Question: who is your favourite fictional character and do you engage with them

Rose Turner answered on 11 Jun 2017:

Ooh that’s a great question!

I have sometimes worked as an actor, and I have played the part Helena from ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ by Shakespeare a few times. I don’t know how well you know Shakespeare’s plays, but that one is a comedy, so it’s got some funny characters and lots of misunderstandings happen in it. The character Helena is in love with a boy, but he is in love with her friend. She follows him around everywhere! Playing that character is really fun because she’s sweet, but also a bit silly and hopeless (at one point I had to cling to the man’s leg and not let go which involved getting dragged across the stage!) Helena finally gets her moment when a fairy starts giving people a love potion and two people accidentally fall in love with Helena and start following her around everywhere instead!

I enjoy acting as a way of really getting to know a character. But I think you can do that with books and films too. I think when we engage with characters, it’s a mixture of using our own personality and experience and then filling in the gaps with our imaginations. So whether reading, or acting, or even watching a film, the characters always partly made out of ‘us’ and our experiences.