Carlos Mencia Quotes

Acting is reacting. You can't react if you're not paying attention, if you're not listening.

Acting to me is always reacting.

I'm more interested in knowing my cues than my lines. If you know what your cues are, then you know what your reaction is going to be to them. Acting is about reacting, and if I can kind of purely react, that's easier for me.

Acting lessons teach you to really listen to what the other person is saying because in acting it's all about responding to the lines.

The big secret in acting is listening to people.

I'm always an advocate of 'acting is reacting,' which can be difficult.

I often have the feeling that acting is really not difficult, because all I do is I just listen. I just listen. I just listen to what there is. And if there's nothing, then I listen to nothing. If there's a chair, and it's empty, I listen to an empty chair, and I will respond to it.

I think back story can help guide your choices, but when you're playing a scene, you're not making choices; you're just intuitive.

It's sort of the most important thing for acting, is to listen to the person you're dealing with.

I think you can really tell a good actor if you can put a camera on them and they can just talk and emote and react and you don't have to keep cutting away from them, because they are the language and the behavior. It's all a tour-de-force performance.

Robert De Niro taught me how to listen, and how to be part of the conversation. It's not just about reading your lines and saying what's in the script; you have to understand your character, along with the other characters so that you can always respond.

Having a guy on a microphone yelling lines at you is counter to a lot of acting techniques.

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 was a student of Stella Adler and then later Lee Strasberg, and they were into sensory work. At its best, acting is not about words - even when the words are important.

Jack Nicholson is a textbook actor who's very intuitive. He is absolutely brilliant at going as far as you can go, always pushing to the edge, but still making it seem real.

There are certain things I learned when I first started learning about acting, to try and place the character physically and emotionally. And the way you place them emotionally is often with humor.

Unfortunately, when you're an actor you have to act. It's not like you can sit in your living room, your bedroom, your study or whatever and act with yourself. It requires having somebody to respond to.

I get bored at the theatre a lot because I notice that there's not always a connection between the actors. They may be technically proficient, but they're not surprising each other. I'm thrilled by actors who make choices that are surprising.

If you're working opposite an actor who can act, then all you have to do is listen and respond.

When you see bad acting, that's usually what it is - they're not listening to the other characters. It's always hard with first-time actors to get them in that moment where they are really listening to the other characters and reacting to the other characters.

If I read something and respond to the role, that's what happens, and if those happen to be a few comedies in a row, or not, so be it.

Acting is about listening and reacting. John Wayne was right: Acting is just reacting. You don't have to do much - as long as you stay out of the way of others. That's why it works.

As an actor, you always find your way. You have whatever preparation techniques you use, and you just go with the scene when you're on set. You can only plan so much when you're working, because things have to come naturally in the scene.

I personally take cues directly from the script, then I like to surprise the other actors. But you must maintain control on a level and see how far you can go up, down or out emotionally. You have to balance the craft with spontaneity.

The thing about improvisation is that it's not about what you say. It's listening to what other people say. It's about what you hear.