If you play an evil character it’s gotta stick a little.
And if you’re a character-actor who always gets the evil role. If you play 100 evil guys. Then 100X moreso.
You get into the evil role. See the world through evil eyes and evil motivations.
And over time it’s gotta bend your personality towards real evilness. Right?
I suppose you could google evil-character-actors. 20 years later, how many got arrested for something heinous.
What do you think?
EDIT
Put more generally : Can habits gained in one context bleed over into another context?
Yes.
Do they?
Possibly. With increasing probability as the habit becomes stronger. And there’s self-awareness to consider. And how much the habit clashes with the new context.
This is a briliant question. I know of a research focused on the positive aspect. Participants, who got to play a game in which they were a superhero and helped people, were immediately afterwards much less hesitant to help (in a staged small accident that happened during the final talk with the examiner). So it seems you could get into habit of helping. I suppose it could work the other way aroud as well and you could build a habit of being selfish and not caring by playing such people. But I suppose most actors don’t play only vilains all the time and have good habits outside the role. Also, playing a vilain can certainly help you connect to and understand your darker sides, which is a great way of getting control of them.
Thank you for this response.
Habit bleedover seems unavoidable, but I like your take. Because of course we are more than our habits. We are also awareness and rationality. And playing the villain certainly would bring that part of ourselves and that reality into that light. It would be healthful, eye-opening and educational for sure.