Summary: In last week’s podcast, I suggested that every actor needs to be a reader. Reading opens your eyes and broadens your horizons. It gives you new information and helps you to understand history and complex ideas. Moreover, regardless of what you are reading, every book will help you to be better at reading and understanding the scripts that define your career. Reading a script is different than reading other types of books because in the script all the information is in the dialogue. This means you have to read the lines carefully and hear what the characters are saying between the lines. Read a script in one sitting. To understand plot and characters, you must have a clear sense of the whole and that is best done by reading the entire work in one sitting. Read actively. This means that as you read, you must use your imagination to create images of the world and characters. Have an open mind and be non-judgmental as you read the script so you can get what the writer is doing stylistically rather than rejecting it before you even know what you have in front of you. Don’t judge the characters; just pay attention to what they do and how they do it. Also pay close attention to the way each character speaks. Their language and tempo-rhythms provide a wealth of information but if you skim over the lines, you’ll miss the specifics that define each character. Finally, to make a script your own, you need to read it many times. Each successive reading will tell you more about the characters and the world of the script
