ABSTRACT
Characters in “real-life media” such as theater performances, films, or TV shows are usually embodied by human actors. Our cognitive person schema, which activates all other aspects of character recognition, is strongly connected to our innate intuition that a person primarily has, or even is, a human body. This chapter looks deeper into the complicated relationship between actors and characters to offer some basic categories and distinctions for their mutual analysis. In the first section, it differentiates between actual persons (actors), star personas, and the characters they portray, touching on the question of how all three dimensions are often entangled and interrelated. The second section then looks at actor-character-relations in more detail, discussing many examples in which a one-to-one correlation is abandoned, as well as inquiring to what degree actors can be considered co-authors of the characters they portray. This leads to the introduction of representational correspondence, a highly useful concept capturing the fact that audiences have to constantly distinguish between the perceptible character traits recorded from actors on the one hand and the mimetic, intersubjective construct of the storyworld on the other. Finally, the chapter relates this back to social, political, and ideological issues of embodiment, especially with regard to problematic media practices like Blackface and Whitewashing.
