ON ACTING: Why Actors Get Bored with Certain Roles

To act is to self-discover. So when an actor accepts a role, s/he is offering to experience (re-experience) a certain aspect of him/herself in front of others.

To experience the same aspects of ourselves over and over again may be profitable, safe, and certain...but it can also become very monotonous, especially to a creative mind. Think of being a cartographer (mapmaker) and have to chart a well known river over and over again.

The search for new and challenging roles is really the search and explore little known and rarely traversed rivers of our own inner emotions. "I want to try and play that character" means I would like to experience that emotional essence of the killer in me, the rapist in me, the lover in me, the Mom/Dad in me. It is that search for the freshness of inner experience, the thrill of exploring uncharted waters, that drives a Johnny Depp, a Sean Penn, a Kevin Spacey, a Judy Dench, a Meryl Streep and a Cate Blanchette to try their hand at so many divergent and character-dissimilar roles.