Can Hypnosis Help Actors Become Their Characters?
What a study of 32 actors suggests about attention, imagination and performance
At first glance, acting and hypnosis may seem like very different worlds. But both raise a surprisingly similar question: how can the mind make an imagined reality feel real enough to change what we experience?
This question has followed me for years. My name is Tiago Garcia, and my background in Film Studies first made me interested in how actors build characters. Later, studying psychology and neuroscience made me wonder what might be happening psychologically when someone becomes deeply absorbed in being another person.
That curiosity led to our recent study on hypnosis and theatrical performance. Here I explore what happens when actors become immersed in a character, why hypnosis may be relevant, and what our findings suggest about it.
Becoming Someone Else
Good acting is not simply about remembering lines or copying behaviour. Actors often have to create a believable inner world for someone who may think, feel and behave very differently from themselves.
Two influential approaches to modern acting come from Konstantin Stanislavski, a Russian actor and director, and Sanford Meisner, an American actor and teacher. Stanislavski urged actors to engage deeply with a character's circumstances and emotions, whereas Meisner stressed spontaneous, truthful responses in the moment. Both show how acting means engaging with a reality the performer knows is fictional.
There is also evidence that acting changes self-referential processing, which is the brain activity involved in thinking about ourselves rather than someone else. In a brain imaging study of actors performing Shakespeare, adopting a character was linked to reduced activity in frontal brain regions that support thinking about our own perspective, which the researchers described as a temporary “loss of self”.
Researchers have also asked whether acting training might strengthen social cognition and emotional control - social cognition being the ability to read what others are thinking or feeling, and emotional control, the capacity to manage one's own emotional responses. Both matter on stage, because actors must take a character's perspective while staying in control of the scene. Acting, then, becomes a fascinating cognitive act in which attention shifts away from the ordinary sense of self towards an imagined identity.
Why Hypnosis?
Hypnosis is not unconsciousness, nor does it hand another person control of your mind; people stay aware throughout. In research, hypnosis is studied through suggestion, focused attention, absorption and changes in how experiences are perceived. Suggestion is a verbal or imagined prompt that shapes what someone notices, feels or believes; focused attention is narrowing awareness onto one idea or sensation while other stimuli fade; and absorption is becoming so engaged in an experience that competing thoughts recede.
That is where the link with acting becomes interesting. Actors, too, focus attention, engage with imagined circumstances and respond to fictional events as though they matter. If hypnosis can support these processes, it may be a useful way to explore role immersion.
How We Tested the Idea
We recruited 32 professional actors. Each participant randomly performed two roles: a firefighter and a person being rescued from a fire. One role was developed and performed following hypnosis, a guided process in which a researcher led the actor through relaxation and progressively narrowed attention before offering suggestions to support immersion in the character, while the other followed a breathing control condition, in which actors instead practised structured breathing and relaxation exercises without any hypnotic induction or suggestion. This gave us a comparison condition that accounted for the effects of simply relaxing before a performance, so any extra benefit after hypnosis could not be put down to relaxation alone.
We also measured hypnotisability, how strongly a person tends to respond to hypnotic suggestions. After each performance, actors answered questions about character creation, immersion, vividness and stress.
When Imagination Starts to Feel Real
The most striking pattern was not just that actors reported a stronger experience with hypnosis. Their descriptions suggested a shift from thinking about the fictional situation to experiencing it more vividly.
Around 72 per cent said hypnosis made character creation easier, while around 84 per cent reported that they could considerably experience what was happening to the character. Participants were also more likely to report sensations related to the burning building, including feeling heat.
This raises a broader question: how can something we know is fictional shape what we actually feel? Actors constantly navigate this boundary, meaning they know the fire is imaginary, yet a convincing performance depends on responding to it as if it mattered.
Our findings do not show that hypnosis makes imagination indistinguishable from reality. They do suggest that changing how attention is directed can influence how vivid an imagined situation feels, which matters not just for acting, but for understanding how suggestion and imagination shape experience.
We also found an intriguing link with stress. After performing under hypnosis, nearly all participants reported little or no anxiety. We cannot say hypnosis helps actors recover from demanding roles, but it raises a question: might techniques that alter immersion also shape how performers move into and out of intense emotion?
What Might Be Happening?
One possibility is that hypnosis helps redirect attention.
Actors must stay in control of the performance while also responding spontaneously as the character. Too much self-monitoring gets in the way. Anyone who has become suddenly aware of their own voice while speaking in public knows the problem: watch yourself too closely and what felt natural turns difficult.
Hypnosis may quiet some of this internal monitoring, allowing attention to shift away from thoughts about yourself and towards the experience itself. For instance, brain-imaging research has found changes in brain networks involved in attention and self-focused thinking during hypnosis, including reduced activity in areas associated with thinking about yourself and letting your mind wander, alongside changes in networks involved in directing attention.
Are Actors Especially Responsive to Hypnosis?
In our study, more than 70 per cent of the actors scored high or very high on hypnotisability. Why might that be? The traits that make someone easy to hypnotise resemble what good acting demands: losing yourself in an imagined situation, holding attention inward, and letting a suggestion take hold.
Actors practice these very skills each time they build a character. That does not make acting and hypnosis the same, but the overlap is striking.
Where Could This Lead?
The obvious question is whether hypnosis can make someone a better actor. Our study cannot answer that because it relied on actors' own reports, with no independent observers judging whether performances were objectively better.
But the implications may reach beyond performance quality. If the findings hold up, hypnosis could matter in two ways. Practically, it might give actors another tool for exploring characters and emotional engagement.
Other open questions follow: could such techniques also help performers step out of intense roles, or reshape how they approach character work over time?
There may also be implications beyond the stage. As noted, actors felt less stress once a hypnosis-assisted scene ended. We did not study a clinical population, so we cannot say whether the same would ease anxiety or other everyday challenges. But that mix of temporary identity flexibility and better emotional recovery raises a question: could it help people cope with difficult moments in daily life?
For me, that is where theatre, psychology and neuroscience become especially interesting. Acting shows us that imagination is not simply something we think about; under the right conditions, it shapes what we feel, notice and experience.
Hypnosis may give us another way to understand how that happens.
