Playing the Villain
From Dramatics Magazine, October 2010
By Michael Daehn
Captain Hook, Mrs. Lovett, Gaston, Iago, Miss Hannigan, Rooster, and Lily
St. Regis, too. Nurse Ratched, Richard III, Caldwell B. Cladwell, Dracula,
Inspector Danforth, and killer-plant-from-outer-space Audrey II. All
rogues without rival—and each one a gift to those of us who make our
home in the theatrical storytelling tradition. For if there’s one thing a
successful theatre practitioner knows for certain, it’s this: compelling
heroes need equally formidable foes.
Audiences love a great villain, of course, and so do actors who are fortunate
enough to be cast as one. Two of my own earliest acting roles were West
Side Story’s knife-wielding gangleader Bernardo and the sadistic drug
kingpin Harry Roat from the thriller Wait Until Dark, assignments that
surely fed my lifelong appreciation for bad guys. Even before Wicked, it
always seemed to me like Oz’s Witch of the West got a pretty raw deal. And
why wouldn’t Hook want revenge, Gaston the pretty girl, or Miss Hannigan
a chance to escape the hardships of the Great Depression any way she
could?
But these roles can be tricky. How do you make your stage villain a
particularly vile and truly memorable adversary for the forces of good,
without going too far into the realm of caricature? How do you craft a
dastardly world view that fits within the world of the play? And how do you
make solid, bold acting choices when you’re playing a character whose
actions violate your own conscience? (We hope.)
In workshops at the Thespian Festival in Lincoln, Nebraska, this summer,
dozens of students and teachers joined me in a quest to create believable
stage villains. We looked at the ways heroes and villains are similar, and
how they differ. We examined specific kinds of villains, each with its own
psychological profile and modus operandi, and talked about how the
various villainous species function in different kinds of shows. And we
worked through some exercises to bring out the physical and vocal
eccentricities that make villainous portrayals so much fun. Here are the
results of our excursion into the dark side.
What’s my motivation? First, an Acting 101 review, from a scoundrel’s
point of view. Regardless of the type of role she’s playing, a successful actor
makes behavioral choices, moment by moment, from among a wide variety
of potential actions that seem appropriate to the circumstances of the play.
The actor’s choices must reflect her character’s backstory or history, her
objectives or character-driven goals, and her specific relationship in that
moment with each of the story’s other characters. Objectives and
relationships often change throughout the development of your character
and in the progression of the story’s events themselves. These shifts can be
big or small, and each one requires believable adjustments by every
affected actor, in every moment, as those moments unfold.
Villains might break society’s rules, but they can’t violate these basic rules
of good acting. As an actor creating a villain for the stage, you must form
relationships with other characters based on what’s happening in that
particular beat or scene. For example, in the original Star Wars movie,
Darth Vader is Luke’s greatest foe; two sequels later, the Sith Lord is
revealed as Luke’s father and sacrifices his life to save his son’s. The
musical Annie’s Miss Hannigan must be able to flip the switch from
shouting her frustrations at her whiny, floor-scrubbing orphans to
presenting herself as matron of the year when Miss Grace arrives. Whether
you’re playing a hero, a psychopath, or something in between, you have to
do what all good actors do: create specific relationships grounded in the
evolving truths of every scene.
Second, when playing any part, your choices on stage must be motivated.
The more passionate the motivation, the more interesting your
performance. Captain Hook is obsessed with revenge against the
charismatic juvenile delinquent who cost him a limb. Dr. Parker will do
anything to protect the secret of Batboy’s birth in the cult musical of that
name. Audrey II wants nothing less than total world domination. One Flew
Over the Cuckoo Nest’s Nurse Ratched just wants to maintain order in the
psych ward. These types of compelling motivations obligate the actor to
make a variety of urgent, clever, and creative tactical choices, which should
result in a character who is fascinating to play and to watch.
Finally, most classic villains have a well-constructed backstory, which
provides numerous clues for why a character behaves the way he does now.
Was Gaston a spoiled infant, toddler, and grade-schooler who heard
nothing but undeserved praise for his “self-confidence” and “way with
people”? What about evil genius Lex Luthor, who was Clark Kent’s
childhood friend—what event(s) could have occurred to change their
relationship so lethally? The more you can discover about your character’s
“packing” or life so far, the greater specificity you will bring to rehearsals
and eventually the performance. Sometimes this information can be mined
from the script or its subtext. Other times it is up to you to make creative,
purposeful, logical choices which compliment those background elements
drawn directly from the text.
(Chris McKay)
Same wants, same dreams, different tactics Villains are like the rest
of us, only more so. They crave loving, supportive friends and family, a
good standard of living, power over their environment, job satisfaction,
feelings of self-worth, and the presence of a soulmate in their lives—the
same things most heroes are after. However, because drama requires
conflict, authors can’t very well bestow these riches equally on heroes and
villains. Characters have to fight for them. This struggle gives the villain his
super-objective or spine throughout the play, and while the audience might
be able to predict the outcome of that struggle, the villain never thinks of
himself as being on the losing side. Most villains are heroes in their own
minds, fighting the good fight. By whatever methods they have at their
disposal. And as with heroes, the most interesting, credible villains have a
balance of strengths and weaknesses. One might be highly intelligent,
capable of taking unorthodox approaches to problem-solving, and even
very funny. One might also be capable of lying, cheating, or assault under
certain circumstances—for example, revenge for the loss of something or
someone precious to them. In fact, both “good” and “bad” character types
benefit immeasurably from an internal tug of war between their
personality plusses and minuses, the to-dos-or-not-to-dos of their inner
monologues. They seem to us more fully realized human beings, part of a
conflicted world we can identify with and want to watch.
The major difference between those we revere and those we fear is the way
they go about pursuing their dreams. Heroes do things we hope we would
do in their situations, with the same positive results. Villains do the things
we hope we’d never do to achieve our goals—and often they relish those
offending acts! Most stage characters, and those of us in the real world who
wish to remain unincarcerated, use a variety of persuasive tactics to get
what we want, including reasoning, flattering, and bargaining. Very seldom
do we pull a threatening tactic—bullying, harassment, blackmail—from our
toolbox of effective everyday coping behaviors. For villains, such methods
are the go-to hammers of life.
But this is no excuse for a boring, repetitive, one-note antagonist. The more
faces your villain presents, the longer she holds our interest. Could
someone who’s that polite or cultured or funny really be a despicable
lowlife? The script will sometimes force your hand early in the choice of a
hammer-like tactic. Otherwise, avoid a Snydely Whiplash-type caricature
and embrace the full range of tactical responses available for your
character. Strive to surprise, seduce, charm, and impress most of the time,
and your evil moments will resonate with far greater malice.
What kind of bad are you? Like heroes, villains come in many different
flavors—and the genre of the play or musical will affect your portrayal as
well. Here are a few overarching types; the sidebar at right identifies a
dozen more specific psychological profiles to get you thinking.
The villain dominated by one excessive trait. These miscreants have
a myopic view of their world. They may fixate on saving humanity like
some evil messiah, gaining total retribution for real or imagined slights, or
perhaps becoming the richest, most powerful, or most popular human on
the planet. Whether motivated by ambition, revenge, or arrogance, there
doesn’t ever seem to be quite enough to satisfy the unbridled demands of
this type. In their levels of commitment, they range from the greedy but
eventually redeemable conman Harold Hill in The Music Man to the
irreparably tragic, baby-murdering Medea.
The blocking character. Many villains in classical comedies (Molière,
Shakespeare) and in the American romantic musical tradition form a wall
between potential lovers, often for selfish or very shortsighted reasons. The
behavior is consistent whether the piece is Tartuffe, The Fantasticks or
Spring Awakening. Just know that you are older and wiser than the
boneheads whose happiness you’re trying to thwart. For their own good, of
course.
The monster. These villains are unprincipled, malicious, sinister, and
often vicious in the pursuit of their world view or goals, although they
might appear friendly when it serves them. In Wait Until Dark, Harry Roat
not only kills his partners in crime but terrorizes a blind woman with
scarves and his switchblade. He coolly moves from one tactic to another
while patiently searching for the one that will give him the answers he
demands. In Sweeney Todd, Mrs. Lovett knowingly sells pies made from
people, certainly a monstrous behavior even in hard times. As an actor
playing a monster, you must fully commit to your justification for your
bold, disturbing actions. You must not judge those actions by your own
moral compass; merely accept that each action takes your character in the
direction he or she needs to go.
Walking the walk, talking the talk Once my villain is grounded in
terms of psychologically and emotionally motivated objectives, I tackle the
challenge of shaping his external features. I follow roughly the same stepby-step process each time, experimenting with a variety of choices as I seek
the right kind of movement, gestures, voice, rhythms, and other outward
characteristics for this particular bad guy, in this particular story.
(Chris McKay)
1. Explore the text for externals. Often the playwright will include
helpful details on how a character uses language, how she wears or handles
clothing and props, including weapons, and how he relates to the people
and spaces around him.
2. Find an anthem (or several anthems, for different parts of the
story). Music can be a great way to get inside a tough character. I like to
reach into my CD collection, sample themes from horror movies and classic
mysteries, and play whichever melody grabs me as most evocative for this
role when working on the physical or vocal qualities. See the sidebar,
What's on your villians iPod?, for a few suggestions.
What’s on your villain’s iPod?
Here are a few musical selections that might make nice underscoring for
the physical exercises described in this article—and for setting the
appropriate villainous mood before rehearsals and performances.
Classics: “Funeral March for a Marionette” (Gounod), “Night on
Bald Mountain” (Mussorgsky), “In the Hall of the Mountain King”
(Grieg).
Pop/rock:“Shockheaded Peter”and other songs by the Tiger Lillies,
Alice Cooper’s Love it to Death and Killer albums, Weezer’s “Only in
Dreams.”
Stage: Chicago; the title song from Steel Pier and “Madame
Guillotine” from The Scarlet Pimpernel; all of the longer musical
numbers on Blue Man Group’s Audio album; “Cop Song,” “Mr.
Cladwell” and “Act One Finale” from Urinetown.
Horror movie soundtracks: A Clockwork Orange, Psycho,
Halloween (not complete without its bubbly “Mr. Sandman”
opening), The Exorcist, Friday the 13th
Carnival music, such as the soundtrack for HBO’s Carnivale or
the movie Carny.
3. Find a psychological gesture. Master teacher Michael Chekhov
encouraged his actors to freeze into an iconic sculpture of their character—
one that combines inner and outer essences and reveals what this character
is all about. I experiment with different images until some sculptural form
feels sufficiently empowering. This gesture may change many times
throughout the rehearsal period, but the initial working choice provides at
least a launch pad for movements and postures.
4. Evil attitude “pops.” Another way of finding your psychological
gesture is to start with a neutral, house-of-wax-statuary pose. As you or a
teacher or friend counts to five, transform yourself, in five increments, into
the most noble, beautiful, positive-valued sculpture you can imagine.
Freeze. Then, on another count of five, change gradually into your statue’s
wicked opposite. Repeat this five-second sequence several times. Then ring
a bell or clap your hands and instantly pop from a “good energy” pose to
“evil incarnate.” Repeat several times and reflect. Your end result might
become a starting place for how your villain moves and physically interacts
with others.
5. Tempo, rhythms, breathing, walks. Actors have long used the
movement analytics of Rudolf Laban to explore character physicality; you
can borrow these same techniques when getting into the body of a bad guy.
Still playing your chosen terror anthem, determine whether your character
has an up tempo or slow tempo. What’s her rhythm of interaction? Does
she talk and gesture at high speed, like many New Yorkers, or does she
stroll slowly through conversation (and life) like a native Texan? How does
your choice of tempo/rhythms affect the character’s breathing patterns?
Short and choppy, smooth and deep—how you breathe affects your speech
and everything else you do. Now consider other physical traits. For
instance, what part of the body does your character lead with—a snobby
upraised chin, a powerful sculpted chest, or the cautious and cowering back
of his lowered head? How much effort does your character put behind his
movements? Are her footfalls and limbs heavy or light? What physical
shapes does he favor? Are her movements direct, like a heat-seeking
missile, or indirect, like an easily distracted puppy? Move through the full
range of possibilities until something feels right. Now you’re ready to walk
and gesture, trying a variety of gaits and postures. A slight limp might ring
true for you, whereas a facial tic might feel like overkill. Subtle smiles and
gentle gestures might convey your villainy much better than a hunchback.
6. Adjustments and enhancements. One of my old acting teachers
would play suitable music and have us move around to it, first as ourselves,
then as the wild animal closest to the essence of the character we were
exploring. Third, we had to mimic some real-life person who shared at least
some of the qualities that drive our character’s choices in the play. Fourth,
we were asked to move like a real-world person who is the exact opposite of
the essence of our character, to clearly discern the differences. Finally, we
incorporated specifics from all these character “layers” with those elements
of ourselves that we began the process exploring.
7. Warm-ups and nonverbal verbals. Once you’ve got the body, the
voice can follow. I often start with several full-body ghoulish wails while
stretching from small to tall. These are followed by a series of evil laughs,
cackles, and full-moon-inspired animal howls. I work pitch, range, volume,
and resonance while alternating between the fearsome sounds of nocturnal
demons and creatures. Then I find a mirror and improvise a complete
conversation with myself without using real words. All of the physical
choices explored earlier are part of the communication process, but the
verbal aspects are only purposeful gibberish with a very specific sense of
give and take. It is sometimes easier to experiment with cadence, tone, and
other vocal qualities before becoming attached to the linear tendencies of
the actual scripted text.
8. Catch phrase packing. When I am ready to make vocal choices with
text, I like to play with a villainous tag line or catch phrase. For example, if
I were playing Mrs. Meers from Thoroughly Modern Millie, I would try a
wide range of variations on the line, “How sad it is to be all alone in the
world,” going from a shout to a whisper, from threatening to caring. If I’m
looking for a more general sinister phrase to explore, I might choose “No
one gets out of here alive!” or “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog
too.” Almost every story with a classic villain has at least one line ripe for
picking, and playing, in character.
9. Style, or The Edge. So we have our basic villain. As a result of all the
work described above, I know what his evilness wants, how he thinks, how
he moves and communicates. I also know why he does the deviant things
he does. These elements should add up to a pretty interesting portrayal.
Still, the best villains have something else that defines them—something
mysterious and hard to identify but which is clearly there. The closest
example I can give is Jack Nicholson’s chilling laugh and Heath Ledger’s
haunting eyes in two stylistically opposed but equally riveting renditions of
Batman’s archenemy, the Joker. It is that something extra that gives the
most memorable stage villains a heightened sense of style, an artistically
engaging edge.
(Chris McKay)
The last monologue A villain’s final words are often fatal—but I have a
few important things left to say, so I’ll have to take that chance. Here are
my last bits of advice.
Play against. The most interesting villains are those who appear to be the
opposite, as virtuous pillars of society or the perfect next-door neighbor or
a highly publicized good Samaritan, until they do inexplicably horrendous
things to everyone’s shock and dismay. If you are performing the villain in
a piece, play against as long as the script allows you to: be friendly, smile
lots, make people laugh and feel good, so they’ll all let their defenses down
sufficiently for you to eventually crush them.
Try substitution. Most of us have never committed crimes like those of
the villains we play. We must find comparables. For example, I may not
have committed first-degree murder, but I have experienced all the steps
leading to that particular offense on numerous occasions. Part of growing
up on the shores of Lake Michigan is learning to win the mosquito battle.
Shooing them away worked fine, but there were times when I actually held
out my arm in an inviting fashion, relished a bug’s landing, planned its
extinction, chose my hand as the murder weapon, and delivered the lethal
blow. It actually felt good. In other words, in the court of mosquito justice,
I am a cold-blooded killer. We all have “dark sides,” analogous evils which
we can channel, as actors, into those wicked acts that are beyond our
everyday experience.
Lie, cheat, steal—and do it well. If you were to attempt any of these
things in real life, you wouldn’t want to get caught, would you? You’d
exercise your lying, cheating, and stealing abilities as well as you possibly
could. The same goes for villains. Don’t worry—the playwright will let the
audience know at the appropriate time what’s not quite right. Don’t
prematurely reveal anything by being less than your best at doing your
worst.
Reveal your zest for villainy. Because villains increasingly see
themselves as above society’s rules, their responses and the ways they
command attention can be much larger in scale than would be believable
for a non-villain. As long as the actor’s work is consistent and grounded,
the range of choices is wide open. Be bold.
Commit fully. Sometimes actors make the rookie-villain mistake of
assuming a forced funny voice or cartoonish physical schtick. Don’t
hamper your own instrument; fully commit to all of your choices as the
character, especially those that are outside your usual range of voice and
movement. Work them, make them organic to you, so that by performance
time they will seem like second nature. And compete fiercely. It is crucial
that you win every single battle, real or imagined, throughout the play.
Challenge and defeat the actors playing your adversaries (those pesky good
guys) as often and as dramatically as possible. Finally, always remember:
You are in the right! The hero, the authorities, the gleefully hissing
audience, or anyone else who impedes your progress is always in the
wrong. After all, where would the theatre be without villains? Stand proud
and wreak your havoc, knowing that some day, in some alternate universe,
the pendulum of justice will swing your way.