I’m known by students and by actors I’ve directed onstage to display contempt for the notion of “the character”. I often find myself saying: “How would you behave if this were really happening? Is this you? Or is it someone you’re imagining yourself to be?” If you’re trying to be someone else, that could account for most of why the behavior looks false. False can mean fake, but it can also mean too thin, incomplete, lacking the behavioral complexities of listening, processing, and responding that are present in life.

In life we wear masks. Every day. Some, we know we wear, and others have become so much a part of who we are that we’re no longer willing or even able to remove them. And we don’t always swap them out either, trading A for B. Often we go ahead and keep wearing A, and then we put B on top of that. And then C on top of the other two. Are these masks part of our character, part of who we are? They sure are. What we pretend, or hide, or avoid in our lives, becomes part of what choices we make in each moment, and then, what behavior results from these choices.

What separates an actor from a regular Joe or Sue is that the actor is equally interested in nobility and depravity. Whatever judgment he or she may have of any human experience must be secondary to a hunger to understand it. And the depth of that understanding, when and if it is reached, determines the specificity of the behavior, and the power of the portrayal.

The reason I state so unequivocally that there is no character is that actors tend to think of a character as putting something on, putting on a series of masks. No! Great actors do exactly the opposite. They ask themselves: What masks do I have to remove to be this other person? When I know an actor thinks and works that way, I have no problem with the idea of a character at all.

If you are playing Richard III, for example, you have to remove the “I don’t wish my enemies ill” mask that we all wear. The “I could be king (or the hottest actor, producer, director, writer, gofer, etc. in Hollywood) if only he or she were dead” mask. If you don’t have those kinds of fantasies, those wildly inappropriate daydreams, you’re not an actor.

Or perhaps you do have them, but you’ve become used to suppressing them. Used to living in the real world instead of the world of your imagination. Cut it out. Those wild thoughts and feelings are good for you. (Even if you’re an accountant really, though much less useful in that profession.)

Watch Helen Mirren in The Queen. She’s playing a character we all know. The imperious monarch of England, Elizabeth II, with a very entitled view of the world, a giant stick up her royal ass, and a truly bad wardrobe. Then watch Ms. Mirren in an interview with Charley Rose, being “herself”. You can see much more of who the actress, the person Helen Mirren really is by watching The Queen.

Is there such a thing as “the character”? Of course there is. Of course it’s not you. Just because you’re an actor doesn’t mean you have to be nuts.

Elizabeth II is the queen of fucking England. You’re not. And all the acting you can do won’t make it so. But if you let the audience see, as Ms. Mirren did, her own passion for order, her own terror of what chaos can ensue from lack of propriety, her own regret at having been less kind to someone than she might have wished to be after the person’s sudden death, and her own sensible desire for sensible shoes, and, provided  you’re dressed and made up just like Liz, then the audience may just believe you are Liz.

What differentiates the actor from the character, (besides the clothes, the pitch of the voice, the spine, or, all the physical things that are much more, ultimately, about mimicry than good acting) and what can eventually bring the two together, is what they care about. Elizabeth II doesn’t give a crap about the film director Taylor Hackford. He’s Ms. Mirren’s husband. So if you are going to play Helen Mirren, what are your concerns? Mr. Hackford’s well being, what great script may next be coming your way, a wardrobe fitting you have today for a film you’re shooting next month, keeping in shape, world peace, etc. If Liz wants to play Helen, then she has to care about those things too, and spiff up her wardrobe.