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.
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.