Getting Out of Character: Stop Taking Your Role Home With You

You're sitting in your car in the parking lot outside the soundstage, and the engine isn't even on.

You wrapped 20 minutes ago, and everyone said good night.

You said your goodnights back.

You think, at least you got your bag.

You found your keys.

You walked out to the lot.

You got in your car and then you just stopped, keys in your hand.

Now you're not even driving.

Because the scene you shot today was the one where your character loses the person they love the most.

Now, you did it 11 times from 11 angles.

And somewhere around take six, it stopped becoming pretend.

You know, it stopped becoming pretend because your body still thinks something happened.

Your chest is tight, your throat aches a little, and there's grief sitting on you that has no address because, well, no one actually died.

You made it up.

And you will not get out of a car.

So you sit there.

Eventually, you drive home because you have to, and you walk in and someone you love asks, how was your day?

And you hear yourself snap at them over nothing, a dish out of place, their tone of voice.

And you see the look on their face, that little flinch, and you think, what's wrong with me?

I love this person.

Why am I like this?

Well, here's what I want you to know before we go anywhere else tonight.

There's nothing wrong with you.

You're not too sensitive.

You're not unstable.

You went somewhere real today in the scene, on purpose, because that's the job.

The problem, though, is that someone taught you how to get in.

Nobody ever taught you how to get out.

That's what tonight is about.

Welcome to Mental Rehearsal, the podcast for struggling actors and actors who struggle in this business.

Talent gets you noticed.

Mindset keeps you in the game.

Meet Dr. Albert Bramante, talent agent, hypnotherapist, and NLP practitioner.

Every episode, we'll expose the metal traps that hold actors actors back and give you practical tools to build confidence, beat self sabotage, and perform at your best.

So stop rehearsing your fears and start mentally rehearsing your success.

I've spent about two decades around actors as an agent, which means I've had a lot of these conversations.

The parking lot conversation, the phone call at 11 at night that starts with, I don't know why I'm calling you about this.

And for a long time, I thought I was hearing a bunch of separate problems.

Turns out I wasn't.

I was hearing the same problem over and over.

It has a name and it has a fix.

And almost nobody in your training ever said either one out loud.

So let's say them out loud.

Okay.

A few years ago, I was working with an actor.

We'll call her Dana.

She was on my roster.

She was a strong actor, trained, serious, the kind of person that does the work and doesn't complain about it.

Now, Dana booked a recurring role on a drama, and the character was carrying a heavy story, a loss.

There was addiction, the whole weight of it, exactly the kind of part that almost every actor prays to get, and then they actually have to go and do it.

And Dana was brilliant.

The dailies were her best work of her career.

There was one scene, a hospital scene, where her character sits with someone at the very end.

And Dana told me later on that she stopped acting somewhere in the middle of it.

It just became a real thing that was happening to her.

That's the good stuff.

That's what she trained years to be able to do.

But about three weeks in, she called me, and she was not brilliant on the phone.

She was flat.

She said she wasn't sleeping.

She said she'd been picking fights with her partner and couldn't stop over nothing.

Over a cup of coffee left in the sink, she said, and I remember this exactly, she said, I feel like I left a part of myself at work, and I can't find it.

So I want you to hold on to Dana in that moment on the phone, telling me she can't find a part of herself.

Because I'm going to come back to what happened to her, and it's not what you get.

Now, here's something I've noticed over years of watching this happen to people.

It doesn't hit everyone in the same way.

Two actors can play equally dark material, and one of them shakes it off by the time they hit the parking lot, and the other one can carry it home for a week or even a longer time than that.

And for a long time, I assumed the one who carried it home was just deeper, more committed, more of an artist.

But that's not what it is.

When I actually started paying attention to who struggled and who didn't, there was a pattern underneath it.

And it had almost nothing to do with talent or commitment.

It had to do with something that got set in people long before they ever walked into an acting class.

And I'll tell you what it is later, because it changes how you think about your own sensitivity.

The last one I want you to think about a scuba diver.

Not a casual 1 in 10ft of water off a beach.

I'm talking about a real one, deep.

A deep sea diver, 100ft down below sea level, working.

Now, when that diver wants to come back up, there's a rule they cannot break.

They cannot just swim straight for the surface, even though every instinct is screaming at them, too.

If they go up too fast, the pressure changes too quickly and a gas that was dissolved in their blood can come out as bubbles.

And it's called the bends.

And it can wreck you.

It can actually kill you.

So what does an experienced diver do on the way up?

They stop.

They hang at certain depths and they wait.

Now, this is what is called decompression stops.

The deeper you went in, the more stops you make.

You come up in stages, on purpose, slowly, so your body can catch up to where you are now.

Keep the diver in your mind, because getting out of character is the same problem.

Exactly.

And most actors have been swimming straight for the surface their entire career and wondering why they keep getting hurt.

So we talked about three threads here.

Dana on the phone.

The pattern under who struggled and the diver who can't come up too fast.

Now, I'm going to tie all three of these together before we're done.

Now, first, the part where you feel understood, and let's name it, the thing that's actually happening in your body when a character won't let go.

When you build a character, and I'm talking really build a character, you're not just memorizing lines, you're deciding how they walk.

You're running their emotional life through your own nervous system.

You're borrowing your real fears, your real grief and your real longing and lending it to someone who doesn't exist.

That's the miracle of what you do.

It's also a risk because your nervous system doesn't have a little sign in it.

It says, this part is pretend.

It just runs a program you give it.

And there's an old idea from Neuro Linguistic Programming, nlp, that I've always found useful here.

When you hold the posture and a facial expression and a way of breathing long enough, your mood tends to follow it.

Therapists use this in the other direction on purpose.

Get someone who is low to stand up straight, lift their eyes, put their shoulders back, and their state often shifts a little towards it.

Now, think about what you do for a living.

You hold someone else's posture and breath and inner weather for hours, for days, and sometimes even for months.

Of course, it moves with you.

You've been running the manifestation of that state deliberately longer than any therapy client ever would.

So the first thing I want you to take off your own back is Is the idea that carrying it home means you did something wrong.

It means the instrument is working.

The bleed is proof you're good, not proof that you're broken.

Now, there's a term I want to give you, because naming a thing takes some of its power away.

In my own work and research, I've used a phrase, post traumatic stress.

It's a cousin of what we understand about post traumatic stress.

And I want to be careful and precise here because they're not the same thing, and I'm not going to pretend that they are.

But the mechanism rhymes.

When a person goes through something emotionally huge, the feeling doesn't always disappear or end when the event ends.

It lingers in the body and it shapes how you sleep, how you snap at people, and how you present yourself.

See, an actor can go through an emotionally huge thing on the set night after night and then be expected to drive home and be a normal partner and parent and friend, as if the switch got flipped.

For a lot of people, there is no switch.

And when they can't find one, they think the problem is them.

Now, I studied a version of this for my own doctorate.

My research was on Acker's, on self sabotage and fear and the patterns that run underneath a performing lifestyle.

And the one thing that kept surfacing was how little support most actors have for the emotional aftermath of the work.

You know, we talk endlessly about how to get into character.

We say almost nothing about how to come out.

And here's what people do instead.

When nobody hands them a way out, they can numb it.

They have a couple of drinks when they get home to take the edge off.

They may spend hours scrolling on their phone until 2 in the morning so they don't have to feel the quiet.

They just try to sleep it off and hope it's gone by the next call time.

And I want to be careful because I understand the pull of all of that.

But numbing is not the same thing as decompressing.

And the difference matters enormously.

See, numbing pushes the feeling down and holds it there.

It doesn't leave a waste.

Whereas decompressing lets the pressure out in a controlled way, so it's gone instead of stored.

The diver doesn't numb the nitrogen in their blood.

They give it a path out.

That distinction is the whole reason the tool I'm going to give you exists.

You've been probably numbing for years and wondering why the roles keep piling up inside.

And it's because the numbing was never the exit.

It just looked like one at 11 at night.

There's a simple way psychologists talk about this that I find useful.

Picture a window.

When you're inside the window, you can feel a lot and still stay yourself.

You've got room when something huge happens or keeps appearing or keeps happening, you can get pushed right up to the edge of the window or even out of it.

And when you're outside, you either get flooded, everything's too much, or you shut down.

Nothing gets in.

A heavy role played right night after night keeps shoving you towards the edge.

Decompressing is how you walk yourself back to the middle of the window where you can actually live your life.

Numbing just parks you at the edge and turns the lights off.

Now, you probably heard the names.

When we lose an actor young to an overdose or their own hand, and people rush to explain it, some of them can be cruel.

They'll call it weakness.

But I want to offer a gentler frame and I think a truer frame here.

Some of these people who went very deep into very dark roles and may have not have had anyone to hand them a way back up.

I am not diagnosing anyone that I never met and I won't.

I'm saying that when someone spends a lot of time in the dark for a living, the coming back up part is not a luxury.

It's not and indulge it.

It's a part of the safety equipment and we have treated for years like it doesn't exist.

Now, if any of that is landing a little too close tonight, I want to this plainly.

Having a therapist is not a weakness.

It's maintenance for an instrument you happen to make your living with.

And it could save your life.

Please treat it that way.

Nothing I teach tonight is going to replace a real human professional when you need one.

Now, here's the assumption I want to take away with you because it's the one that's been quietly hurting you.

Most actors believe that getting out of character is supposed to be automatic, that a real professional just raps for the day and becomes themselves again in the car.

There's no effort required.

And so when it doesn't happen automatically, when the grief follows you into the kitchen, you read it as a personal failure, something the tougher actors don't have to deal with, something you should be able to just will your way out of.

But that belief is exactly backwards.

And the diver is how I want you to see it.

The diver does not come back to the surface automatically.

The diver comes back on purpose in stages using a procedure.

And here's the part that should change how you feel about yourself.

The divers who get hurt are not the ones who make their stops.

The ones who get hurt are the ones who ignore the stops and bolt through the surface because they're tired, they want to be done.

Making the stops isn't weakness, it's the exact opposite.

It's a professional move.

It's what experienced ones do precisely because they respect how deep they went.

So getting out of character was never supposed to be automatic.

It was supposed to be a skill, a procedure you run on purpose, matched to how deep you dove.

You don't fail at something that's meant to be effortless.

You were never handed the procedure.

That's a completely different problem and it has a completely different solution.

Here's a procedure.

I call this the decompression stops.

There are three of them and they work exactly like the diver stops.

Now, how many you make depends on how deep the roll took.

A light day, maybe one stop is plenty.

Now, if you're playing a scene that has a brutal all day grief in your chest day, you're going to make all three in order.

You don't skip stops on the way up.

That's the whole point.

Now, before I give you the stops, one quick way to know how deep you went so you know how many to make.

Ask yourself three plain questions on the drive out.

Number one, is my body still keyed in, still holding onto the scene?

Second question, am I bracing for something?

Like I'm about to walk into a fight?

And thirdly, would the people who know me best say that I seem like myself right now or not quite?

If it's a light no across the board, step one is plenty.

If you're bracing, add step two.

And if you generally can't feel yourself at all out there, the character has really moved in and now you need to do all three.

You don't have to guess.

Your body already knows how deep it went.

You just have to ask it.

So let me walk you through each one.

The first one is what I call the doorway.

This is the everyday stop, the one you do after almost every working day.

And for most days it may be enough on its own.

Now there's three small pieces, and the whole thing takes about a minute.

First, you name it and you release it out loud using actual words and actual voice.

Even if it's just you in the car, something like that was a character and I'm setting them down now.

So you're directly speaking to your own nervous system and it listens to Your voice more than you think you're telling it.

The scene is over.

So you do one physical thing that makes a change.

Divers reduce depth.

You're going to use your body.

Maybe take one specific item off that belonged to the workday.

A jacket, the shoes, maybe a ring that the character wore.

Even simply washing your hands or your face slowly, with intention, or even just literally walking through a doorway.

And as you cross the doorway, you decide that the character stays on the other side.

Now, pick one that works for you and use at the same time every day when this scene is over.

Because repetition is what builds the power.

Now, third, right there, you fire your anchor for your own self.

Press your thumb and your forefinger together firmly, and as you do, say your own real name and one true thing about your actual life.

In this case with Dana, it said, my name is Dana.

I'm going home to my dog and to my partner in my own bed.

Now, it's a touching, the words that go together every single time.

And here's what happens over weeks of doing it.

That little press of the fingers becomes a shortcut straight back to yourself.

You're building a button that you can push.

Now, the objection, because you're already having it.

You might say, well, this feels silly.

It feels performative.

I get it.

But listen, you already have rituals.

You're just not choosing them.

Refreshing your email is a ritual.

Replaying the scene in your head on the drive home is a ritual.

Snapping at the person you love the most in a grim way is a ritual.

All I'm asking you to do is run one on purpose and in your own favor instead of running the accidental ones that will hurt you.

Deliberate is the whole advantage.

Now, if that position doesn't work, the next one you're going to do is the observer position.

You make this stop only when step one was not enough.

You did the doorway, you named it, and the character is still sitting on your chest.

Fine.

We're going to go one level deeper now, the way a diver hangs on to the next step.

Unless you're driving or doing anything that requires heavy machinery, close your eyes and picture the hardest moment of the scene you played today.

But I want you to put it on a screen across the room, not inside of you over there in the future and the farthest.

And on that screen, you're going to watch a character played by you from the outside.

You're in the seat watching it.

The character is on the screen.

The distance is the entire technique.

Now, as you're watching this, adjust the picture like You've got the controls.

Push the screen further away, make it smaller, grain the color at.

Turn the voices down until the voices are so tiny and far off.

And as you shrink and push it back, notice that the feeling shrinks with it because the feeling was riding on the picture the whole time.

When the picture gets small and distant, so does the grief.

The reason this works has a name.

When you're inside a memory, feeling it from the inside, it's what you call the associated state.

And the emotions come at full strength.

When you step out and watch from a distance and the emotional charge drops, you're not pretending it didn't happen.

You're changing your seat from inside the character to outside.

Watching that change of seat is something you can do on purpose.

And some people may object here and say, I'm not a visual person, I don't really see pictures.

That's fine.

More people are like you than aren't.

You don't need a vivid movie.

You just need a sense of direction and getting a rough sense that the thing is over and getting further away, quieter.

That's enough.

Your nervous system responds to instruction, not to the resolution of the image.

Now the next stop is for the long term ones and more significant drama.

This is a deep stop.

Most of the days when you're on set, you most likely are not going to need this, but you're going to need it for the scene, for the role that went all the way down the rabbit hole, maybe the one that's been living within you for weeks.

So what we're going to do now is a little self hypnosis.

Two or three minutes.

And since guiding people in their own mind is a lot of what I do, I want to demystify it first.

Hypnosis, whether it be self hypnosis or traditional hypnosis, is not a loss of control.

It's the oppos opposite.

Some could argue that all hypnosis is self hypnosis.

You're not handing the wheel to anybody.

You're taking the wheel back from the character and steering yourself home on purpose.

Now here's a reset.

Now sit down somewhere, you won't be interrupted.

Close your eyes.

Take three slow, deep breaths in and out.

Let your shoulders and your jaw and your hands get a little heavier, a little softer, and just travel all the way down slowly from five down to one.

And let each number take you a little further into the calm.

5, 4.

The body letting go.

3, 2, 1.

All settled in.

Now picture yourself stepping back into your own life.

See your own front Door.

You're in front of your house right now.

See the people who are actually your family.

Say your name to yourself.

And here's the key piece.

Pick one word that means home to you.

It can be the word home, a person's name, a place, whatever lands for you as you rested at settled.

This is me feeling.

Say the word to yourself and take a slow breath with it.

You're trying the word, the feeling of being yourself.

Do that two or three times.

Take a deep breath in, look in the mirror, and then Lex out slowly.

Now I'm going to count on one to five, and you're going to open your eyes.

Feeling Absolutely wonderful.

1, 2, 3, 4 And 5.

Now you're going to do this sometimes in a parking lot.

It's not going to take you all three minutes.

It can just be simply settled by a thumb and a forefinger and even your word that you came up with, now we know the button works.

One more thing before I close the loops, because someone's already thinking, can I do this before the scene instead of after?

Yes.

In fact, the actors who do this the best build a small entry ritual too.

A way to stepping deliberately into character at the start of the day.

Because it turns out when you consciously choose the door to walk through, it's a lot easier to find it again on the way out.

If you know how you got in, you know where the exit is, but start with the exit.

The exit is the part that's been hurting you.

And so that's a procedure door word for most people.

Observer position when it needs to be the return to self reset for the ones that are deeper.

Now it just matched to your dive.

Now let me tie off the three threads I left.

Now, let's start with the diver, because now you know why I brought them.

The diver was never a story of a fragile person who can't handle the deep.

The diver is the story of a professional who respects the deep enough to come back from it correctly.

The bends do not come from the divers who make their stops.

They come for the ones who don't.

And every actor I've ever watched get hurt by a role.

They weren't too sensitive.

They weren't too deep.

They were just swimming straight for the surface with no stops every single time.

And they'll call it toughness, but it was never toughness.

It was just an injury waiting to happen.

Now let's talk about the pattern I said got set long before acting Glass.

What I noticed over the years is that actors who cleared characters most easily tended to be the ones who were the most secure in themselves to begin with.

And there's a whole body of work in psychology about attachment, about how safe and steady we learn to feel in our earliest bonds.

And it turns out that steadiness shows up here, too.

If you feel solid in who you are, you can go be someone else for a while and find your way back without much trouble.

Now, if your sense of self is shakier, and plenty of wonderful actors have a shakier one precisely because they feel everything, then the character has an easier time moving in and staying.

But here's the part that matters, and it's the reason why.

I told you to wait.

This is not a fixed sentence.

It is not a diagnosis you're stuck with.

A steadier sense of self is something you build every one of the stops, as I just taught.

You're building it.

You're using repetition to build it.

Every time you name the character and come back to your own name, you're practicing being solid in yourself.

So if you're the one who carries rolls home, you are never weak.

You just started with a lighter anchor.

And the anchors can be forged.

You're forging one every time you make a stop.

Let's talk about Dana.

Now, Dana on the phone was telling me that she left part of its work and couldn't find it.

Now, we built her version, exactly what I just gave you tonight, if nothing fancy, just a door ritual on her trailer before she drove home, the scream technique for the nights when the scene wouldn't let go.

And on the worst stretch, we did, the deep reset was the word she chose, which now, I'm not going to give you her word, because that's her own word, and I want you to come up with your own.

It wasn't magic, but she started driving home as herself again.

It took a couple of weeks, but she stopped, bracing for the fight.

Now, here's the thing she said to me at the end of the job, and it's the reason I wanted to tell you her story.

She told me she finally stopped feeling so much.

Now, that was never the goal, and thank God, because feeling is where the work comes from.

What she said was, I think I can go deeper now because I finally trust that I know the way back.

That's a shift.

She didn't become less of an artist.

She'd become a braver one and actually a stronger actor.

She could afford to dive deeper because she stopped being afraid of drowning.

And that's what this actually gives you.

Not less feeling, but More range because you're no longer scared of where the deep end goes.

So here's what I want you to leave with tonight.

You are never too much.

You were never too sensitive.

You were never too deep.

You're never too fragile for this work.

You were just never taught.

The way back up, the getting in, everyone drilled into you.

It was the getting out that nobody mentioned.

And even blaming yourself for failing at this skill that no one has ever put in your hands.

Well, now today it is in your hands.

The doorway, the screen, the reset match to how deep you went.

That's it.

That's the way back.

Now, here's one question I want you to sit with.

And I mean actually sit with.

It's not an answer it fast and then move on.

Is there a character you're still carrying now that you never consciously set down?

Now, maybe not from a set, maybe from a chapter in your own life.

Sit with that one for a minute.

After this ends.

If tonight gave you something, the best thing you can do is send this to one actor, you know, who's been driving home as someone else.

That's how the show reaches the people who need it.

And you want to go further with this kind of work, reach out to me now.

On the next episode, we're going to talk about a different kind of character you play.

It's the one you perform when you compare yourself to everybody else and quietly decide if you're behind.

Well, it's a trap, and there's a way out of it.

I'll see you in that episode.

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