Acting is not about being someone different. It's finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.
Our heroes are human heroes. That's a very new situation. Most other societies have had, right at their center, the worship of something transcendent: a god, a spirit, a natural force, the universe, whatever it is -- something else that is being worshiped. We've slightly lost the habit of doing that, which is, I think, why we're particularly drawn to nature.
In the realm of perception, the whole is not only more than but also very different from the sum of its parts.