INTJ Acting

[demvesalius]

So I'm taking an acting class and must say that I'm enjoying it. Standing in front of an audience doesn't bother me and I'm actually one of the better students (so far), as far as making the the audience laugh with me and not being fake. I do get energized by it, but not from the crowd, instead because I get so focussed in an imaginary world I can be apart of. My partner and I have even been practicing our scene in public in front of complete strangers.

Are there any INTJ's out there who have ever acted? How did you like it? What did you have to do differently from others, as far as your mental approach, being INTJ?

[TheLastMohican]

I have acted in several plays, and I enjoy it plenty. I don't know what mental differences between INTJ's and other types are important for acting. I don't get stage fright, and I seem to be at my best during the actual performance. I'm not sure why, but I always seem to do my best job of keeping a straight face (in comedies) and delivering my lines when in front of the audience. I gather this is the opposite of the normal pattern. I do get a bit more energized when there is an audience reaction, probably because I am a perfectionist and I like knowing that something was done well enough to cause the reaction.

[Homini Lupus]

When I was a boy-scout I did quite a lot of acting (non professional and very simple but still acting) and was quite good, not to say that it's also a way to develop social skills. Now I think all my social life as both a stage and a fighting ground (the latter expecially when I'm sustaining oral university exams); this is why, even if i have strong intraverted tendencies, I'm a false extraverted. In my (very limited) experience the best way of acting is tricking yourself as much as you can to believe you really are the character you are acting: you think, act, live like him I also found that the best characters are those made of a part of yourself, not necessarily a dominant part.

[Uberfuhrer]

I've never acted in a play or movie or anything, and I have no interest in doing that. I do, however, get a rush out of spontaneously pretending to be imaginary characters. But I don't have any interest in memorizing lines of a script as much as I am in being authentic -- that is, expressing the randomness of my own imagination rather than play a prescribed part.

I am actually inclined to use the characters I imitate through performance as part of a writing project. I like to think like the characters I create in my head, but when I have trouble writing about them, I pretend to be them.

[jikin]

I did a lot of it in high-school. I found it to be enjoyable and was told that I was very good at it. It's fun to be somebody else and try to think like them.

[Claptonian]

I acted when I was a teenager and I was pretty good at it. I'm nearly incapable of "public speaking," but when I have a character I can immerse myself in, I have no problem.I'm a guitarist now, and while I have no trouble playing in front of people, I'm not good at connecting with the crowd. In the beginning, I would just look down at my guitar the whole time. I really need that disconnect from the audience in order to be comfortable, but I'm comforted by the fact that Eric Clapton (I suspect he's an INTP) did the same thing early in his career. ;)

So yeah, I think INTJ's are well suited for acting. I think we're good at immersing ourselves in something, and that's really the key to acting, particularly stage acting. If you immerse yourself in your character, it doesn't really matter if you forget a line, or if a fellow actor messes up, because the immersion allows you to think "in character" and recover from any problems. When you're confident in your ability to improvise and recover, stage fright becomes nearly irrelevant.