It’s All About Relationships: Why the Audience Only Cares About People

Film and television can do almost anything now. Choreographed action, invented technology, time travel, plots with more turns than a mountain road. It’s all thrilling and none of it matters, unless you care about the people it’s happening to. Strip the lights and the effects off any movie, series or play you’ve ever loved and what’s left underneath is a person triumphing over something, loving someone against the odds, hoping in the dark. Everything comes back to people, and to their relationships with each other and with themselves.

Luke, I am your father

Take science fiction, the genre most about the gadgets. Star Wars. Star Trek. Lost. The X-Files. What comes to mind? Lightsabers, phasers, the island, the aliens. Sure. Those things are cool. And yet the most famous line in the whole franchise is a father talking to his son. Kirk and Spock’s friendship defined a series more than any starship did. Lost is about how strangers treat each other when the plane goes down. Mulder and Scully; enough said. Relationships, relationships, relationships.

Why this matters to an actor

Because it’s so easy to get buried in the rest of it. Blocking, dialogue, choreography, the costume, the prop, where the camera is; all of it is real work and none of it is the point. The point is your character’s relationship to the person across from them. How we treat other people is most of who we are, and the audience learns who your character is, and where the story is probably going, almost entirely from how they relate to the others in the scene. Every look, every touch, every pause, every tone tells them.

The audience should feel something about your character. Love, pity, hatred, sympathy, anything but nothing. They should root for you or against you. They should want the relationship to grow or fail or mend, and if a character dies they should worry about what it’s going to do to yours. Move them there and they’ll forgive a thin plot. Leave them cold and no explosion will bring them back.

Build the relationships the audience never sees

When you prepare a role, don’t stop at the relationships on the page. Who did this person love before the story started? Who hurt them? Who’s the friend they call, the parent they don’t? The audience will never meet those people, and those people are why your character does what they do in front of the ones the audience does meet. Build them, and the scene partner in front of you stops being a scene partner and starts being the second most important person in the room, after the ones in your character’s head.

Life is a series of relationships. Art imitates it. So does good acting.