Honesty, Always, No Matter What

An Actor’s Thoughts on Embodying a Character

Bri Castellini (left) and Colin Hinckley in Brains, season 2 episode 4

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When I first discovered acting, it was like someone flicked a light switch on in my head. I spent the first couple years of performing in constant awe, amazed that I was actually allowed to do this. I started as a stage actor, auditioning for basically anything that would allow me to make a fool of myself in front of large groups of people. In the early days, it was easy and fun. Basically, I was just mirroring what I saw in life, then shooting it full of human growth hormones. “Life, but bigger,” was what it boiled down to. Years of training and experience then honed this into about a dozen more precise ideas. Guiding principles like, “specificity is humanity,” and the big one, “honesty, always, no matter what.” These ideas help me navigate a process that is often difficult and tedious. Trying to pry a living, breathing human off the page of a script is not easy and requires constant nurturing and care. There are about a billion metaphors utilized by actors, but the most effective one for me has always been “the actor as a vessel” metaphor. The idea that you are no more than a conduit for your character. Open yourself up, then let the character walk in and make himself comfortable. If you’ve done the work, there will be plenty of room for him to be who he needs to be.

Over the years, I’ve had my share of acting quandaries. Most of those quandaries had to do with finding honesty in characters that I didn’t immediately understand, and those quandaries were often solved by utilizing those dozen or so ideas that I mentioned. But when I was invited to act in the web series Brains, I faced two new, unique challenges I hadn’t faced before.

The first was that I was not only joining the cast for season two, but I was taking over a major character from season one. This, to be honest, scared the dickens out of me. What if fans hated me? What if I didn’t do justice to the character? What if my style was completely incompatible with the rest of the cast and crew? Obviously, I had played characters that other actors had played before, but this was different. I was being inserted into a well-oiled machine, tasked with taking over a small portion of that machine’s operation. With other roles, we were starting fresh, building something together. Here, I was being dropped onto a locomotive already barreling down the tracks.

The second challenge was that the format was completely different from anything else I’d ever done. The idea of sustaining an honest and compelling character for a whole season, a character that was not only consistent with season one, but also consistent across the season, was a task I’d never faced before. In film and stage acting, you’re able to create your arc and present it, more or less. But with a web series, I had to cultivate and maintain a character across the season, as well as on each individual episode. Consistency was paramount. What if my character, Carl, was wildly different in episode ten than he was in episode one? How would I protect the integrity of the character and not lose him over the course of filming?

As it turned out, the answer to both questions was incredibly simple: honesty. When I found myself scared that I was doing Carl an injustice or playing a false note, I would take a breath and just remember: “honesty, always, no matter what.” Don’t try to be cute. Don’t try to be clever. Don’t try to be compelling. Just hear my scene partner, let it affect me, then react honestly. All those other things, (being clever, ostentatious, whatever) are lies. They serve my ego, not the character. Once I was able to see these little actor tricks for what they were, once I saw them as lies, all those other problems melted away. I could have spent hours meticulously observing Connor (my predecessor) and his performance, trying to mimic every gesture and nuance, matching his cadence, altering my appearance. But that would have been a lie. And a lie is a wall behind which no one can see you. Whether it’s playing a character you don’t like, or maintaining a character over a whole season, it always comes down to the simple, clear maxim: “honesty, always, no matter what.”