Nollywood actor Ebisan Arayi has shared a powerful insight into the mental discipline required in his craft, revealing how he carefully chooses roles and why failing to detach from a character can spill into real life.
Speaking on the Conversations With Kenni podcast hosted by Kehinde Ajose, the rising star explained what he prioritises before accepting any part.
“The first thing I consider is the character. The character is very important because an actor’s character is how social media shapes society or culture these days. Once I consider the character, I check if the character is strong enough and inclined with who I am or if I have to create a new personality for that character,” Arayi said.
He also looks at the story itself.
“Is it heavy enough? Does it have depth? Or is it just the predictable type of film? I’m so grateful to God that we now have quite a number of storytellers in Nigeria that are doing a fantastic job by creating more depth in movies.”
Arayi described his unique method of assessing roles.
“I consider the character first because I have something I call a character box where I have to go in to check if I have the range to pull it off or if I have to create or recreate it. Is something similar to what I have in the box in the script? Do I need to recreate that? Or do I need to create from scratch?”
When asked if he had ever struggled to leave a character behind, the actor became more intense.
“It is an actor’s job to create characters and undo them because if you don’t undo your characters, your characters can undo you,” he stated.
He recalled a personal experience that drove the point home. After returning to Nollywood following a break that began in 2011 when he left for school, he found himself on set with an actress and suddenly felt unexplained resentment toward her.
“I’ve been on set with an actress before who I don’t know why I had resentment for her. Then I remembered during the shoot that I was still seeing her as a character from another show from some time back. It was around the time I came back from my break. I left Nollywood in 2011 for school before I came back. I had to remind myself that I was an actor and this was a new character here in front of me. I can’t hold the resentment my former character had towards her own former character towards her in the present.”
Arayi stressed the danger of carrying residual emotions.
“If you don’t undo a character you build for a particular movie, you’ll find out that it’ll start to undo you. If I didn’t undo it immediately, I would have probably been giving her some type of vibes that would’ve hindered her own performance or confuse her own character if she had built a character for it. I had to undo that character on the spot, reminding myself that it was a new movie and a new set.”
He described characters as deeply immersive.
“So yeah, you have to get out of characters because they can be really deep. I don’t know about other actors, but for me, characters are very deep. You know what it means to tap into some parts of yourself and become who you’re not because of something you have just read? If you’re not an actor, I don’t think you’ll understand that. Except if you’re not an actor, but you have the gift of bringing fiction to life. It’s then you can be able to understand what I’m talking about. Acting is not something you learn, it’s a rare gift from the creator himself.”
The candid conversation offered fans a deeper look at the emotional labour behind Arayi’s performances and the self-awareness that helps him stay grounded in an industry that demands constant transformation.