Ian Mckellen Quotes

I think you have to draw from any character and bring it to yourself as much as possible.

The interesting thing about acting is using all your own stuff and having some kind of personal catharsis while you're working.

As much as I know people love the method and what you can draw out of yourself, a lot of acting is very imaginative.

In acting, you draw so much on your private life.

I tend to get comfortable with the dialogue and find out who the person is in the script and try to hit that. People are sort of independent of their occupations and their pastimes. You don't play a politician or a fireman or a cowboy - you just play a person.

I've always used my own personal emotions and things that I've gone through in my life to build a character. The work that I do before a film feels almost like therapy, between me and whoever I'm playing.

As an actor, you always want to find a piece of who you are in every role you take on.

I didn't need clothes. I was allowed the opportunity to act out moments you don't get the opportunity to experience in your own life, let alone as a character in a film. I didn't feel naked.

I think there's always pieces of yourself that bleed into your character. That's inevitable.

In acting process, it's very difficult to explain. It's something very intimate, very private.

I've always remembered something Sanford Meisner, my acting teacher, told us. When you create a character, it's like making a chair, except instead of making someting out of wood, you make it out of yourself. That's the actor's craft - using yourself to create a character.

I love acting it's apart of me and I try to put a little bit of myself in each of my roles.

When I do my job, I dive into these characters and try to flush something out of myself into these characters, and hopefully that translates well.

There are elements of myself in every character I do, just because you take from your real life experiences and sprinkle those into your character.

In acting, while you play different roles, you begin to discover yourself and begin to notice life as you relate to the characters you represent.

In all my characters, I try to find an iota of myself, and in Castle, I found a lot. He gets away with a lot, so that's fun.

I think it's necessary to identify with anything - with any character you play, there's got to be something in common, so you can link up to that person, even if it's like one tiny thing. But it's equally fun to play somebody completely different, and trying to find what that thing is to make it.

One of the nice things about acting is that it allows you to open up to the other people within you.

The joy of acting for me is to be able to experience emotions in a safe environment. You can't scream and cry in the street because everybody will look. If you do it on a movie set, you get applauded.

The thing I adore about acting is that it's not me: you get to experience all these emotions, but essentially it's not you.

Actors are pretending for you, but they're not lying. They are not putting on a guise instead of themselves. They are finding things inside that they have experienced.

I don't really approach a character as to whether or not it's good or bad. I just approach a character as to where it lives in me.

When I'm creating a character, I don't see it so much as playing someone else as just playing a specific part of myself under certain circumstances.

In every character you play, as much as you hate to admit it as an actor, but there's an element of you that you bring to it. Either the character helps you discover that element of you or the other way around, where that element of you helps you discover the character.

Everything, I think, about acting is based on imagination.