How to Do a Script Analysis: A Practical Guide for Actors

Your first read should be about getting to know the story. Focusing on your character’s scenes, pay attention to the major events, relationships, and turning points. What happens to the characters? How does the story change from beginning to end?

At this stage, resist the urge to decide exactly how you’re going to play the role. Instead, ask yourself: What is this story about? What kind of world does it take place in? What does the character go through? You’ll have plenty of time to make detailed acting choices later.

Hot tip: Attempting to learn the whole script before rehearsals start “can backfire miserably,” says Sydney-based playwright and former actor Jordyn Fulcher. “If you learn the entire script alone before rehearsal begins, you can end up siloed inside your own interpretation and vision of it. You form rhythms, habits, and even these little performance tics that can become ingrained in your performance.”

Now it’s time to look more closely at your character. The Stanislavsky Method of acting – which has influenced most acting techniques practiced today – is grounded in The Magic “If” principle. The concept teaches actors to put themselves in the characters’ shoes and consider what they would do if they were in the character’s situation.

Start by identifying everything the script tells you about them. Consider their age, occupation, relationships, background, location, and circumstances. What has happened to them before the story begins? What is happening around them now?

Pay attention to information that other characters provide about them too. Your character may not describe themselves accurately, but another character’s opinion could reveal something important.

This is a key part of script analysis, because your character’s circumstances affect how they behave.

Someone asking another character for money, for example, might behave very differently depending on whether they are joking, desperate, embarrassed, or angry.

One of the most useful questions you can ask when analysing a scene is: What does my character want? This is known as your character’s objective.

An objective is the goal your character is trying to achieve in a scene. It should be something they are actively trying to get from another person or situation.

Instead of choosing a vague objective such as “be sad,” look for something playable, such as “to convince them to stay” or “to get them to tell me the truth.”

Your character can also have a larger objective across the story, while their immediate objective changes from scene to scene. Stanislavski-based approaches to acting commonly explore objectives, actions, and obstacles as tools for creating specific performance choices.

Credit: Pixel-Shot/Shutterstock

Once you know what your character wants, ask: What’s stopping them from getting it? An obstacle may be another character, a physical situation, or something happening internally.

If your character wants their partner to forgive them, for example, the obstacle may be that their partner no longer trusts them. If they want to escape a situation, the obstacle may be that they have nowhere else to go.

Conflict is what creates dramatic action. Without an obstacle, there may be little reason for your character to fight for their objective.

Think about how the obstacle affects your character’s behaviour. Do they become more persuasive? Angry? Vulnerable? Manipulative? Does their strategy change when their first attempt doesn’t work?

A scene rarely stays emotionally or dramatically identical from beginning to end. Look for the moments when something changes. Your character may receive new information, change their approach, become angry, or suddenly realise something important. These shifts can be used to divide a scene into “beats.”

A beat is essentially a section of action in which a particular tactic, intention, or emotional situation is operating. When something changes, you may have reached a new beat.

Marking those moments in your script can help prevent your performance from becoming one long, unchanging emotion.

Once you understand what your character wants, think about what they are actually doing to achieve it. This is where a technique called “actioning” can be useful.

Actioning involves assigning an active verb to a line or section of dialogue that describes what your character is trying to do to the other person. You may choose verbs such as “persuade,” “challenge,” “comfort,” “threaten,” “seduce,” “mock,” or “reassure.”

Rather than playing a line as simply “angry,” for example, you may decide that your character is challenging the other person. Finding the right verb for your character can help you approach the moment with intention. 

Characters don’t always say exactly what they mean. Subtext is the underlying meaning, feeling, or intention beneath the words being spoken. Your character might say, “I’m fine,” while desperately wanting someone to realise they’re not.

Look at the gap between what the character says and what they actually want. Ask:

• What does my character know that the other person doesn’t?
• What are they hiding?
• What do they want to say but can’t?
• Why are they choosing these particular words?
• What changes if the other character doesn’t respond?

Subtext can add layers to a performance without requiring you to exaggerate the emotion on the surface.

Credit: megaflopp/Shutterstock

The words themselves can provide clues about how a character thinks and behaves. Look for repeated words or phrases, unusual punctuation, interruptions, pauses, and changes in sentence length. Is the character precise or rambling? Do they use slang? Do they avoid certain subjects?

Read your lines aloud and listen to their rhythm. The writing may also tell you where a character’s thoughts shift. Don’t automatically smooth out awkward sentences or pauses; they may be meaningful.

After analysing the script, you should have a much clearer idea of who your character is and what they are trying to achieve. But script analysis isn’t about creating a rigid performance that you can never change.

Your analysis gives you a foundation. The rehearsal process gives you the opportunity to test your choices and to be responsive to your director’s feedback and instructions. You may discover something during rehearsal that changes your interpretation completely.

Try different actions. Experiment with how you approach an objective. Listen to your scene partner and see what happens when they respond differently.

The point of script analysis isn’t to prove that you understand every detail of a play, film, or television episode. It’s to give you some useful benchmarks.

The deeper you understand the circumstances, objectives, obstacles, relationships, and subtext, the more specific your choices can become. Rather than simply deciding that a scene is “sad” or “angry,” you can understand what your character is trying to achieve in that moment – and play the action.

That can make your performance feel more truthful, detailed, and responsive.

It can also make auditions less intimidating. If you’re given a scene you’ve never seen before, knowing how to do a script analysis gives you a process you can rely on.

And when it comes time to learn your lines, you’ll no longer be memorising a collection of words. You’ll understand what you’re saying, why you’re saying it, and what you’re trying to achieve.

The next time you open a script, don’t just ask, “What are my lines?” Instead, question: “What is happening, what do I want, and what am I doing to get it?” That’s where the real work of acting begins.