The Master Guide / 09 Performance · Acting
The master acting profile
A character who recurs gets one description of how they behave, kept with their anchors.
A character who recurs gets one description of how they behave, kept with their anchors.
150–220 words of observable behaviour: how they stand and move, what their hands do, how they look at people, what they do under pressure.
The lived-in body line from the treatment: hands, posture, skin and habits as visible fact, never a group stereotype.
Kept with the anchors (the character's sheet and identity close-up).
Rewrite it for each scene; never paste it in whole. Each PERFORMANCE block takes only what that shot's task needs. A comic character's profile also names the attitude and the persistence beat.
Written for this guide (an invented character):
MASTER ACTING PROFILE: SALMA, 38, owner of a small bakery in an Alexandria side street.
Salma moves like someone who has been on her feet since four in the morning: quick in the hands, slow in the hips. She stands with her weight on the left leg and the right heel lifted, ready to step. Two old oven burns sit pale on her right forearm, and flour stays in the creases of her knuckles however often she washes. Before she touches anything that isn't dough she wipes both palms down the front of her apron, a habit she no longer notices. She listens with her head tilted a little to the right and her eyes on the speaker's eyes, and she starts to answer just before they finish. When she is pleased she presses her lips together instead of smiling. When she is worried she touches each tray on the rack in turn, one finger, counting, and squares the loaves on the shelf. She looks straight at people, but her eyes drop to the counter whenever money comes up. She never sits during working hours; at most she leans one hip against the counter's edge. Her laugh is short, through the nose, and she turns her face away as it comes.
Why: casting real people is the route to authentic performance that sources cite most often. Directors and casting directors who work with non-actors (Henry-Alex Rubin, Zach Heinzerling, Kharmel Cochrane) ask for a person's own lived behaviour, not a performance. The profile writes that behaviour down so it survives every generation.