By Kaia Ryden on August 5th 2024
Actors are physically and mentally drained from their jobs. Many actors must work extremely long hours and have very packed schedules to stay relevant, or become relevant. In the busy life of an actor, there is so much to do and so many people to be. How can one person bear the lives of so many without any consequences?
It’s been said that acting can be “a great escapism”. While throwing yourself into another person’s life can make you forget about your own, once that role is finished your real life will always come back to you. Someday, when the lights turn off and the curtains close, you will find that none of your problems have gone away.
If a person is acting like everybody but themselves, how long will it take for them to forget who they really are? While playing a role, actors experience decreased activity in the region of the brain that helps form a sense of self. Their brains are desperately trying to catch up with the changes that the actors are forcing on themselves, and in the process, they end up losing the most important characteristics: their own.
Some actors immerse themselves more than others. These people we call method actors. Method actors are at a higher risk of losing themselves because they thoroughly climatize themselves into their character’s life. Antioch University posted a study that elucidates the case of Daniel Day Lewis. For his role in My Left Foot, he taught himself to put a record on a turntable with his toes, and for his role as Abraham Lincoln, he even lived and acted like Lincoln for an entire year.
When you put yourself so deep into someone else’s life, will you ever be able to fully return to your own? The line between a person’s real life and acting life, the reality and their role, can easily be blurred. Each actor creates a new life for themselves every time they pick up a new role. A new name, a new personality, and a new set of ideals. This can create confusion in the actor’s mind and cause their sense of self to be lost.
An actor has a mental strain on them in everything that they do. That line will, at some point, be crossed over, trampled, blurred, and finally erased when an actor gets lost in their role. As a society, with our growing knowledge of mental health and how to improve it, we need to bring the issues that actors endure to light and give them more opportunities to help themselves. More help groups or therapy specifically for actors would be a great step in the right direction.
Actors are humans too, and they deserve a little TLC. It’s a hard world out there; we should make it a little easier for all of us.
