How to Play a Character You Don’t Like (Without Judging Them)

You read the play on the train home and by page twenty you’ve decided your character is awful. Not a villain, exactly. Just a snob, or a bully, or a husband who talks to his wife like a pet. You’d cross the street to avoid him, and in three weeks you have to be him, eight shows a week.

Most of the advice you’ll hear is a single line: don’t judge your character. True, but it doesn’t tell you what to do on Monday when you sit down with the script and still can’t stand the man.

The short version: you don’t have to like them, you have to understand them from the inside. Argue their case the way a lawyer would. Find the want under the behavior. Answer questions as them, out loud, until their logic comes faster than your opinion. Then trust the play, and the other characters, to do the judging for you.

Why your dislike shows from the back row

When an actor disapproves of a character, it leaks. You hear it as a little sneer on the lines you find ugly, a pause that says “can you believe this guy,” a performance pitched at the audience instead of at the other person in the scene. Actors call this commenting: playing your opinion of the character instead of the character.

The trouble is that the character never thinks those thoughts. A snob doesn’t believe he’s a snob. He believes he has standards. A controlling husband believes he’s protecting his family. If you play the label, you’re showing the audience something the person you’re playing can’t see, and the scene stops being about two people.

Andrew Gallant, co-founder of Green Shirt Studio, makes the point with Richard III in “Playing Characters You Don’t Like”: play the role as your idea of a monster and it comes off as a caricature. The same is true of smaller sins. Play “smug” and you get a cartoon. Play what the smug person wants, and you get someone the audience recognizes.

Be their lawyer, not their fan

Two actors put it in different ways. Javier Bardem, in comments collected by AMC, says flatly: “As an actor, you can’t judge.” He passes on a line from an actress from Spain: actors are lawyers for the characters they play, and have to defend them.

Chukwudi Iwuji, who played the sadistic High Evolutionary in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, put it another way in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter: “I cannot defend him, but I can defend playing him.”

They aren’t as far apart as they sound. A lawyer doesn’t have to believe the client is innocent. A lawyer has to know the client’s version better than anyone in the room and argue it with full conviction. That’s the job: not approval, but advocacy. You can think Torvald Helmer is wrong about nearly everything and still make his case so well that part of the audience nods along before they catch themselves.

That’s the moment you’re after. When an audience member recognizes their own father, or themselves, in the character you dislike, the play is working. When they just hiss, you’ve let them off the hook.

Find the want under the behavior

Gallant’s technique is to find the character’s deepest wish and put it in positive terms. He describes playing Artie in John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves, a man who kills his wife, and connecting through Artie’s longing for a family. The act stays terrible. The longing is something any actor can play.

Do the same for any character you dislike. Write their behavior on one side of a page and the want underneath it on the other:

• The snob who corrects everyone’s grammar wants to be taken seriously in a world that once laughed at him.
• The bully at the office wants to never again feel as powerless as he once did.
• The mother who belittles her daughter wants to keep her from making the mistakes she made.
• The husband who treats his wife like a child wants a home that looks safe, orderly, and admired.

Those wants are inventions until the text backs them up, so check each one against the script, the way you would when you build a character’s backstory. The best version is the one the lines support and you can play in every scene. For more on turning a want into something you do to the other person, see our guide to finding your objective in a scene.

Work it through: Torvald in A Doll’s House

Many actors find Torvald Helmer hard to like. He calls his wife his lark and his squirrel, lectures her about money, and in the last act, when Nora tells him she’s leaving, he answers with this:

HELMER. To desert your home, your husband and your children! And you don’t consider what people will say!

NORA. I cannot consider that at all. I only know that it is necessary for me.

HELMER. It’s shocking. This is how you would neglect your most sacred duties.

NORA. What do you consider my most sacred duties?

HELMER. Do I need to tell you that? Are they not your duties to your husband and your children?

NORA. I have other duties just as sacred.

HELMER. That you have not. What duties could those be?

NORA. Duties to myself.

HELMER. Before all else, you are a wife and a mother.

Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House, Act III, translated by R. Farquharson Sharp (Project Gutenberg)

Read it as a modern audience and Torvald sounds like a parody. Read it as Torvald and look at what he reaches for: what people will say. He isn’t only angry. He’s frightened, and the thing he’s frightened of is losing his standing, which he has spent the whole play protecting.

Now look at “Do I need to tell you that?” That isn’t a sneer. It’s genuine bafflement. To Torvald, a wife’s duty to her family is as obvious as gravity. Ibsen even gives you the evidence in Nora’s very next speech: she tells him she knows most people would think he’s right. Torvald isn’t a monster. He’s a man saying what his whole world believes, and discovering, for the first time, that the person he loves doesn’t.

That gives you something to play: not “condescend,” but “make her see sense before she ruins us both.” A man trying to save his marriage with the only arguments he has is a far harder thing to watch than a cartoon of a bad husband. If you want to run the scene, the full play is in our play library.

Answer questions as them, out loud

Judgment lives in the third person: “he’s so controlling.” The fix is to spend rehearsal time in the first person until their logic comes to you faster than your opinion does.

There’s a small, interesting piece of research on what happens when actors do this. In a 2019 study in Royal Society Open Science, Steven Brown, Peter Cockett, and Ye Yuan scanned the brains of 15 acting students trained in method acting as they silently answered hypothetical questions, such as whether they would go to a party they weren’t invited to. They answered as themselves, as a close friend, and in the first person as Romeo or Juliet.

Answering in character went with lower activity overall, especially in frontal brain regions linked to thinking about yourself, compared with answering as yourself. The authors suggest acting may involve a kind of “loss of self.” It’s one small study, and it didn’t test rehearsal, but its question format adapts into a drill you can use tonight: answer “would you” questions as the character, in the first person, and keep your own opinions out of the answers.

Here’s how to run it for a character you dislike:

1. Write ten “Would you” questions the play never answers. For Torvald: Would you lend money to a friend? Would you forgive your wife a lie? Would you ever cry in front of her?
2. Answer each one out loud as the character, starting with “I.” Give a reason every time: “No, because a man who borrows has already lost.”
3. Have a scene partner or friend ask the questions in a random order, so you can’t rehearse the answers.
4. Notice where you hesitate. A pause may mean your opinion of the character got there first. Ask that question again until the answer comes from them.
5. Go back to the script and play one scene straight after the drill, while their logic is still warm.

You can also ask Genie, Offbook’s script-aware assistant, about your character’s motivation or what’s under a particular line, and highlight the exact words you’re stuck on, as the video below shows. Then argue with the answer. If you disagree, you’re thinking like the character’s lawyer.

Let the play do the judging

Here’s the freeing part. The playwright already has an opinion of your character, and has built the play to show it. Ibsen doesn’t need your Torvald to be unpleasant; he has Nora walk out the door. The audience’s judgment comes from what the other characters do to him and what he does to them, not from how you tilt a line.

That means your job is smaller than you think. Play his want as hard as you can, and trust the story to give the audience everything they need. When you hold back to show you’re not like him, you take away the very thing the play needs to land: a man who believes he’s right.

The same is true when the character is lying, scheming, or cruel. For those, see our guides to playing a villain without playing evil and to playing a character who is lying.

Rehearse the lines you hate most

Every actor with a character like this has a line they dread. For Torvald it might be the one above. Find yours, and give it extra rehearsal, because that’s the line where commenting sneaks in.

First, learn it so well you don’t think about the words. A line you’re still reaching for is a line where your own discomfort has time to show. Turn it into first letters and say it from those:

B a e, y a a w a a m.

Our free first-letter memorizer turns any speech into cues like this. Then say the line five different ways, each with a different want under it: to calm her, to warn her, to remind her, to shame her, to plead with her. Pick the one that makes the most sense to the character, not the one that makes him look worst.

Last, run it with someone reading the other part, because the line only works as a reply. This scene is listed, with its setup and run time, on our acting scripts page. To run it alone, Offbook’s realistic voices read the other part and cue the next line when it detects you finished.

Leave them at the stage door

Living inside someone you dislike is tiring, and some actors find it follows them home. Keep a clear line: first person in rehearsal (“I’m protecting us”), third person outside it (“he thinks he’s protecting them”). A small ritual at the end of the night, such as changing clothes or a short walk, helps some actors leave the role in the dressing room.

And remember why you said yes. Characters you don’t like are often the best parts in the play, because they’re the ones the story pushes against. Play the person, let the play pass the sentence, and you might find the audience arguing about him on the way home. That’s a job well done.

Questions actors ask

How do you play a character you hate?

Stop trying to like them and start trying to understand them. Write down what they want under their worst behavior, check it against the text, and play that want in every scene. Answer questions as them in the first person until their logic comes faster than your opinion.

Why do acting teachers say never judge your character?

Because judgment shows. If you disapprove, you tend to comment on the character, playing a sneer or a wink at the audience instead of playing the person. The character believes they’re right, so you have to play someone who believes they’re right.

How do I play someone whose views I disagree with?

Separate the views from the person holding them. Find what those views protect for the character, such as status, safety, or love, and play that. Saying a line isn’t endorsing it. You’re showing the audience how a person like this thinks, so they can judge it with clear eyes.

How do you make an unlikeable character believable?

Give them a reason for everything and a fear underneath. One of Torvald’s first worries in the scene above is what people will say. Let the other characters react to them honestly, and resist softening them or making them worse than the text does.

What if the character’s lines make me uncomfortable to say?

Learn them until they’re automatic, so the discomfort has no gap to show in, and work in the first person only during rehearsal. If a line crosses a personal limit, talk to your director early rather than playing around it.