Improv Character improv games
A character is not an accent. It's a way of wanting something, and a body that wants it. These games build one fast — from a walk, from a status, from a single obsession — and then keep it alive when the scene stops being about it.
A Voice Per Body
Take a strong physical posture — hunched and heavy, puffed and proud, coiled and quick — and let a voice fall out of it without deciding one in advance. Speak a few lines as that body, then change posture and let a new voice arrive. The body leads, the voice follows, never the other way round. Character voices invented in the head come out as cartoons — a funny accent bolted onto nothing. Found in the body, they come out true, because a real voice is shaped by a real physicality: the heavy man rumbles, the anxious one clips his words. This links voice to body so your characters sound like someone, not like a bit.
Animal Work
Choose an animal and become it entirely: the rhythm, the breath, the centre of gravity, the way of looking. Then humanise it in stages — 75%, 50%, 25% — until only a person is left, with something animal inside.
Ask the Expert
One player is an expert on a subject the audience invents — the mating habits of clouds, competitive napping — and takes questions from the host or crowd. The expert knows nothing, and it doesn't matter: the game is total, unshakeable confidence. Every answer is delivered as settled fact, and the expert is never, ever wrong. It's a pure confidence and character drill, ideal for nervous players. There's no scene to build and no partner to track — just the discovery that commitment alone is funny, and that certainty invents its own logic if you never flinch.
Character Walks
Players walk the space, leading with one body part at a time — the nose, then the chest, the pelvis, the knees. Each lead changes the whole body, and from that changed body a voice, an age, an attitude and an opinion are allowed to emerge. Then they meet others and make small talk fully in character. It teaches that character starts in the body, not the head. Rather than inventing a personality and bolting it on, players discover one from a physical impulse — which produces truer, fuller, more surprising characters than "I'll be a grumpy pirate". It builds a reliable physical toolkit for finding people fast on stage.
Dub the Muted TV
Mute a drama or a talk show and dub every character out loud, live. You choose neither the entrances, nor the silences, nor the looks: you have to justify whatever happens, exactly as on stage. Fifteen minutes, never stopping to think.
Gift Giving
Pairs exchange imaginary gifts. The giver mimes handing over a wrapped box — the receiver opens it and defines what it is — "A puppy! You remembered!" — and the giver instantly justifies the choice as if they'd planned it all along. Swap roles and repeat, keeping the objects specific and the reactions warm. It drills two skills at once: endowment (the receiver names the gift, making a bold offer) and joyful acceptance (the giver says yes to whatever they're handed). It teaches players to give each other gifts on stage — to set a partner up to look good — and it quietly builds space-object work and the generosity that makes ensembles thrive.
Given Circumstances
Before playing, the partners silently settle four things: who I am to you, where we are, what has just happened, what I want now. Then the scene is played — and none of the four is ever spoken aloud. The audience must read them off the behaviour.
Good, Bad, Worst Advice
A panel of three takes real problems from the audience — my boss hates me, my plant is dying. One panellist always gives genuinely good advice, one gives clearly bad advice, and one gives catastrophically terrible advice, in that order. The frame is simple, but the room for character and escalation is enormous. It's an accessible character game with a clear engine. The fixed roles free players from inventing structure, so they can pour everything into distinct voices and heightening. It teaches playing to a defined function within an ensemble and finding the comedy in escalation — the "worst" seat is a masterclass in commitment.
Hot Seat Interview
One player sits in the hot seat as a character — invented on the spot or drawn from a prompt — and the group interviews them: name, job, childhood, secret fears, strong opinions. The character discovers their own history, voice and viewpoint live, in the act of answering, rather than deciding it all in advance. It's a character-depth builder and a superb warm-up before character-driven longforms. Players learn that a rich person is found through questions, not manufactured, and that committing to the first honest answer generates the next. It cures thin, one-note characters by giving them a past, a want and a texture — and it's low-pressure because there's no scene to sustain, only answers to give.
Interview Your Character
Invent a character in one sentence, then interview them for fifteen minutes — questions out loud, answers out loud: what do they eat in the morning? who do they lie to? what are they ashamed of? what have they lost? Write down the three answers that surprised you.
La Ronde
Scene 1 is characters A and B. Scene 2 keeps B and brings in C. Scene 3 keeps C and adds D, and so on, until the chain loops back to A — one community of interlinked characters, each scene overlapping the last by a single person. You watch relationships ripple across a whole town. The form forces continuity and consequence: a character carries what just happened into their next scene, so choices accumulate. It teaches character consistency, the discipline of the hand-off, and the pleasure of a world that feels connected. Simple to grasp, hard to play well — the carried-over character must stay the same person while everything around them changes.
Laban Efforts
Eight movement qualities to travel through: punch, float, press, glide, flick, slide, wring, dab. Each player explores walking, then an everyday gesture (pouring a glass) in each quality. Then improvise a short scene, keeping YOUR quality.
Party Quirks
A host is throwing a party. Three guests arrive one by one, each carrying a secret quirk, identity or condition suggested by the audience — a guest who thinks they're a lighthouse, who ages backwards, who can only lie. The host welcomes them and, through the scene, tries to guess each quirk, sending them off once they've got it. It's a character showcase built on endowment. The guests must play their quirk boldly enough to be readable but woven into real party behaviour, and the host must stay generous — guessing too fast kills it, guessing too slow drags. Great for teaching commitment to a single strong choice.
Play the Verb
Each player is secretly given a transitive verb to play on their partner: to seduce, to punish, to reassure, to humiliate, to rescue. You don't play an emotion, you DO something to someone. If the verb isn't working, change it mid-scene — as people do in life.
Record, Then Listen
Record two minutes of monologue in character — any pretext will do: a complaint, a wedding speech, a confession. Then listen back. The second half is the exercise: catch the tics, the sentences that curl up at the end, the irony you hide behind, the moments where you comment instead of playing.
Status Party
Everyone draws a playing card that sets their social status (ace low, king high) and mingles at a party playing it — without ever naming a number. Then the twist: hold the card to your forehead so you can see everyone's status but not your own, and treat each other accordingly until you can guess where you sit. It's the clearest status drill there is. Players learn that status is played, not stated — through eye contact, space, interruption, how you offer a drink — and that it's relative, shifting with whoever you meet. Status is the hidden engine of most scenes, and feeling it in the body here makes it usable everywhere.
Status Walk
Out in the street, one afternoon: walk twenty minutes in high status (steady gaze, slow gestures, few words), then twenty minutes in low status (darting eyes, small gestures, apologies). Play nothing — change only those three settings, and watch what people give back.
Superheroes
A crisis is announced — the moon is falling, all the world's socks have vanished. The first hero steps up and is given a ridiculous name by the audience, then must solve nothing alone: as each new hero arrives, the player already onstage christens them ("Thank goodness you're here, Captain Lukewarm!") and that player must instantly embody whatever name they've been handed. It's an endowment engine. Nobody names themselves — you become whoever your teammates declare you to be, and you say yes with your whole body. It teaches accepting a gift and building a character from a single label, plus the generosity of setting each other up for a strong entrance.
The Moment Before
Before entering, each player decides in silence what happened to them ten seconds ago — not yesterday, ten seconds. They've just been fired, they've just read a message, they've been running. You come in WITH that, and play an ordinary scene.
The Pitch Ladder
Say one sentence at the very bottom of your voice — a gravelly basement. Then climb, rung by rung, the same sentence a little higher each time, until you're up in a squeak, then come back down. Notice the two or three rungs where your voice cracks, tightens or hides: those are your edges. Most improvisers live on three notes and call it their voice. A character lives in pitch as much as in words — the timid one thin and high, the boss low and slow. Widening your range hands you a whole cast to draw on, and this ladder shows you exactly where the unused rungs are.
Three Faces in the Mirror
In front of a mirror: pick three people you crossed paths with today — the cashier, the man on the bus, your boss. Take each one's body for sixty seconds: the back, the rhythm, the gaze, the mouth at rest. Don't hunt the caricature, hunt the exact posture. Move from one to the next without stopping.