I can't lay claim to this but today I read an interesting UK Guardian article about 'over acting', on Heath Ledger's Joker it said: Above all, however, we must pay homage to Heath Ledger's Joker. His self-conscious metalaugh ("Hoo, hee, ha ... "), the way he licks his lips, his 8-year-old-boy-doing-something-wrong voice – it's all of it better than the best of Jack Nicholson (widely praised for his own overacting in the Tim Burton Batman). Why is it better? Because Ledger, though he is milking the hell out of every line, believes in the Joker. Somehow – and here we come to the paradox at the heart of overacting – the most stylised way to play a character is to inject the lines with so much psychological realism they're almost bursting. Ledger delivers a line-reading worthy of Lear (at 2:00, the way he says: "No I'm not. No. I'm. Not."), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K3E5tLoadoa psychologically true character as cartoonish as O'Toole's Lawrence. If you truly believe in a character, you can act the hell out of it – you can stretch that rubber band as far as you can, because you know it's not going to snap. Overacting is believing. Chris Michael http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/oct/11/why-i-love-overacting The article currently has 192 comments but this one really caught my eye, interesting from a writing point of view: '[Ledger] was portraying a psychopath. And having worked with psychopathic personalities in the mental health field, what he did was eerily accurate. There can be a flatness of affect punctuated with a manic or over-specific cadence speech pattern. A belief in nothing but self gain. No emotional depth. A dated physical presentation. Obsessive behaviours, especially around controlling other people and situations. He had it all right. Exactly right. The hair on the back of my neck stands up every time I watch him portray that character.' (Sorry for posting if this if it needs to be removed due to my pasting other folks comments!)

Sorry please ignore me, this was meant for the 'psycho' posting