[OOC] David on Jackson's Trauma
May. 28th, 2016 09:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ididntforgetYour character is holding in a massive amount of trauma from a brief time in his childhood. How did that influence your portrayal of him?
It very much influences every character in the show. There are four boys that went to the juvenile detention facility and what I found fascinating is that different things happened to different kids in that moment...but they all went through a trauma and suffered in various ways from PTSD. So my character...has the effect of that PTSD and the effect of that trauma and him getting over it has meant that he has compartmentalized it...and pushed it down to his very core...His entire M.O. is about removing himself from every aspect that might create a trigger for what he's been through...So he spends a lot of that time in the pilot and throughout the season trying desperately to push these elements of trauma back into his bedrock so that he can function.
The big elephant in the room is sexual abuse, which plays a major part of this story. It seems like the show's policy is to address it but not make it the main part of the story.
Exactly, you don't want to make it the main point of the show. The essence of great storytelling, in my opinion, is to not show what it is the person actually went through--Because the imagination of the human is so much more violent than than any picture you can paint...And with this story...we leave it very much in the hands of the actors to portray the results the abuse as opposed to the abuse itself. And in doing so we allow the audience the ability to come with us on a story that...might get them to think about something which they might might not otherwise have thought about but not doing so in a way that is going to make it grotesque or too confronting.
[From HERE]
It very much influences every character in the show. There are four boys that went to the juvenile detention facility and what I found fascinating is that different things happened to different kids in that moment...but they all went through a trauma and suffered in various ways from PTSD. So my character...has the effect of that PTSD and the effect of that trauma and him getting over it has meant that he has compartmentalized it...and pushed it down to his very core...His entire M.O. is about removing himself from every aspect that might create a trigger for what he's been through...So he spends a lot of that time in the pilot and throughout the season trying desperately to push these elements of trauma back into his bedrock so that he can function.
The big elephant in the room is sexual abuse, which plays a major part of this story. It seems like the show's policy is to address it but not make it the main part of the story.
Exactly, you don't want to make it the main point of the show. The essence of great storytelling, in my opinion, is to not show what it is the person actually went through--Because the imagination of the human is so much more violent than than any picture you can paint...And with this story...we leave it very much in the hands of the actors to portray the results the abuse as opposed to the abuse itself. And in doing so we allow the audience the ability to come with us on a story that...might get them to think about something which they might might not otherwise have thought about but not doing so in a way that is going to make it grotesque or too confronting.
[From HERE]
