How to Build a Character

How one book became two, and why it matters

Almost everything actors believe about Stanislavski comes from an accident of publishing, and once you know it a lot of confusing arguments stop being confusing.

He wrote a single volume about the actor's work on themselves, in which the first part dealt with the inner work and the second with the physical. He intended them to be read together, as one continuous training.

That is not how they arrived in English at all.

What Stanislavski wroteOne book, two parts

1930sWorking on a single volume on the actor's work on themselves, inner and physical parts together.
1934–38Develops the Method of Physical Actions, working from the body toward feeling, and moves away from emotion memory.
1938Dies, with the whole work unpublished in Russian.
1948Part two finally appears in Russian, ten years after his death.

What reached EnglishTwo books, thirteen years apart

1936An Actor Prepares. The inner half, published alone and read as the whole system.
1930s–40sStrasberg builds the American Method with only that half available to him.
1949Building a Character. The physical half, delayed by the war, arrives long after the Method has set.
2008Jean Benedetti reunites both halves in one volume, An Actor's Work, as intended.

So the inside-out reputation is largely a translation accident. The Method was assembled from the first half of a two-part book, and built around emotion memory — a technique Stanislavski himself had already moved away from by the time the second half was written. Generations of actors were taught half a system and told it was the whole one.

Two old hardback books side by side on a wooden table, one more worn than the other

This is not a conspiracy and nobody hid anything. Both halves have been available for seventy-five years. But the first half arrived first, it arrived alone, and it arrived in the country that would go on to export acting training to the world.

In every physical action there is something psychological, and in the psychological, something physical.

Stanislavski, quoted by Sharon Marie Carnicke, who argues he was never the inside-out theorist the American tradition made him

A correction to our own research brief, and it was a big one. Our brief proposed a striking argument: list the sixteen chapters of Building a Character, notice that none of them is about backstory or psychology, and conclude that Stanislavski secretly built character from the outside. We checked it, and the argument does not work. You cannot count the chapters of the second half of a book and report that it does not contain the first half. The absence of psychology chapters is a consequence of where a wartime publisher cut one volume in two. What is genuinely true, and more interesting, is the story above.

What is in the half you were not taught

Having said all that, the second half is still the part almost nobody reads, and it is full of things an actor can use tomorrow.

Here are its sixteen chapters in Hapgood's 1949 translation. Read the list slowly, because the emphasis is not what you would expect from the man who is supposed to have invented inside-out acting.

Chapters I–IIWhere it starts

Toward a Physical Characterization. Dressing a Character — an entire chapter on costume and make-up.

Chapters IV–VIThe body

Making the Body Expressive. Plasticity of Motion. Restraint and Control.

Chapters VII–IXThe voice

Diction and Singing. Intonations and Pauses. Accentuation: the Expressive Word.

Chapters XI–XIIRhythm

Tempo-Rhythm in Movement, then Speech Tempo-Rhythm. Two whole chapters on how fast a person does things.

And the restNot about the body

Characters and Types, Perspective in Character Building, Stage Charm, Toward an Ethics for the Theatre, Patterns of Accomplishment, Some Conclusions on Acting.

An honest count, since we nearly published a wrong one. Around nine or ten of the sixteen chapters are genuinely about external means — body, voice, movement, speech, dress. The rest are not. Chapter III is about psychological transformation, and Chapter XV, which Hapgood titled Patterns of Accomplishment, is about the actor's inner creative state. Anyone telling you the book is fourteen-sixteenths physical technique has counted the titles rather than read them. We were about to be one of those people.

The book opens with a student saying exactly what a lot of readers of this page are thinking. He understands the inner work in principle, but not how to turn it into something an audience can see.

If you do not use your body, your voice, a manner of speaking, walking, moving, if you do not find a form of characterization which corresponds to the image, you probably cannot convey to others its inner, living spirit.

Kostya, the student narrator, in Stanislavski's Building a Character, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood, ch. I

The teacher agrees with him, and his reply is the sentence to take away. Note the second half of it, which usually gets cut when the line is quoted.

Without an external form neither your inner characterization nor the spirit of your image will reach the public. The external characterization explains and illustrates and thereby conveys to your spectators the inner pattern of your part.

Tortsov, the fictional Director, in the same chapter

That second sentence keeps the external in its place, because it explains and conveys the inner pattern. It is a delivery mechanism rather than a substitute.

The story worth stealing

Tortsov describes an acquaintance he knew well: a man with a deep bass voice, long hair, a heavy beard and a thick moustache. The man cut his hair and shaved, which exposed small features, a receding chin and protruding ears, and then pitched his voice high to hide the bass.

This went on for half the meal and I talked with him as though he were a stranger.

Tortsov, Building a Character, ch. I

Half a meal passed with someone he knew well, and he did not recognise him. That is the strongest argument for physical character work anywhere in the literature, and it comes from the tradition everyone cites for the opposite.

And the story immediately next to it argues the other way. In the same chapter Tortsov describes a beautiful woman who was stung in the mouth by a bee, so that her lip swelled and her mouth was distorted. That external change did not make her someone else. Stanislavski put both stories on the same pages deliberately: a chosen transformation you inhabit is not the same as a disfigurement that happens to you. If you see the bee quoted as an outside-in example, it is being used backwards.

The mechanism, in his own words. The external does not simply create the internal. It prompts it, and the inside then adjusts. His phrasing in chapter two is that the actor's “inner faculties responded to the external image he had created, and adjusted to it”. Response and adjustment, running both ways. That is a more useful idea than either “inside-out” or “outside-in”.

The biography trap

Here is the most common way character work fails, and it does not look like failure at all. It looks like diligence.

An actor answers every question on a character questionnaire, then writes two pages of history: the childhood, the siblings, the first heartbreak. They feel thoroughly prepared, and then perform the scene exactly as they would have without any of it.

That is not laziness but a category error. Information about a person is not the same thing as a constraint on their behaviour, and only the second kind changes what a camera sees.

The testIf you can delete it and the scene plays the same, it is not character.

What it is insteadTrivia. Interesting, and inert.

This is the same test the given circumstances chapter uses, applied to a different pile of paper. Run every line of your character work through it. Most of it will not survive, and the performance will be better for what is left.

The same person

Stated as biography

Stated as behaviour

Money

She grew up without much.

She checks the price of everything before she picks it up.

Family

He is the middle of three children.

He waits to see which way the room is going before he says anything.

History

She was badly let down once.

She asks people to repeat promises back to her.

Status

He used to be senior to her.

He still explains things she already knows.

Everything in the right-hand column is filmable. Everything in the left-hand column is a fact you happen to know, and a camera cannot photograph a fact you happen to know.

Yes, you can overbuild, and it costs you the thing you are being assessed on. Two failure modes. The document becomes the achievement, so preparation feels like work done rather than work that changes anything. And the construction sets hard: the audition research on this course describes actors who rehearsed a mispronunciation until they could no longer take a correction, and a casting director who can tell when someone has done twenty takes because they have ironed out all of the humanity. A heavily built character is difficult to redirect, and directability is precisely what a casting director is testing.

How long should it take? Proportionate to the part. A lead in a rehearsed play deserves weeks. A three-page self-tape deserves the four questions further down this page. The mismatch between those two is where most actors waste most of their preparation.

The case that there is no such thing as character

This position is held seriously by serious people and it deserves a proper hearing rather than a dismissal.

David Mamet argues in True and False that character work is the playwright's job, that time spent on a character's biography is wasted, and that the actor's task is to show up, say the lines, and pursue the goal. His summary of the whole book is four instructions.

Invent nothing, deny nothing, speak up, stand up, stay out of school.

David Mamet, True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor

And the harder line, the one that gets quoted most and misquoted almost as often.

There is no character. There are only lines upon a page.

Mamet, True and False, p. 9

A misquotation we caught and want to name. That line circulates widely as “there is no character, there's just you”. It is not what Mamet wrote. We traced the popular version to a section heading in a blogger's reading notes, where the blogger's own paraphrase sat under Mamet's shorter phrase and the two fused. This is the fifth time on this course that a “quotation” has turned out to be a summariser's heading. It is the single most reliable way that acting misinformation spreads.

Two things support Mamet's position, and we should say so plainly rather than hurrying past it.

The first is the casting reality. A great deal of screen casting is looking for a person rather than a construction, which is why the working slang for being cut on appearance alone exists at all. The second is that nothing in this entire research project has demonstrated that elaborate character construction actually produces better performances.

And the counter, which is also real. The book above exists, it is about physical transformation, and half a meal passed before Tortsov recognised his own acquaintance. Chekhov built a system on the imaginary body. Laban gives four parameters that measurably change a scene. “There is no character” is a healthy corrective to homework, and a poor description of what Alec Guinness was doing.

A source we removed. Our brief supported this section with a quotation from Uta Hagen about thoughts and feelings being suspended in a vacuum. We could not find those words in anything Hagen wrote — the only place the phrase appears anywhere is an uncited sentence in a Wikipedia article. We have cut it. Worth knowing separately: Hagen distanced herself from Respect for Acting later in life and pointed students to A Challenge for the Actor instead, so quotations from the earlier book are shakier ground than they look.

Three layers, and backstory is not one of them

This is our framework rather than anyone's published model, and we are labelling it as such. It reconciles the argument above into something you can actually work with.

Circumstances

What is true and pressing right now. Comes from the text, plus what you supply where the text is silent.

The testDoes it change what you do in this scene?

Behaviour

What this person does that another person in the same situation would not. Comes from observation and from choice.

The testIs it visible? Could a camera photograph it?

Form

Body, voice, rhythm, dress. This is the subject of the half of the book you were not taught.

The testDoes it read at the scale you are actually playing?

—

Backstory

Not a layer. It is raw material for the first two, and it has no independent existence in a performance. If a piece of history is not producing a circumstance or a behaviour, it is not doing anything.

Note that this settles the inside-or-outside argument by refusing it. Layer one is inside and layer three is outside, and both of them are legitimate entrances to the same building.

The physical toolkit

This is layer three, and it is the half most actors never learned. Each of these is a dial you can turn deliberately, which is different from doing an impression.

Tempo-rhythmStanislavski gives this two chapters. How fast does this person do things, and how fast do they think? It is the most changeable parameter available and the least used.

Laban's four dialsDirect or indirect, quick or sustained, heavy or light, bound or free. “Play him nervous” is unplayable. Four settings you can adjust produces nervousness as an output.

The imaginary bodyChekhov's second body, imbued with the character's qualities, and the psychological gesture that embodies their driving force. This is where the idea of a character “centre” belongs.

GestusBrecht's term for behaviour that reveals social position. Unusually useful on screen, because social position is often exactly what a casting director is reading.

VoiceFour of the sixteen chapters are voice and speech. Half a meal passed and he did not recognise the man.

DressA whole chapter, and the mechanism is that the external prompts and the inner adjusts. What you wear changes how you carry yourself before it changes how you look.

An actor experimenting with a different posture in an empty rehearsal room

Why every character comes out like you. Almost certainly because you are working entirely in layer one and never touching layer three. Change one physical parameter on purpose — the tempo, the weight, where you carry yourself — and watch what happens to the scene. It costs five minutes and it is the fastest experiment on this page.

On stereotyping, and it matters. The safeguard is the same one from the beginners chapter. If you imitate, you are copying an output, and the output you are most likely copying is another actor's version rather than a real person. If you work from circumstances and parameters, you are building behaviour. Work from primary observation of actual people, because caricature propagates when actors copy actors.

What the screen takes away

Almost every book on character was written for the stage, and the camera removes most of what those books are about. Very few pages say so.

A chest-up frame contains no walk. It also contains no posture below the shoulders and no costume beyond a collar. The techniques that read at twenty metres are precisely the ones a close-up magnifies into caricature. So layer three, the subject of Stanislavski's second half, is largely unavailable to you on screen.

That is not a counsel of despair, though. It means the weight moves to layers one and two, plus a very small number of physical things that do survive a tight frame.

What still reads in a close-up

Tempo of thought — how quickly this person arrives at things. Completely visible.
The eyes — where they go while a decision is being made.
Breath — in frame, audible, and characterful.
Stillness, or the lack of it.
Status — relational, observable, and it survives a tight frame better than almost anything.

Shooting out of order. The tool is on the camera-versus-stage chapter: Robert Donat's 1938 emotion chart, which maps a character's emotional temperature scene by scene so you can arrive at any fragment on the right point of the curve. It was designed for exactly this problem and it is ninety years old.

Building a character from three pages

This is the situation most readers of this page are actually in, and it is served by almost nothing written on the subject.

You have three pages, a one-line breakdown, and about forty-eight hours, so a character questionnaire is useless here and so is anything that takes a week. Here is what fits instead.

Who is this person to me?

Not “my boss”. The person who passed me over. Relationships are specific or they are decorative.

What do I want from them, here?

In this scene, from this person, in the next ninety seconds. Not what the character wants in life.

What is in the way?

If nothing is in the way there is no scene, so find it, even if you have to supply it.

What just happened?

The moment before. This is the single most reliable source of a first line that does not sound like a first line.

Then one physical choice

A tempo, a weight, a place they hold themselves. One. One parameter is enough to make you not-you. Three is a costume drama.

If the writing is thin. Thin writing is an invitation rather than an obstacle. The stated layer is small, so the supplied layer is large, and a specific point of view is what casting consistently says distinguishes the tapes they remember. You are not being asked to fix the scene. You are being asked to have decided something about it.

Do casting directors want to see “a character”? Mostly they want to see a person doing something specific to someone, at a scale that fits the frame. The casting corpus on this site is consistent about what they are watching: whether you are listening, and whether you are alive when you are not speaking. Neither of those is a construction. Both are behaviour.

The four-line part

A co-star role with four lines has no room for interpretation, which sounds like a limitation and is actually a clarification.

The whole job at that scale is one question: who is this person when nobody is watching them? The nurse at the end of a long shift. The officer who has been on that door since six. Answer that one question and everything else follows in about ninety seconds.

One circumstance, one want, one physical parameter. That is the complete method at this size, and it is the difference between a real person and a plot function, which is exactly what a casting director is deciding when they watch a co-star tape.

Where the sources disagree

Every chapter on this course ends here. On this topic the disagreements are unusually old and unusually live.

Did Stanislavski teach inside-out?

Commonly saidHe is the founder of inside-out acting.

What we foundThat reputation comes from the Method, built on the first half of a two-part book. His own late work runs from physical action toward feeling, and scholars argue the system was always psychophysical.

Is Building a Character a separate book?

Commonly saidIt is the second volume of a trilogy.

What we foundHe wrote it as the second half of one volume. Benedetti reunited the two halves in 2008 as An Actor's Work.

Does the outside affect the inside?

Commonly saidAssumed to run one way, inside to out.

What we foundStanislavski describes the inner faculties responding to an external image and adjusting to it. Both directions, reciprocally.

Is there such a thing as a character?

Commonly saidThe premise of the whole enterprise.

What we foundMamet: there is no character, there are only lines upon a page. Taken seriously, it is a real position with real support.

Is backstory useful?

Commonly saidThe standard homework, and the standard questionnaire.

What we foundOnly where it produces a circumstance or a behaviour. Delete it and see whether the scene changes.

Can you prepare too much?

Commonly saidMore preparation is always better.

What we foundAn over-built character is hard to redirect, and directability is what is being assessed in the room.

Does physical transformation work on screen?

Commonly saidIt is what “character acting” means.

What we foundA chest-up frame contains no walk. The layer Stanislavski's second half is about is largely unavailable to you.

The book that taught America how to act was half a book. The other half — the half about the body — did not reach English for another thirteen years.