Living in Alternative and Inner Worlds: Early Signs of Acting Talent

TLDR

The study explores early predictors of acting talent by interviewing 11 professional actors about their childhoods. Researchers compared actors to a lawyer control group and collected detailed accounts of family background, education, training, play, imagination, fiction orientation, emotionality, and mental state attunement. Actors recalled greater engagement in alternative and inner worlds, feeling different from peers, early play practice, and career choice despite parental discouragement, suggesting these factors predict sustained theater involvement.

Abstract

In an exploratory, qualitative study, 11 professional actors were interviewed about their childhoods to investigate the early predictors of acting talent. To control for verbal talent, scientists-turned-lawyers were selected as a comparison group. Participants were asked about their families, schooling, and training, as well as about their early propensities for play and imagination, their orientation towards fiction, and their emotionality and attunement to others' mental states. Actors' childhood memories differed from those of the lawyers in the following respects. The actors recalled greater engagement in alternative worlds (imaginary and fictional worlds) and in inner worlds (emotional and other mental states). Not surprisingly, then, they were also more likely to recall feeling different from others and unable to engage fully in school. Unlike the lawyers, the actors recalled practicing for their adult roles as early as age 4—by inventing and directing plays in their backyards. Unlike lawyers, actors chose their careers despite parental discouragement: although their parents valued the arts, they discouraged the choice of acting as a career. Taken together, the results suggest that an early interest in alternative and inner worlds and an identification of oneself as different from others are predictive of early and steady involvement in theater—a choice of career in which one can live daily in another world of imagined lives and in the other world of others' mental lives.