If you play an evil character, it’s gotta stick a little.
And if you’re a character-actor who always gets the evil role. If you play 100 evil guys. Then 100X moreso.
You get into the evil role. See the world through evil eyes and evil motivations.
And over time, It’s gotta bend your personality towards real evilness. Right?
I suppose you could google evil-character-actors. 20 years later, how many got arrested for something heinous.
What do you think?
EDIT
Put more generally : Can habits gained in one context bleed over into another context?
Yes.
Do they?
Possibly. With increasing probability as the habit becomes stronger. And there’s self-awareness to consider. And how much the habit clashes with the new context.
Some of the best regarded actors in terms of sincerity and generosity are actors who notoriously play villains, like all of the stories about how Alan Rickman was on the set of Harry Potter, he played Snape in the movies and his breakout role was as Hans Gruber in Die Hard, but to the Harry Potter kids he was their favorite mentor and they have quite a few stories about him that they’ve shared with the public since Alan’s death in 2016.
Playing a villain is hard when you’re not that sort of person, that’s why actors treat playing a villain as a challenge, and why the villain role is treated with prestige. However, that’s acting, acting is the art of transforming yourself into somebody else, and some people simply do it far better than others, and some people simply aren’t acting that’s just who they are, only history will spot the difference.
Ya but the question was “does playing evil make you evil?”. Not “does playing evil reveal a preexisting evil?”. It’s a big difference.