Jr High Blog

There’s something magical about the way a story can come to life in a movie theater: the way the room is dark, but the screen is so big it’s all consuming with its light. From your seat you get to experience new worlds or different versions of your own. You see things you would’ve never seen before—that would’ve never existed if it hadn’t been for someone who dared to dream bigger than the limits of this world. But what good is the scenery, the lighting, the CGI, the budget, or the costumes if the actors in a movie can’t convince someone to care? If the actors can’t entice an audience to go along with them on their journey, why would the audience watch? Why would we listen to a script? It’s not about the words a person says, but who says them and the way they’re said. The true magic of movies is how an actor can become someone else to turn a script into a message and a story into an experience that stays with you long after the credits roll. But maybe there’s something more to learn from actors than just their ability to entertain us. By understanding how they step outside of themselves to become someone else, we can discover how to better understand the people around us.

But how does an actor with their own life and values read a script and adopt a new identity, even if only for a short time? They shift into a new person, in a new place, with a different style and moral compass, and turn memorized lines into a natural spoken meter. They morph themselves just so, so that we will believe, if only for a moment, that what we are watching is real. Their emotions feel so genuine it compels our empathy. And they don’t do it just once but many times. How?

“The character’s only 50% and then the mastermind is me” (Psychological Effects).

Researchers in a 2025 study, Brott, Wilson, and Brooker, interviewed seven actors to understand how they create characters, experience their emotions, and eventually separate themselves from those characters. This study found that an actor can be deeply connected to a character while remaining conscious of their own identity. Essentially, you don’t have to lose yourself to become someone else, because you’re just representing that person; you aren’t actually them. Actors don’t abandon themselves. Instead, they balance two identities simultaneously. Participant 5 in the study perfectly illustrates this balance, as the actor recognizes that while they bring a character to life, they are still the ones consciously making the decisions behind that character’s actions.  

“You’re just understanding yourself more” (Psychological Effects).  

In the study, one participant describes looking for the humanity in their character, even when that character makes questionable decisions. Rather than judging the character immediately, the actor considers the circumstances that could lead an ordinary person to behave similarly. This suggests that acting can actually teach a person more about themselves. When actors try to understand the motivations behind a character’s decisions, they’re forced to examine their own beliefs, emotions, and capacity for making similar choices.

“It turns out that we don’t typically experience a single, isolated emotion” (Our Minds).

Emotions aren’t as simple as just one label. They often have levels to them. Someone can experience grief alongside relief, guilt, anger, or even happiness. Emotions aren’t always as simple as being sad or happy. What makes an actor’s performance convincing isn’t necessarily their ability to cry on command or appear angry. It’s their ability to understand the complicated emotions behind a character’s behavior. People rarely experience just one emotion at a time, and neither should characters.

However, understanding why someone feels something isn’t necessarily the same as feeling what they’re feeling. In a study by psychologists Thalia Goldstein, Katherine Wu, and Ellen Winer, researchers found that actors may be more skilled at using what is called “theory-of-mind skills,” but they don’t necessarily have greater empathy. Empathy is when you feel or share another person’s emotions, but theory-of-mind only requires understanding what someone else might think, believe, or experience. Actors don’t need to feel these emotions themselves; they just need to understand them in order to convey them. Empathy can actually overshadow the performance of actors sometimes if they’re too lost in the emotions and not in the scene. What most would assume is the gifting of empathy in actors may actually be a greater understanding of the minds of others.  

“Actors must think and behave not as themselves but as the characters they are pretending to be” (Neuroscience of Romeo and Juliet).  

The psychological shift of an actor’s identity and that of their character can be observed in the brain. In a 2019 study, researchers Brown, Cockett, and Yuan used brain scans to examine what happens when actors take on the identities of Romeo and Juliet. They found that when actors responded as their characters rather than themselves, activity decreased in parts of the brain associated with processing one’s own identity. The researchers suggest that acting may involve a temporary suppression of self-processing. In other words, actors aren’t forgetting who they are, but their brains may be shifting attention away from themselves to make room for someone else’s perspective.

“Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others” (Philippians 2:3–4, NIV).

So, what does this teach us about identity, compassion, and understanding? If actors can temporarily quiet their own sense of self to understand someone else’s perspective, what does that reveal about the human capacity for compassion? Maybe becoming someone else doesn’t require us to lose ourselves but instead allows us to see beyond ourselves. Philippians 2:3–4 encourages us to look beyond our own interests and consider those of others. Isn’t that, in a way, what acting teaches us to do—to step outside our own experiences and attempt to understand a life different from our own?

Maybe what we can learn from actors is that understanding someone doesn’t mean agreeing with them, but it does require us to recognize that their experiences have shaped them just as ours have shaped us. After all, how often do we forget that, but for the grace of God, we could find ourselves in someone else’s shoes? Compassion begins when we stop looking at others through the lens of our own experiences and begin considering theirs. The next time you find yourself sitting in a dark movie theater, watching someone bring an entirely different life to the screen, remember that the magic isn’t just in their ability to become someone else; it’s in what becoming someone else can teach us about being human.  

Sources:

Brott, Genevieve, et al. “A Qualitative Study Into the Psychological Effects of Acting Work Among Australian-Based Actors.” Australian Journal of Psychology, vol. 77, no. 1, no. 2486775, Apr. 2025, https://doi.org/10.1080/00049530.2025.2486775.

Brown, Steven, et al. “The Neuroscience of Romeo and Juliet : An fMRI Study of Acting.” Royal Society Open Science, vol. 6, no. 3, Mar. 2019, p. 181908, https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.181908.

“What Acting Can Tell Us About Our Minds | Psychology Today.” Www.Psychologytoday.Com, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-internet-brain/202109/what-acting-can-tell-us-about-our-minds. Accessed 27 Oct. 2026.