If you play an evil character, it’s gotta stick a little.
And if you’re a character-actor who always gets the evil role. If you play 100 evil guys. Then 100X moreso.
You get into the evil role. See the world through evil eyes and evil motivations.
And over time, It’s gotta bend your personality towards real evilness. Right?
I suppose you could google evil-character-actors. 20 years later, how many got arrested for something heinous.
What do you think?
EDIT
Put more generally : Can habits gained in one context bleed over into another context?
Yes.
Do they?
Possibly. With increasing probability as the habit becomes stronger. And there’s self-awareness to consider. And how much the habit clashes with the new context.
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HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHA
Some of the best regarded actors in terms of sincerity and generosity are actors who notoriously play villains, like all of the stories about how Alan Rickman was on the set of Harry Potter, he played Snape in the movies and his breakout role was as Hans Gruber in Die Hard, but to the Harry Potter kids he was their favorite mentor and they have quite a few stories about him that they’ve shared with the public since Alan’s death in 2016.
Playing a villain is hard when you’re not that sort of person, that’s why actors treat playing a villain as a challenge, and why the villain role is treated with prestige. However, that’s acting, acting is the art of transforming yourself into somebody else, and some people simply do it far better than others, and some people simply aren’t acting that’s just who they are, only history will spot the difference.
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I can’t help but notice how rarely actors become crime-fighting billionaires.
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I would say no. The point of acting is to slip into a role and sell a part - ideally, believably. That’s what makes a great actor.
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I guess I’m struggling to fully understand the logic of “playing pretend” making you the thing you’re pretending to be. You would need to already be a psychopath, lack empathy, etc, etc. That’s not something you learn.
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I’ve only heard of this happening to a degree with the super deep method actors. And even then they didn’t become evil, so much as fall into a depression and fuck up their mental health which possibly lead to some of them dying (example: Heather Ledger after taking on his role as The Joker).
I’m not a big star or anything, but I do local theatre sometimes and I also love to roleplay in D&D and such, and I think playing the villain is the most fun because it can be cathartic to a degree. It’s fun because it’s out of character, not because I want to do the things my evil characters do. It’s just fun to pretend and explore ideas that you can’t IRL without hurting people.
Of course not.
Personally I’d say no.
For what it’s worth I been DMing campaigns for 20+ years playing evil characters and monsters. You have to get pretty elaborate and good at planning “evil” things. I put evil in quotes because it’s acting, you aren’t evil you are playing a role.
You’re phrasing this as a question, but it’s clearly not for you.
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We did address your question. We said no. You started twisting the question to try and get the answer you wanted. We still said no. Actors have a strong enough sense of reality and fiction that they do not take on the traits of their characters, good or bad. Beyond that, you have to be humble as fuck to regularly play a character everyone’s meant to hate, and it’s not uncommon for hero actors to develop a hell of an ego. This is your answer.
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One person said yes (and literally nothing else). Nobody said maybe. Everyone else said no. You are the only person who thinks it bears further discussion. I checked.
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Asked yours last night. Hard to understand with her mouth full, but ultimately confirmed that it was no. We laughed pretty hard because otherwise she kept repeating the opposite all night.
What twisting? I only pointed out that you posed a question in bad faith. You gave an answer to your own dumb “question” and then proceeded to argue with and insult anyone who disagrees with your opinion. Why even ask in the first place? Clumsiness in phrasing is obviously not your greatest fault.
Most evil characters are cartoonishly evil. I’m yet to see the headlines “grocery store grazer gets put in police car while bellowing an evil laugh”.
Yes
No
