Unpopular opinion : Why do we have actors?

It’s kind of weird that humans pretend to be other humans. Then we watch it because we are fascinated by humans pretending to be other humans even though we know they aren’t the right humans. That they are in fact imposters …and we all just eat popcorn and stare at it. Books are even a sketchy pastime because you’re reading someone else’s mind and you think you can only do that because they wrote it down for you. Do you really need the symbols known as words to read someone’s mind? Or have we just been conditioned to believe we need the symbols. If you think about it we are translating someone’s thoughts out of symbols but it’s not likely we need the symbols.