Mekhi Phifer Quotes

When I do a character, I try to base it on someone I have met or an experience I've had.

I take my time to get into the mindset of the character and say my lines. I really have to be the person that I am playing.

As an actor, you pay attention very closely to everything that happens to you, and you're constantly watching others as well, trying to just find out where everything comes from.

You have to play your characters, not like them.

For me, as an actress, you are playing a character, and to play that character, you have to get into that mindset.

I used to think the actor's job was immersing himself completely in another personality.

If James Franco's wearing a costume, and I'm wearing a motion capture suit, we don't act any differently with each other because of what we're wearing. We're embodying our roles.

I suppose with any character that you play you always bring your personal experience to it. You always bring people that you know or that you've met and sort of - this is what I do, I mean, I don't know what anyone else does - but people that you know or that you've met that have affected you in certain ways, you bring into it.

That's what acting is. You're pretending to be someone else.

One of the reasons I love acting is because I'm so interested in other people's lives, and I often incorporate things I hear or observe into my work. I've become a bit of a 'person addict,' and so I like brushing up against lots of different characters.

An actress spends a lifetime observing people. You build up a mental library. No, not a library. Make that a repository.

I don't have any training as an actor, but I guess I'm an intense pretender. When you read something over and over, it gets into you a little bit. You can't help but begin to feel it, even if you're a healthy person as I think I am.

As actors, you play people who are not yourselves!

In acting, you have to pull from real-life situations, from people, to help develop a character.

You have to be completely in the character, and that's so hard to do. That's why, when they call, 'Cut!,' you often feel yourself shift. Unless you're Daniel Day Lewis, who stays in character all the time, there's a switch that happens.

I find it quite easy to get in and out of character. I don't know why - I guess it's my job.

I think it's always easier to play parts that you have something concrete that you can relate to.

The way I approach acting when there's a real life character, it's sort of like a Venn diagram. What I come up with is some amalgam of the two of us.

Let me put it this way. There is more to acting than just acting like somebody. I like to act in such a way that other people get some notion of what it's like to be somebody.

One of my favorite parts of being an actress is being a detective.

As an actor, you can't just imitate someone. You have to get under her skin.

The whole business of being an actor is to explore, from research to shooting to why you do it. You're trying to see why people do what they do and how it feels to do what they do.

Once you're playing someone, you shouldn't be judging them in any way. That's what being an actor is - it's having empathy for people that are different from yourself. Once you've committed to that person, your responsibility is to tell that story.

I don't know how to play a character unless I love him.

The only thing that I know how to do as an actor, as a trained actor, is you can't villainize the character you're playing. Whether it's a fictional character or a real character. Because then you operate from that sort of negative point of view, and you can't humanize him.