Photoplayer Hater

Serious acting is not like a weekend seminar. Actors make commitments to their characters and they bleed into real life. Once you take on a role your life will be changed.

Fighting the change will water down your performance and make you a less attractive actor to work with. The key is to prepare for the side effects of acting and learn to cope.

Hairstyles

There are some lucky actors that get to wear a wig instead of actually cutting or growing their hair a certain way. You will not be that actor. You are the scrappy upstart that will probably be in low budget productions. In those cases your character who has a shaved head will now make it so you have to have a shaved head. If your character needs long blonde hair, you will now have to live with extensions and the jokes.

Body Weight

There are fat suits to make you look pudgy, but they cost money. Unfortunately there are no skinny suits. So you will likely have to gain or lose whatever weight necessary to fully inhabit your character. Gaining weight is easy to do but hard to live with: your body is heavier and harder to move, you might find your health worsening. Losing weight is not fun and can be dangerous if done improperly. Your character's body will be yours and you will have to deal.

Speaking Voice

For actors with the ability to alter their tonality to suit their character they will find it becoming the way they always speak, in-character or not. A man once known for his deep, sexy voice might have to have a nasally higher pitched voice for a role and could find it hard to turn off. A woman with a sweet voice might need to rough it up and lower it for her role as a policewoman and when she speaks that way in real life she might find it affects how people treat her in real life.

Personal Values

Criminals have good reasons for being criminals and your role as a thief will have you exploring moral territory you are uncomfortable with. You might find yourself tempted to commit small crimes as you rationalize the benefit to you and the slight chance of getting caught, something you would never do before playing a robber. Your head will be swirling with ideas that you have never considered as you work to become a character.

Worldview

An actor who believes sexual orientation is genetic and is not gay might land a role as a homosexual. This actor has to find a way to love people of the same sex and it might become confusing when they find that they can and how flexible sexuality is. You have a way of looking at the world and the characters you play may have a different perspective, yet you need to empathize and it might change the way you see things.

Becoming a character is not something you can just leave behind. It changes you as a person when you become someone else for an extended period. You will find there are many people you could have become. Once you leave the role and try to reassert your previous personality there will likely be some remnants of previous characters and you might even be the better for it.