Genuinely asking—it’s not rhetorical.
I ask because I’ve started to notice how often my questions come from a place of already anticipating the answer. Not only in my acting, but in my life.
It feels strange to admit because questions sit beneath nearly every story, world, and character I create. Curiosity is one of the central ideas running through my work. Yet in conversation, I often find myself riding the rhetorical wave: asking while simultaneously analyzing the person, the situation, and the answer I expect to receive.
That habit becomes especially visible in acting because many characters genuinely do not know. They ask from wonder, uncertainty, hope, fear, or simple curiosity. They are not always interpreting the person in front of them or trying to solve the scene before it has happened. Sometimes they ask because they need an answer.
Of course, I experience curiosity too. I’m not a robot. But it is not always my first instinct. I tend to wonder with furrowed brows instead of widened eyes, and it can take time for me to enter the kind of openness that allows a question to remain unanswered.
So I’m working on it through new monologues. I’m trying to let curiosity become the driving force rather than an undercurrent – to allow wonder to exist without immediately turning it into analysis. To ask from innocence rather than intelligence. To remain inside the question instead of rushing toward what I think it means.
Does that make sense?
Sigh.
I’m still working on it.