The BodyHow posture builds a character, and what health care taught me about notes

Character physicality is how a character's body behaves: how they stand, sit, walk, reach for things and recover when something goes wrong. In a screenplay it lives in the action lines. On screen it lives in the actor. In my experience it's also the least-used tool in a development meeting, which is strange, because it might be the only one that works every time.

Here is how the meeting usually goes. A character feels thin, so somebody asks for a quality. More menace. More warmth. More edge. The writer nods, drives home and adds three adjectives to the action lines, and two weeks later everyone reconvenes to discover the character is now thin and adjective-heavy. Ask instead how the character sits down in a restaurant, and the writer has to invent a past to answer you. I'm not sure there's a better trick in development. I'm not sure it even counts as a trick.

During my time working in health care, I spent a lot of hours watching people arrive. The intake form asked where it hurt, but the body had usually filed its answer before anyone handed over the clipboard.

People lowered themselves into chairs in ways that described their week. Some held one shoulder higher than the other, like they were still carrying the bag. Some answered every question about pain with a joke, which turned out to be its own kind of answer.

Men rated their pain a three and then needed both armrests to stand up. Some people sat on the very front edge of the seat, the way you sit at a job interview you already suspect you aren't getting. Some stood the entire time, because sitting was the problem and they had decided, reasonably, not to participate in the problem. A few walked in apologizing before they said hello, as if pain were a scheduling error they had personally caused. Every so often someone filled out the body diagram by shading in the entire outline, which I respected as a creative choice.

Then there were the hands. People held their phones like casts. Some kept their car keys in a fist for the whole visit, and I eventually understood that as a person who wanted the option of leaving fast. Parents answered questions addressed to their grown children. Husbands described their wives' pain with total confidence and incorrect details.

And almost nobody said ten. On a scale of one to ten, ten seemed to be reserved for childbirth and kidney stones, and everyone appeared to know one person who had survived both and would not stop bringing it up.

The clinicians took all of this in instantly. I usually caught it on a delay, the way you realize a song was in a minor key only after it has already made you feel strange. What stayed with me was guarding, the small, constant protection of a part that once got hurt. People guard for years. They guard long after the injury has technically healed. Guarding is the body holding on to something the person would rather forget, which is about as good a definition of a character as I've heard.

Performers figured this out a century before I did. Konstantin Stanislavski, whose name gets invoked every time an actor refuses to break character at Thanksgiving, spent the end of his career on what became known as the method of physical actions. The idea was that a sequence of simple, truthful physical tasks could lead an actor to an emotion more reliably than chasing the emotion head-on.^[1][2] His student Michael Chekhov took it further with the psychological gesture, one movement that holds an entire character, rehearsed until the actor could carry it through a role without anyone seeing it.^[3]

Screenwriters mostly leave all of this to the actors. The page says what a character wants, and the body becomes a casting problem. I get why. Describing posture from the page can feel like telling a stranger how to hold their fork. But the reader is the first audience a character ever has, and readers, like everybody else, believe what they can see.

The best physical performances tend to start from one decision about the body. Everything else in the role then has to negotiate with that decision.

Joaquin Phoenix, The Master (2012). Phoenix plays Freddie Quell, a Navy veteran coming apart after World War II, and he plays him crooked. PopMatters described him standing “with skewed posture and hands on his hips,” looking “like a gnarled bird, wild and wounded.”^[4] The posture handles the exposition. You don't need a flashback to know something went wrong for Freddie in the war. You need about four seconds of him standing in a doorway.

John Hawkes, The Sessions (2012). Hawkes played Mark O'Brien, the poet and journalist paralyzed by polio, opposite Helen Hunt, and he played him almost entirely lying down. To build O'Brien's curved spine, he worked with the props department on “a crude piece of foam rubber about the size of a soccer ball” wrapped in duct tape and kept under the left side of his back. He told NPR he had to act “primarily from a horizontal position,” and that it hurt.^[5] When the body can't move, the whole performance migrates into the face and the voice, which is exactly where Hawkes put it.

Ian McKellen, Richard III (1995). Shakespeare hands Richard a body and dares the actor to do something with it. McKellen's version moves the play to a fascist 1930s Britain and gives Richard a withered arm, which the film's design connects to Kaiser Wilhelm II's palsy.^[6] What makes it frightening is how little he complains about it. This Richard has adapted, and a villain who has adapted is a villain who plans.

Daniel Day-Lewis, My Left Foot (1989). Playing Christy Brown, the Irish writer and painter with cerebral palsy, Day-Lewis reportedly stayed in his wheelchair between takes, had crew members lift him over equipment, was spoon-fed at lunch and learned to paint and type with his feet.^[7] Please do not adopt this as a workflow. It does show how far an actor will go once the body becomes a character's first fact.

Eddie Redmayne, The Theory of Everything (2014). To play Stephen Hawking across decades of motor neurone disease, Redmayne worked with the choreographer Alexandra Reynolds four hours a day and visited a London neurology clinic every two weeks, meeting more than thirty patients. Reynolds summed up the process this way: “We put what we knew into picking up a pen, drinking, walking, existing.”^[8] That sentence is basically a screenplay note. Pen, drink, walk. Three verbs, and an entire condition lives inside them.

Screenwriters worry, correctly, about directing actors from the page. The workaround is to write behavior rather than mechanics.

• Give one physical fact early. A single clear detail in a character's introduction does more than a paragraph of description.
• Write the adaptation, not the injury. “She opens the jar with her teeth” tells us more than “she has a bad wrist,” and it gives the actor something to play.
• Let it change. The Theory of Everything is close to a two-hour record of posture changing. A character's body should react to the plot.
• Save it for pressure. A physical tell matters most in the scene where it would be inconvenient.
• Leave room. Name the behavior and let the actor find the specifics. Hawkes's duct-taped foam ball was nobody's action line.

In a development meeting, the swap works like this. Take the quality you wanted and turn it into a question the writer can only answer by building a physical biography.

Every one of those is easier to execute than a mood. Nobody in the history of word processing has successfully typed “warmer.”

Part of why I started paying attention to any of this is a thriller about a hitman I'm developing. For the health side of all this, see What Is the Popping Sound When a Chiropractor Cracks Your Back? and Does MPI Cover Chiropractic Care?