How to Learn Lines When You Play More Than One Role

The cast list goes up and your name is there twice. You’re the Messenger in Act One and a servant in Act Three. It’s a compliment: the director trusts you to carry more than one person. Then you sit down with the script and realize you now have two sets of lines, two sets of cues, and one brain.

Two weeks later, in a run, it happens. Your servant opens his mouth and the Messenger’s line comes out. It’s the right length, the right rhythm, and completely the wrong character.

The short version: doubled roles get mixed up because they’re similar, and similar memories compete. So make them different on purpose. Map where each character lives in the script. Give each one its own cues, its own voice, and its own body. Learn one track at a time until it holds on its own. Only then run them together, and drill the moments where you switch.

Why your characters’ lines get tangled

Memory researchers have a name for this: interference. Proactive interference is when something you learned earlier gets in the way of learning something new. Retroactive interference is the reverse: the new thing makes you lose the old one. Doubling gives you both at once.

The part that matters for actors is what makes interference worse. As Simply Psychology’s summary of the research explains, a classic 1931 study by McGeoch and McDonald found that recall got worse the more similar the material learned in between was to the original list, with synonyms doing the most damage. The more alike two memories are, the harder they compete.

Doubled roles are often near-synonyms. They tend to be the same size of part, with the same function in the story: a courtier, another courtier, a servant, a messenger. They speak to the same leading character, often in the same register. Here is a pair that the actor Ashley Normand doubled in a production of Hamlet at Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Company. First, Rosencrantz greeting Hamlet in Act 2:

GUILDENSTERN. My honoured lord!

ROSENCRANTZ. My most dear lord!

HAMLET. My excellent good friends! How dost thou, Guildenstern? Ah, Rosencrantz. Good lads, how do ye both?

ROSENCRANTZ. As the indifferent children of the earth.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2 (Project Gutenberg)

And three acts later, the same actor walks back on as Osric:

OSRIC. Your lordship is right welcome back to Denmark.

HAMLET. I humbly thank you, sir. Dost know this waterfly?

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 5, Scene 2 (Project Gutenberg)

Both characters greet Hamlet with a polite “lord” or “lordship”. That is exactly the kind of overlap that lets one character’s words leak into the other’s mouth. You can’t change the text. You can change almost everything around it.

Map each track before you learn a word

In a big musical, an ensemble member’s sequence of characters, entrances, and costumes through the show is called a track. When you double, you have a track too, even in a straight play. Before you memorize anything, find out exactly what it is.

Stage managers already do a version of this. The actor/scene breakdown described in Christopher Boltz’s Technical Theatre Practicum is a grid that charts who is onstage on every page. Boltz likes to put characters played by the same actor in adjacent columns, so the chart shows at a glance when one actor is needed, and when they might be frantically changing costume. Ask your stage manager whether one exists. If not, make your own.

• List every scene in order, with page numbers, and mark which of your characters is in it.
• For each entrance, write the character’s name and their first line, and the cue that brings you on.
• For each exit, write the last line you say and how long you have before the next entrance.
• Circle every place where one character exits and the other enters within a scene or two. Those are your danger zones.

This one page does a lot of work. It turns “I’m in most of the play” into a short list of specific entrances. It shows you which pairs of lines sit closest together in time, which is where mix-ups are most likely. And it will matter for wardrobe too: our guide to doing a quick change covers the other half of a fast switch.

Give each character a different cue, voice, and body

Interference feeds on similarity, so the cure is distinctiveness. Every way you make the two characters different gives your memory another handle to tell them apart. Normand and Kinnear both did this deliberately.

In a post on doubling for Pigeon Creek, Ashley Normand says the hard part is “remembering which character goes where” while keeping separate personalities in your head. Normand’s fix was contrast. Normand’s Rosencrantz sits at the low, gruff end of their natural voice and walks with a swagger. Normand’s Osric is pitched higher, closer to their natural speaking voice, smoothed out, and dresses immaculately, at least in Osric’s own opinion.

Rory Kinnear did the same thing on screen. Talking to The A.V. Club about playing twin brothers in Our Flag Means Death, he said he wanted them distinctively different: one with lots of hair and one bald, with “different vocal patterns, different voices”, and different temperaments, one more of a jerk and the other more threatening. If twins can be pulled apart, your Messenger and your servant can.

The cue is the most useful difference

Voice and body help, but the thing that actually triggers a line is the cue before it. Each of your characters hears different people. Rosencrantz takes his cues from Hamlet and Guildenstern in a scene among friends. Osric takes his from a Hamlet who is openly mocking him. Learn each character’s lines as answers to their own cues, not as a free-floating list. Our guide to picking up cues explains how.

A cue script makes this concrete: only one role’s lines, each with the last words of the speech before it. Make one for each character, by hand or with our cue script maker. You now have two short documents, not one long one, and each line is tied to the words that trigger it.

Make the body part of the memory

Helga and Tony Noice have spent years studying how actors remember. As the APS Observer reports, they found actors learn lines by focusing on meaning and intention, breaking scripts into connected “beats”, and that the key is what they call active experiencing: using every physical, mental, and emotional channel to get the meaning across to another person.

For doubled roles, that means rehearsing each character in its own body, not sitting still with the script. Stand the way Osric stands when you learn Osric. Walk the way Rosencrantz walks when you learn Rosencrantz. If the characters don’t have bodies yet, our guide to finding a character’s walk is a good place to start. Each line then gets learned along with a posture, a rhythm, and an intention that only one of your characters has.

Learn one track at a time

The instinct is to learn the play in order, switching characters whenever the script does. Resist it, at least at first. If you learn both characters in the same session, you are building the two similar memories side by side, which is the setup that produces interference.

Instead, give each character its own sessions. Work on one character’s track from first entrance to last exit until you can say every line from its cue without looking. Then put that character away and start on the other. Kinnear told The A.V. Club that when he played several characters in the film Men, he mostly managed to play one a day. On a film schedule, that’s luck. In your own practice, you can choose it.

It also helps to practice in different places and at different times. Research on context and memory is more mixed than its famous example suggests. When Jaap Murre repeated the well-known diver experiment, in which words learned underwater were said to be recalled best underwater, he did not find the effect, and he notes that in many circumstances the effect of the surroundings on recall is rather weak. So don’t count on the rehearsal room to separate your characters for you. The cues you carry with you, voice, body, and the other characters’ lines, are much stronger.

You can rehearse each track in Offbook. Upload the script, pick one of your characters as your role, and realistic voices read every other part and wait for you to say each of your lines. Hide your lines while everyone else’s stay visible, as the video below shows, and you’ll be recalling each line from its own cue. When that track holds, pick your other character and run that one the same way.

For a long speech in either track, our free line memorizer turns your lines into first-letter cues, a good step between reading the speech and saying it with nothing in front of you.

Then run them together, and drill the switches

Once each track stands up on its own, put them back in the order of the play. This is where the danger zones from your map come in. A switch is a short sequence: your last line as one character, the time offstage, and your first line as the other. Practice it as one unit.

1. Say your exit line, in the first character’s voice and body.
2. Physically drop that character: walk out of the room, shake out, change your shoes or jacket if you have a rehearsal piece.
3. Find the second character’s body before you say anything: posture, walk, where the breath sits.
4. Hear the cue that brings you on and answer it in the second character’s voice.
5. Repeat until the switch is boring.

If your switch includes a costume change, practice it with your hands busy, so the line doesn’t depend on standing still. And keep a short note for each entrance, the character, the cue, and the first line, somewhere you can glance at it in the dressing room during the first few performances.

When the lines cross anyway

Even with good preparation, a line from one character will sometimes slip out of the other’s mouth, usually late in the rehearsal process when you’re tired. In rehearsal, don’t panic and don’t just push through it. It’s information.

• Write down the exact pair: which line came out, and which line belonged there.
• Look at why. Often the two cues sound alike, or the two lines are built the same way, like Rosencrantz’s and Osric’s greetings to Hamlet.
• Make that pair more different: a different gesture, a different target in the room, a different intention for the line.
• Drill the right line from its cue five or six times, then run the other character’s similar moment once, so you practice telling them apart.

Word-perfect matters more than usual when you double, because a paraphrase in one character can borrow words from the other. If you notice you’re drifting, our guide to stopping paraphrasing has a method for getting back to the exact text.

And remember why directors double. The Folger Shakespeare Library notes that a long tradition holds the same actor played both Cordelia and the Fool in King Lear, and that one actor can play both Claudius and the Ghost in Hamlet. Doubling can link two characters in the audience’s mind. The better you separate them, the more that link lands. If you’re working on Shakespeare, our Hamlet page breaks down who speaks how much.

Questions actors ask

Should I learn both roles at the same time?

Not at first. Learn one character’s track until you can say every line from its cue, then learn the other. Running them together comes after each one holds on its own.

How do I keep two characters’ lines separate?

Make the characters different in every way you can control: voice, posture, walk, intention, and how each one listens. Then learn each character’s lines from that character’s own cues, so every line is tied to a moment only one of them is in.

What if my two characters are almost the same?

Find a difference anyway, even a small one: a different pitch, a different thing they want from the lead, a different speed. The more alike the roles are, the more these choices help, because similar material is the kind that interferes.

What do I do if I say the other character’s line in a show?

Keep going and get back to the right text as soon as you can, the way you would after any slip. Afterward, note the pair of lines, find what made them sound alike, and drill the right one from its cue before the next show.