Jessica Chastain Quotes

I love intimacy, always, of performing.

Acting is the most communicative thing I can imagine doing.

Don't forget there are two sides to performing. Finding the truth, but you also have to be transparent enough for the audience to see it. How many times have you seen a performance and thought: 'Well, it seems to be meaning a great deal to you but it ain't coming across to me?' It is to be shared.

It's just poetry, beauty and love. How hard can that be to act?

As an actor, you're naked emotionally; you're revealing yourself emotionally.

Acting is also working with people who invite you into their dreams and trust you with their innermost being.

There's a oneness to showing yourself to an audience. They feel that. It's healthy. That's what acting is all about.

The immediacy of improvisation is intoxicating, but there's an intimacy that you get that's very different when you're doing drama.

I always found that the closer I got to who I really am, on stage, the more they responded to it.

What's great about acting is you can let all your wackiness hang out while you work.

I liked theatre because I could hide behind a role I was playing, but now, I just love being on stage. I don't pretend that I'm anyone else, I just show my full range when I am up there, and it's very liberating.

I think as an actor, you have to make yourself vulnerable to emotions.

I feel the dams of emotions open up more easily when one is acting.

I can disappear into things very easily. But with acting, you have to be in the moment, and it gives me this incredibly fulfilling emotion: being really present.

Playing live is closer to theatre, although when you're up there on your own, it's quite scary and revealing because you're playing your own songs. It's like a one man show that you've written yourself.

It's communication - that's what theatre is all about.

I do this acting thing mostly for myself. I like to make a connection and communicate with the audience to make myself feel less lonely. I also do it to develop my own character, so sometimes I do it to just be away in a certain area that I've never been to. But mostly, the story has to do something for me.

Action is drama. If we cannot make the audience laugh, smile or cry with us, we are not actors.

I feel that I'm sort of playing me but more feminine, and to me more feminine means smarter.

I guess I'm just a born performer or artist or sharer. I find the intimate details of my life compelling and interesting. I guess that I'm assuming that everyone else does, too.

The body cannot lie. You cannot be somebody else onstage, no matter how good of an actor or dancer or singer you are. When you open your arms, move your finger, the audience knows who you are, you know.

To put on a performance, you have to be emotional. You can't be a zombie.

The key to acting - from what little I know about that wonderful craft - is listening, and interacting with the other person in order to achieve magic. One way to do that is almost to provoke.

I had a moment - and I don't know if it was funny, necessarily, but I realized the effect I could have on people - when I was doing a production of 'The Little Prince,' and I played the snake.

The more you're writing absolutely honestly, and absolutely bare of intention - even if it feels absolutely personal and small because it's at your own scale - other people relate to it much more.