Perhaps you’ve seen the new Beauty and Beast film this year. I’m not going to lie; my daughter and I were GRIEVED that Dan Stevens had to be written out of Downton Abbey in order to take on the role of the Beast for this film, but he was perfect! In numerous interviews, he talks about how he had to fuse several technologies in order to get the full role of the Beast layered into the film, and it struck me that this triple-pass to building a character follows the way I often coach kids in building their interpretive characters.