Christoph Waltz Quotes

I've seen so many excellent actors - excellent actors - who, the minute they're told they're in a comedy, turn into God knows what - creatures from another planet! I mean they just... the voice changes, they don't look the same, it's like - it has no similarity to any living human being, do you know what I mean?

If you're going to play a brain surgeon, you just have to learn how to say the words. You don't have to go and learn how to cut open somebody's scalp. I think acting is acting. Being is something else.

Comedy really is my bread and butter, even when I'm doing a serious character, with the exception of Outcast. I have found very little humor in this character. Most of the time, what I do, somewhere there is comedy in it.

I'm actually a thin serious person but I play fat and funny, but only for the movies.

Joey being one of my finest performances ever. Matt LeBlanc's basically doing the same thing right now, playing himself on Episodes. When I did Joey, I really leaned on them to make me the biggest ass they possibly could, because, frankly, everyone in their heart of hearts thinks of themselves that way. Or at least I do, anyway.

I'd love to do comedy. I'd probably have to get my laughing fits in check, because generally if I've done comedy, I'm usually the straight character that plays against the very obviously funny character, so that's really hard when the person is really hilarious.

I think if you play characters, it's very important not to ever tag them with any sort of disorder, or diagnose them, or whatever. You have to normalize the behavior to get inside the character.

I think you're bound to get a sense of any character that you play. It's not something you often do in comedy.

I would like to do a lot more of it, I feel comfortable with it and basically it's all in the writing. I'm not a personality type actor, I need a good script in order to be funny, but it's definitely something that I like doing.

I've never done anything comedic. In all the years I've been an actor, I've never delivered one comedic line.

I'm not an actor who consciously accesses bits of my life, in order to play parts. Obviously, you don't need to have been a father to play one, otherwise everyone who's been a father would be able to act.

If you play men, in a way it's easier. You can have a voicebox, you can have false hair, mustaches, wigs, you can have all kinds of stuff. But when you're playing women playing men, you only really have yourself to work with, plus tiny little extras.

Playing Shakespeare requires technique. You don't play a Bach toccata by getting in the mood.

It's our job as actors to make it look like it's not manufactured. If you have two actors who understand their characters - and therefore what they are trying to portray - then all they need to do is be the characters and there's a chemistry there.

I'm not a broad comedy guy. I've been funny in movies, but I'm not a comedian. I'm an actor who's sometimes funny.

I had the prosthetics on, and I went to my trailer, I looked in the mirror, and I smiled. And I was, like, "This is the character - everything she does is with a smile and a bit of glee and joy." And that's how I created Darla [from Buffy The Vampire Slayer]. Prior to that, I was, like, "I have no idea how to play this 400-year-old vampire from hell!".

You don't have to kill somebody to play a murderer. You have to read the script and interpret the character.

We get the scripts before the table read, but I don't look at them until we go into the table read. I don't want to know, when I'm playing a moment in the current episode, what's going to happen because it might change how I'm playing that.

When you play a character with power and energy, people lock into that and go, "Oh, this must be the guy."

I never like to go out of character when filming starts. I fear that if I do, I might not be able to pick it up again.

I think comedy's just about being interested in comedy and what makes people laugh and experimenting.

Female roles in comedies are usually quite silly, I think.

The delineation between the actor and his part is a practical matter. When the camera runs, you want the actor to be the character.

In television, and especially in a situation comedy, you kind of play yourself, or at least the essence of yourself.

With comedy, you have to do it right. In a drama, there's a lot of different ways to succeed in a moment. But comedy comes from reality. You can't try to be funny.