Newsweek s Oscar Roundtable Comfort in the Discomfort

Viola Davis explains why she wrote a 50page biography to play the mother of a Catholic schoolboy in Doubt. I always go, Why did I tell people that , she says. Its so embarrassing. It makes me feel like Im being such the thespian. But Michael Fassbender reveals that he did the same thing, when he played Magneto in XMen: First Class. The actors talk about other ways they find their charactersand the pitfalls of doing things that make a performance seem artificial.