Inhabiting an ‘evil’ role can be stressful, but it also helps foster compassion
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Version 0 of 1. Jamie Dornan, who plays serial killer Paul Spector in the BBC drama The Fall, spoke at a press conference this week launching the show’s second series. “You can’t fail to be left slightly scarred by inhabiting someone like that for two seasons,” he said. “I do carry elements of him with me in a worrying way.” Is this an indication that he is doing it right or that he is doing it wrong? I would suggest the former. Granted, there is a school of thought that sees acting as just prancing around – not least, among actors. “Know your lines and don’t bump into the furniture,” Spencer Tracy famously quipped. But there is another school that sees acting as a way to touch people’s underbellies, bypassing intellect. For that to happen, it is essential for the player to bypass their own intellect and reach a point of lived experience; a dramatic truth. I don’t necessarily mean “the method”. In many ways the part of Stanislavski’s system that was developed in America through Lee Strasberg, which focuses on internal factors (at the expense of 80% of Stanislavski’s teaching, which was about external spheres of influence, technique and preparation), is a difficult cheat. Some claim it is evidence of a failure of a creative imagination. In any case, most modern acting teaching rejects any one rigid way of doing things as uniquely right. What I mean is something much simpler and more difficult: approaching a character with empathy. An actor judging the character they play as “evil” is usually fatal to the drama. Few people see themselves as wicked. Within our own, occasionally warped, framework of thought we are usually the hero of our own novel, not the villain. Understanding, therefore, becomes the most important quality for an actor. Because of the way I look, I have had to step into the shoes of a rather interesting array of rogues. From rapists to drug dealers and paedophiles, it has often been highly unpleasant to occupy the headspace of such people, sometimes for months. I understand Dornan’s discomfort entirely. A couple of years ago, I had to see an osteopath because of back pain. As he tortured my skeleton, he explained how the body adjusts to anomaly, trauma and imbalance. If your hip is a little out of joint, your pelvis shifts a tad the other way to compensate, your spine bends accordingly, and so on. Often, this results in your head ending up slightly tilted. “When you walk out of here,” the osteopath explained, “everything may seem at an angle because of the adjustments I made. In actual fact, you will be seeing the world straight for the first time in years.” Playing someone unpleasant can have a similar effect on the way we stack the blocks of our psyche. If one cares about it and wants to get under the skin of that character, warped begins to look normal and vice versa. Adjustments are necessary afterwards to see the world straight again. I am confident Dornan will find the right ones. I am rehearsing at the moment for David Baddiel’s new musical The Infidel. I am playing (of course) the villain: an extremist hate preacher. Even in this lighthearted set-up, where one moment I am calling for the tearing down of decadent western civilisation and the next dancing in the style of Madness, a religious zealot preaching violence is a weird skin for an atheist, pacifist softie to wear all day. I can feel my head tilting a little. I can hear myself defending him in rehearsals if someone suggests he is irredeemably awful. What frightens Dornan is the same thing that has frightened all actors, I’m sure, at one point or another: the realisation that we all contain the bigot, the thug, the zealot, the killer; that these feelings bubble away surprisingly close to the surface of civility. But I feel lucky for getting to explore all that in the safe environment of a rehearsal room. Ultimately, I wonder if this tilting of the head might be a healthy thing for all of us to be doing. The ability to see things from a different perspective is the basis of compassion and the ability to forgive. To understand our “evil” impulses brings us closer to controlling them in ourselves and formulating rational, rather than hysterical, ways of dealing with them in others. |