over that,” she admits.

While she finds it easier to transition from certain characters, others, like the orphan chess prodigy Beth Harmon in The Queen’s Gambit, throw her for a loop.

“In the case of Beth in ‘The Queen’s Gambit,’ I had worked back-to-back on two projects with one day off in-between, so by the time I got to actually filming the show I was exhausted, and there was no energy to create a barrier,” she recalls. “And that was potentially the toughest thing about the show because it was a wonderful experience as an actor to not have to reach for any emotion, but then you have to go through the psychological, like, warfare figuring out, ‘Why do I feel so awful this morning? What is happening?’ And then you go, ‘Oh, it’s not my feelings. I just have to sit in them all day. And I have to be aware enough to go, ‘You are not depressed. The character is depressed. And at some point that will leave you.’”

Still, when the film was completed and released, she found herself grieving the loss of the role she’d grown so attached to.

Elizabeth Olsen

WandaVision actress Elizabeth Olsen points out that, with all the patience and professionalism required of actors on set for hours on end, oftentimes that leaves them feeling less patient when they arrive home. “Regardless of what the day requires emotionally of you, you’re just tired,” she says.

Cynthia Erivo

English actress Cynthia Erivo, who portrayed abolitionist Harriet Tubman in the biopic Harriet has experienced difficulty with separating from certain characters.

“I had a mini-breakdown, a real ugly cry realization,” she shared. “I had no time to actually rest or do anything after playing [Harriet] and went straight to see my mother in London. And I don’t know what happened, but I just—the visual representation of shattering glass, that was what was happening to me.” Recalling all the heartbreak she had to tap into for the role had taken its toll. “It didn’t go when I was finished, and it took some time to just dissipate,” she explains.

When it came to playing Aretha Franklin in the miniseries Genius, Erivo described the hardship she experienced when the production shut down due to the lockdown. “Unfortunately the pandemic hit when we were in the middle of shooting it, so I couldn’t completely get rid of [Aretha] during the six-month hiatus, and I had to go right back into playing her after that. So it’s like you’re pulling this person with you the entire time so you don’t lose them when you get to set again. So it just felt like she was stuck for ages.” That meant keeping Aretha’s mannerisms and speech patterns ready to go during the elongated period of time.

Gillian Anderson

Likewise, Gillian Anderson revealed she suffered from a couple of “mini breakdowns” during The X-Files while playing FBI Special Agent Dana Scully for nine seasons. “When you immerse yourself as entirely as we can and we do for such long periods of time, there’s not going to be no consequences for that,” Anderson says. Indeed, she found herself grieving terribly after her last stage performance as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire in London.

Have you ever had a hard time separating from one of your characters?

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