Finding grace in acting like a robot
It’s one thing to break out your best robot dance moves at a party, but it’s another to perfect the mannerisms of a hyper-advanced robot on TV.
Gemma Chan is an expert in the latter. The British actress plays one of the artificially intelligent personal aides called Synthetics — Synths, for short — on the AMC series Humans, airing Sundays.
Set in a parallel present London, England, Humans positions Synths as the must-have gadgets of the day. Yet Chan’s character, Anita, seems to be developing human traits that set her adoptive family on edge.
Playing a robot that provokes both empathy and uneasiness is a tricky feat, Chan says. One step too far into human territory you lose credibility. Appear too robotic, and you’re just a Roomba with pretty hair.
Chan spoke about the Synth boot camp on the set of Humans and the five steps it took to hone her character:
1. Workshopping
A month before filming, the actors worked with choreographer Dan O’Neill to hone the Synths’ mannerisms, Chan says. “We discovered that because these things were ultimately machines, every movement had to have an efficiency to it. There has to be a reason why everything is done in a certain way.”
2. Reprogramming
“We had to learn how to walk again, how to stand up and sit down,” Chan says. “As human beings, we have so many idiosyncrasies and physical ticks that we’re not even aware that we’re doing. So it was really tough to shift that back and find the stillness, and when you’re moving to find the grace of it all. ”
3. Personalizing
“Once we’d developed a common set of ground rules, we each did individual work with the choreographer to make the movement unique to our characters,” Chan says.
4. Repressing
“I have to play some difficult emotional scenes, and finding a way to play those but not being able to express emotion in the normal human way was really hard. I wasn’t allowed to cry, but I’d find that I’d still get tears in my eyes or cry. ”
5. Chilling out — literally
When Anita is first delivered to her new family, she’s packaged in a big see-though bag. Chan says that oddly enough, being in the bag — poked with air holes for safety — was a welcome challenge.
“It was really cold when we were filming — the winter in London — and my costume was just a layer of silk, so I actually found that I liked being in the bag. I asked them to leave me there in between takes.”