Books Featuring Actors as Characters

Books Featuring Actors as Characters

This article relates to Audition

The protagonist of Katie Kitamura's Audition is an actress, and sections of the novel reflect her thought process on performance, from the creation of her character to her considerations of a play's rhythms and structures. This plot device allows author Kitamura to contemplate themes that she and all novelists must also explore, such as character development and ways of viewing identity. It is no wonder that novelists so often utilize other types of performers as protagonists.

For readers interested in this kind of reflective conversation between the arts, here are a few novel suggestions that revolve around theatrical and film performance. In these novels, the protagonist's identity as a performer provides a circuit for the novelist to branch into themes that deepen their reflections on their own work as artists and as creators of characters.

Actress
by Anne Enright

The daughter of a legendary actress sets out to write her mother's biography. Among other aspects of the acting life, the novel explores the changing landscape of sexual exploitation in film industry, the crafting of character, the celebrity's rocky relationship with fans, and the strength that an actor can draw from her art.

Enter Ghost
by Isabella Hammad

A London-based actress visits her childhood home in Haifa and joins a West Bank production of Hamlet. This novel delves into the acting process and follows the actress as she creates her character.

Trust Exercise
by Susan Choi

Teenagers at a performing arts high school navigate play production under the eye of a charismatic and manipulative teacher. This plot takes several sharp turns as characters reveal themselves to be deeply unreliable, but ultimately the novel is about power and performance.

The Hypocrite
by Jo Hamya

A father watches a play by his daughter, a young playwright, and witnesses her refashioning of a traumatic period of her childhood that involves him. The author uses this performance to open a dialogue about how life's difficulties can be transformed into art, and what kinds of responsibilities the writer bears toward others.

Mona Acts Out
by Mischa Berlinski

Several weeks before taking on the role of Cleopatra, Mona spends Thanksgiving musing on the experiences which led up to and may or may not inform the role that she is about to play.

Other novels that center actors on stage and screen include Saving Hamlet by Molly Booth, All's Well by Mona Awad, Playworld by Adam Ross, and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.

Filed under Reading Lists

This "beyond the book article" relates to Audition. It originally ran in April 2025 and has been updated for the April 2026 paperback edition. Go to magazine.