This evening I attended a talk by one of my favorite writers, George Saunders. In the course of a wide ranging conversation with the audience, he mentioned something a writer gets to do that we can’t normally do in real life: See things from inside somebody else’s head.
In particular, the writer can give us a privileged view of the minds of people we would not at all like in real life. In fact, we might go out of our way to them. But when we encounter such a prickly soul as a literary character, we find ourselves inside his head, and therefore cannot help but understand how he feels. And so we like him.
To do the same thing as an actor requires an analogous kind of skill. Think about the actors and actresses who have made you like a character you would have found repulsive in real life. These actors give us a window into the human soul that the average leading man or leading lady could never provide.