I recently read about the fascinating process through which the now-deceased actor Heath Ledger prepared himself for his iconic role as the Joker in the 2008 superhero thriller The Dark Knight. Having studied acting and theatre myself I have always found the techniques employed by actors to be fascinating, and have often utilised them myself in improving my social presence and dating life. According to one source:
“When asked about his preparation process and how he got into character for his role in The Dark Knight, Heath himself said that he locked himself away in his London hotel room for around a month, writing a character diary and constantly experimenting with different voices.”
Now, we all know that Ledger sadly died a few months after filming for The Dark Knight had been completed, and while some have blamed his immersion in the role as a contributing factor, we can never know all the factors involved. But even in spite of that tragic development, Ledger’s decision to entirely immerse himself in the character he was working on to the exclusion of even socialising with others is fascinating, and immediately piqued my attention.
For one thing, I have always loved the anonymity of hotels where, once you’ve checked in, you are pretty much left to do as you wish, but with everything you want on hand via a quick telephone call to room service. As someone who has travelled solo extensively I’ve stayed in many hotels on my own and I’ve usually found the experience to be both restorative and amenable to contemplation. So I can completely understand why Ledger chose to locate himself in a hotel for his transformation. When you are working on an inside-out psychological change then your own home – or anywhere familiar – is really not appropriate. You can only imagine how all of Ledger’s possessions would remind him of his ‘true’ self and thus get in the way of his becoming someone else. Isolation, too, seems to have been central to Ledger’s method (I’m assuming he was alone in the hotel – this would make sense, and I haven’t seen anything to suggest otherwise).
Again, if you want to effect large-scale personal change you need to disassociate yourself, albeit temporarily, from those others who are apt to bring you back down to earth, reminding you who you ‘really are’. Still more fascinating is Ledger’s actual method, described here as keeping a journal and experimenting with different voices. I suspect that he also tried out different physical manifestations of the Joker too, as he used the private space he’d secured for himself to really get under the skin of the new character.
All of which leads me to the central proposition of this article – namely that, if Heath Ledger can do this for a movie role and create an Oscar-winning performance, then why can’t you do it to create an entirely new character for yourself to portray socially? In other words, if you are normally a somewhat self-effacing and diffident ‘nice guy’, could you use this Ledger method acting technique in order to create your alter ego as a dashing and mysterious international playboy? Or as a powerful and dominant man? Or as whatever else you would like to become?
My answer is yes – and this is definitely something I’ll be expanding on further in future articles and videos, as well as in my forthcoming Charisma And Dating Academy Course.
For now, though, I want to highlight an idea by Samuel Kampa, a PhD candidate in philosophy at Fordham University, who writes about the ‘Possible World Box’ in regard to Heath Ledger:
“I recently extended this model by looking at situations where character immersion comes into play. When you’re fully immersed in a character, you cognitively attend exclusively to statements your character would endorse. Your attention is fixed exclusively on your Possible World Box, and your Possible World Box contains only the beliefs and desires of your character. For example, if and when Ledger was fully immersed in the character of the Joker, he consciously thought things such as ‘Chaos is beautiful’ or ‘Chance alone is fair,’ and he did not consciously think ‘I am Heath Ledger’ or ‘I am acting on a soundstage.’ In other words, Ledger attended only to his Possible World Box, paying no attention to his Belief and Desire boxes.”
So, when creating the character of your ideal self, you needn’t get worried about ‘losing yourself’ in your imagination and going insane. Instead, what you must do is create a Possible World Box that contains all the beliefs and desires of this ideal self, and only attend to that.
For example, your personal world box might contain the idea that ‘I am irresistible to the opposite sex’. And while your personal Belief box might contain the notion that ‘some women don’t find me cute’, while you are in character you will disregard this entirely. Because your new, ideal character has no use or time for such thinking.
If you want to use this method to re-engineer or recalibrate your character to become – say – more of a sexy rake type individual, then you should take yourself away from others for a little while (OK, a month in a hotel might be a bit much, but a shorter amount of time away from the normal comforts of home is desirable) and use journaling as a tool to work out just what’s in the ‘Possible World Box’ for your new character.
That done, you should then set about working out how a person with such values and beliefs would present themselves in public (right down to things like stance, gait, facial expression and so on) and then practice embodying this. It might sound a little off-the-wall, but research has shown that even by thinking about their roles, the manner in which actors behave in the real world off-set afterwards changes for a considerable length of time. So this kind of preparation work is surprisingly powerful.
And if you explore it in relation to your social presence and dating skills then you will definitely begin to see benefits.
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