How to Play a Character Who Is Lying

The script says your character is lying. Maybe it’s a small lie, a denial over breakfast. Maybe the whole second act hangs on it. Either way, the moment you know it’s a lie, something strange starts happening in rehearsal. Your eyes slide away from your partner. You touch your neck. A tiny, guilty laugh sneaks in before the line.

You’re trying to help the audience. You want them to know it’s a lie, so you show them. And that’s exactly why it looks fake.

The short version: don’t play “lying”. Play what the lie is for. Your character lies to get something from the other person, so commit to getting it, and say the false words as if they were true. Decide who knows the truth, the other character or only the audience, because that changes everything. Then rehearse the moments where the lie gets tested, because that’s where real liars come unstuck.

Why “playing the lie” looks fake

Ask people how to spot a liar and most of them give the same answer. The Global Deception Research Team asked people in 75 countries and found one belief dominated across cultures: that liars avoid eye contact. In their first study, almost two-thirds of people named gaze aversion as a way to tell. Yet the research they cite found that gaze aversion has little to do with whether someone is lying.

So when you look away on the lie, you aren’t playing a liar. You’re playing the stereotype of one, the thing every audience member already expects. It reads as acting, because it is a sign rather than a behavior. Our guide to indicating covers why showing the audience a feeling tends to flatten it.

Real liars, mostly, look like people telling the truth. That’s the whole point of lying. A character who signals every lie would never fool anyone, and the scene stops making sense: why does the other person believe them?

What real liars actually do

If the eyes don’t give liars away, what does? A big review of the research, DePaulo and colleagues’ 2003 analysis of 158 possible cues to deception, found that liars are less forthcoming and “tell less compelling tales”. Their stories also have fewer of the small imperfections that true stories carry, the “wait, no, it was Tuesday” corrections. They seem more tense. But many behaviors showed no link, or only a weak one, to lying.

Two more findings are gold for actors. The same review found the cues grew stronger when the liar was more motivated to succeed, especially when their sense of who they are was on the line, and when the lie covered up something they’d done wrong. The higher the stakes, the more the strain tends to leak.

And Bond and DePaulo’s 2006 review, pooling the judgments of more than 24,000 people, found that people sort lies from truths correctly about 54% of the time, barely better than a coin toss. They also found that people appear deceptive when they are motivated to be believed.

That last point is the key to the whole craft. What often looks like lying isn’t the false words. It’s the effort to be believed. So the leak, when it comes, should come from how much your character needs this to work, not from a gesture you add to flag the lie.

Play the action, not the lie

Nobody lies for its own sake. A lie is a tactic, a way of getting something from the other person: to be left alone, to keep their love, to avoid a punishment, to win. Find that and you have something to play. Our guide to finding your objective walks through how to name it.

Write the lie as an action verb in your script: to reassure, to dismiss, to charm, to deflect. Then play the verb fully. If your character is lying to reassure, really try to make the other person feel better. If you’re lying to dismiss a question, really try to make the question feel silly. The tactics guide has a longer list of verbs that work.

Say the false words as if they’re true, because to your character in that moment, they need to be. A good liar believes the lie while saying it. Your job is to commit to it as completely as your character does, and let the truth live underneath, in what you want.

Who knows the truth? Decide it first

Every lie on stage has two audiences: the character being lied to, and the people in the seats. What each one knows changes how you play it. Before you rehearse, answer three questions in the margin.

• Does the audience already know the truth? If they saw the crime in the last scene, the lie is dramatic irony, and they’ll enjoy watching you get away with it. You don’t need to show them anything.
• Does the other character know, or suspect? If they’re testing you, the scene is a duel, and every question is a trap.
• Does the audience find out later? If the lie is a twist, the first time has to look completely honest, so that a second viewing reveals what was there all along.

This last case is the one actors overplay most. If the story needs the audience to be fooled, any tell spoils the surprise. Play it straight, then trust the writing and the director to plant the clues. Our guide to playing subtext covers how a hidden truth can live under a line without being shown.

A lie that grows: Jack and the cigarette case

Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest has one of the best lying scenes in English, and it shows a pattern you’ll meet often: the lie that has to keep growing. Jack has just told Algernon he doesn’t know anyone named Cecily. Then Algernon produces Jack’s lost cigarette case, inscribed by “little Cecily”. From Act 1 (you can read the full play in our library):

ALGERNON: Yes; but this isn’t your cigarette case. This cigarette case is a present from someone of the name of Cecily, and you said you didn’t know anyone of that name.

JACK: Well, if you want to know, Cecily happens to be my aunt.

ALGERNON: Your aunt!

JACK: Yes. Charming old lady she is, too. Lives at Tunbridge Wells. Just give it back to me, Algy.

ALGERNON: But why does she call herself little Cecily if she is your aunt and lives at Tunbridge Wells? “From little Cecily with her fondest love.”

JACK: My dear fellow, what on earth is there in that? Some aunts are tall, some aunts are not tall. That is a matter that surely an aunt may be allowed to decide for herself. [...]

Source: Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 1 (1895, public domain).

Look at how the lie is built. “Cecily happens to be my aunt” is invented on the spot. Then Jack adds details nobody asked for: charming, old, Tunbridge Wells. He pads it with facts nobody asked for, which is where the comedy starts. Then Algernon asks the question Jack didn’t see coming, and Jack has to invent again, faster and worse.

There’s research behind why that question sinks him. In a 2009 study by Aldert Vrij and colleagues, pairs of liars and pairs of truth tellers were questioned separately about a lunch they said they’d shared. On the unexpected questions, such as drawing the restaurant, the liars’ answers matched each other far less than the truth tellers’ did, and up to 80% of the people were classified correctly. Jack prepared nothing for this question, so every follow-up catches him out.

So don’t play Jack as a bad liar. Play him as a man solving a problem, line by line, with growing confidence in each fresh lie. Each new invention is a new tactic. “Some aunts are tall” should land as a triumph: he really thinks he’s won. The comedy is in how hard he commits, not in a wink to the house.

Rehearse the lie under pressure

Lies get tested by questions, so the rehearsal that matters is the one where the questions come at you fast. Here’s a routine that works on any lying scene.

1. Read the scene once with your partner and mark every lie, then write the truth beside it in pencil. You need to know exactly what you’re hiding.
2. Next to each lie, write the action verb: to reassure, to deflect, to charm.
3. Run the scene saying the truth instead of the lie, out loud. It feels odd, but it shows you what’s at stake if it slips out.
4. Run it again with the real lines, playing only the verbs.
5. Ask your partner to pick up their cues faster each run, so your character has less time to think before each answer.
6. Finally, have someone ask you a question that isn’t in the script, in character, and answer it as your character would. Now you know how your liar improvises.

Step five is easier with a partner who never gets tired of asking the same questions. In Offbook, realistic voices read every other part and wait for your line, so you can run Algernon’s interrogation as many times as you like. You can speed up the other voices’ playback, and Auto-advance moves the scene on after a few seconds of silence, so a long hesitation costs you the line.

Learn the lie word for word. An improvised lie on stage still has to be exactly the playwright’s improvised lie, and Wilde’s rhythms only work when every word is in place. If you tend to drift, our guide to stopping paraphrasing can help. Once the words are solid, you can afford to make Jack’s invention look effortless.

Small lies, big lies, and the lie that cracks

Not every lie should play the same. Match the size of the strain to the stakes, just as the research suggests.

Small, practiced lies

In Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Nora’s husband asks if she’s been eating sweets, and she says, “No, certainly not.” She has: later in the same act, she offers a guest a macaroon. It’s an easy lie, the kind she seems used to telling. Play it lightly. The danger comes later in the play, when the stakes rise and the same ease starts to cost her.

High-stakes lies

When the lie protects something huge, a crime, a marriage, a reputation, some strain will show. Let it come from the effort to hold the lie, not from a gesture: a slightly too-smooth answer, a story with no rough edges, a beat too long before a simple reply. Keep it small. The audience will feel it more than they’ll see it.

When the lie cracks

The moment a character is caught is often the most alive moment in the scene. Don’t anticipate it. Play the lie as if it will work until the instant it doesn’t, and let the discovery land on you fresh each night. Our guide to playing a villain has more on characters whose whole life is a cover story.

Questions actors ask

How do I let the audience know my character is lying without overacting?

Usually you don’t have to. The writing, the earlier scenes, and the director’s staging tell them. Unless the lie is a twist and the audience truly needs a hint, the smallest version is best: a beat of relief after the other person turns away, when your character thinks no one is watching.

Should I look away when my character lies?

Only if your character would. Looking away is the most common belief about liars, which is why it reads as a stage cliché. Some liars hold eye contact on purpose. Decide what your particular character does to be believed, and do that.

How do I play a character who lies to themselves?

Play the belief completely. A character in denial isn’t hiding the truth from others; they’re hiding it from themselves. The truth shows up in what they avoid: a topic they change, a name they won’t say, a question they answer too quickly.

What’s the difference between a lie and subtext?

A lie says something false. Subtext is the meaning under a true or neutral line. They overlap, because every lie has subtext, but you can play subtext without a single lie. In both cases, the work is the same: know what’s really going on and play the want, not the hidden meaning.