Bruce Nelson describes himself as an “outside-in” actor. This means that he finds a character’s external mannerisms—his voice and body language—before discovering the character’s internal motivations. This is contrary to the “inside-out” process that most American actors use today, but Nelson’s method has worked so well for him that this newspaper has twice named him Baltimore’s “Best Actor”—in 2004 and 2011.

One reason Nelson’s approach works so well is that audiences also work “outside-in.” When we sit in the audience at the Everyman Theatre to watch Nelson play Elyot Chase, the cynical British aristocrat in the white tuxedo in Everyman’s current production of Noel Coward’s Private Lives, the first thing we encounter are those mannerisms, and we use them to discern his inner thoughts.

When Elyot, on his honeymoon, steps out on the balcony of a French hotel for a cocktail, he doesn’t realize that his ex-wife Amanda, whom he hasn’t seen in five years, has done the same at the far end of the balcony. When Nelson and actress Deborah Hazlett notice each other out of the corners of their eyes, they turn their heads toward each other in synchronized slow motion.

We expect an explosion, but all we get are widened eyes, and then back on go the masks of polite smiles and banter. Where’s the big reaction? Wait a minute, wait a minute, here it comes—Amanda leaves the porch and Elyot finally lets go and retches with disgust. These outer signifiers—the surprise, the masks, the retching—tell us everything we need to know about a man who feels compelled to keep up appearances at all costs, even in the face of realizing that he’s not as over his first marriage as he thought.

“When I get a script,” Nelson, 45, says in the men’s dressing room at Everyman, “the first thing I look for are those outer things—a line I can say in a certain way, a bit of business. A director hands you a cigarette case and a lighter and says, ‘Can you use this?’ I say, ‘Sure.’ I pick up the case, tap it, pop the cigarette in my mouth, and then pop it back out because I’m so aghast at something Amanda has just said. That’s how I find my character. I don’t think about it—it just happens.”

And it does happen. In all of Nelson’s most memorable roles—as Elyot, as Charlotte in I Am My Own Wife at Everyman, as Louis de Rougemont in Shipwrecked at Everyman, as Martin in The Goat or, Who Is Sylvia? at Rep Stage—the character always wears a mask of deception, but there’s always a moment when that mask slips. When that happens, not only does the audience learn something surprising about the character, we get the sense that the character himself is making the same discovery at the same moment.

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