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Expansion. Discovery. For me, exploration is the essence of acting, and I’m always on the lookout for opportunities I haven’t had, roles I haven’t played in situations I haven’t experienced. Of course, as is the case with any actor, my personality and instincts are more suited to a particular type of character. In my case, at least in the younger pool of academic theatre, that happens to be somber father figures in their 50s and 60s (I’ve been told I have ‘gravitas’). But, as I’m hoping to find work as a young actor, playing men more than twice my age over and over hasn’t been the most relevant experience. I’ve got the “stand-still-with-hands-in-suit-pockets-and-look-severe” pose down, but for a while I’ve yearned to branch out, play different characters. I recently got that chance, when I played Caliban in The Tempest. This is his story. Being the first non-human character I’d played, Caliban presented one challenge after another. The first weekend I had the script I did a lot of text work, making some strong choices before we started blocking. What are his Inner and Outer traits? What does he say about others, and what do others say about him? What are the intricacies of his relationship with his father-turned-captor? As the son of the devil and a witch, he needed to be relatable but bizarre, both human and supernatural.
In conjunction with the text work, I started looking for Caliban’s spirit animal, the creature off of which I’d model his physicality. Specificity in action is vital to all acting, but nonhuman characters require a special attention to detail. If I was gonna spend two hours traversing a raked stage on all fours, I needed to commit every physical quirk to muscle memory. I ended up modeling Caliban primarily after a monitor lizard. I chose a komodo dragon for my character study in London and I liked its horizontal torso and intense focus, though I wanted something smaller and less ponderous. Ergo, monitor lizard. With that choice, I began playing the most physically demanding role I’ve ever taken on. There’s a fundamental problem with trying to replicate the movement of a lizard: I am not a lizard. My limbs aren’t built like a lizard’s, my joints don’t rotate like a lizard’s, my weight isn’t distributed like a lizard’s. Trying to perfectly mimic such movement was impossible for a single scene, let alone an entire play. So, while keeping the core of a monitor lizard, I layered in elements of other animals—dropping in hints of a tiger’s linear limb movement with the monitor’s foot-swinging walk; choosing to perch myself over all fours like a rat, rather than splaying myself out in a two-hour plank which would only end in tears—to form a composite physicality that was neither purely mammalian nor solely reptilian. But just because I made it easier on myself doesn’t mean it was easy. I’m a fairly fit young man—I eat well, try to balance strength and stamina at the gym, and lead a generally active lifestyle—but Caliban was unlike anything I’d done before. I had the physical ability to play him, but every evening was an exercise in endurance. Even when squatting in my modified crouch, my shoulders took a beating on that rake. Keeping my torso more horizontal than vertical took its toll on my legs. Suffice to say that I slept like a baby after rehearsal. Like a rage-filled, vengeful lizard-baby. But that’s the kind of challenge I like, and here I go back to what draws me to acting—exploration, discovery, enactment. I love crafting a character and slipping into it like a suit, finding where it’s too tight or too lose, and amending until it fits perfectly. For me, a lot of that craft is in physical work. A distinct physicality acts as a bridge into the emotional and intellectual life of the character, helping me lose myself and become the character. Even if that character is a lizard-tiger-rat-man, the stranded son of Satan with the slightest spark of virtue.
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