Exercises to Create a Compelling Character

The process of character development serves to make a character more well-rounded, relatable, and compelling. It helps an actor to better understand, appreciate, and connect with the character—and audiences are much more likely to feel engaged when they can relate to the character’s needs, fears, emotions, thoughts, and struggles. The actor’s process starts with reading the script and then rereading it. After that, there are several exercises actors can use to breathe life into a performance. Here are a few.

Write out your character’s biography

Every person who’s ever lived has had a backstory. On occasion, characters—whether fictional or real—come with fully established backstories. However, actors commonly need to gather the clues scattered within a script to imagine a rich and plausible personal story about their characters. What are pivotal moments in their life story starting with birth through the teens years and into adulthood? Remember, this exercise is not intended to overwhelm performers with inconsequential details, but rather to focus on a few of the most impactful moments of the character’s life—those that serve as the foundation of his or her beliefs and needs.

Questions to ask when creating a backstory can include:

What are important aspects of the character’s personality?
What kind of stressors existed in his/her family life?
What are the character’s beliefs about people?
How does his/her behavior change when under stress?
What does he/she conceal from others and why?

What are your character’s hidden thoughts?

For each line of dialogue and each action, your character has a thought. What are those thoughts? Jot them down in the margins, keeping in mind that the words your character is thinking may contradict what he or she is actually saying.

What is your character’s purpose and intentions?

What is most important to your character? What does he or she want and need? Perhaps love, money, success, or revenge? The answer should include both the obvious and subtle ambitions. And how do these objectives change along the journey?

What are the character’s obstacles?

What hurdles must the character overcome to accomplish his or her goals? This can apply to a scene as well as the overall storyline.

What do you have in common with your character?

Make a list highlighting the ways you’re most similar to and opposite of the character.

Finetune your character’s physicality

What do they look like and how do they dress and style themselves? What life experiences made them choose to present themselves in this manner? Also, consider the unique qualities of your character’s voice—the speed with which they speak, the volume, and what vocal quality (raspy, winey, assertive) as well as which dialect.

As Samuel L. Jackson says, “Sometimes you will never have to explain [your creative decisions] to an audience or to the other cast members. But it’s important to you as a person because all those kinds of things determine how you feel about people, how you look at them, how you interpret their actions, what your prejudices are toward those people in a particular way. ‘Are they smarter than me? Do I like that? Do I not like that? Is he dumber than me? Am I going to manipulate him because of it?’ And it’s stuff that an audience might, or they probably won’t, ever know … If there’s no source material to tell me what kind of person I am, then it’s incumbent upon me to create a human being that’s inside that story, that has a full life, that feels a certain way about things.”

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