It was Friday afternoon. My manager called me and said he was sending me audition sides for a meeting that would happen Monday or Tuesday. He told me about the show and the role, and in spite of everything I have learned in 37 years as an actor, I got excited because it was really fantastic stuff.
I read the sides, and extracted as much as I could about the character from them. See, there’s a preparation thing that I have to do whenever I’m going to perform a role, whether it’s for a job I’ve booked, an audition, something on-camera or a voice job: I read the scene (or the whole script) and I ask a series of questions based on what it tells me. What does this person want? What’s in his way? How does he feel about that? What does he do about how he feels?
Sometimes, a scene makes the answers to those questions really easy to find. It’s there in the dialog, and in the prose that the writer uses to describe the scene. Sometimes, the characters are drawn so clearly, finding those answers is as easy as reading the words on the page. But most of the time, I have to do some work to find the writer’s intention, so that I can take words on a page and turn them into a character that makes the audience feel something. For this particular audition, the character was fairly clear, and though I didn’t get to read the entire script, the audition sides were an interesting scene that told me a lot about who he was, and why he was interacting with the other character in the scene.
I broke the scene into some broad strokes, so that I knew what he wanted. Then I broke down the lines into specific actions that let him deal with what was in his way, and how he felt about those things. To be completely honest, this is my very favorite part of being an actor. I love breaking down a script and then breaking down its scenes and then breaking down those scenes into even more specific actions, so that every single thing I do, every choice I make, is logical and real and grounded in the reality of the character and the world he lives in.
