Victor Garber Quotes

As an actor, I believe that acting is actually behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances.

There is no overacting, only untrue acting.

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.

Nobody is more truthful when he's acting than De Niro.

Everyone seems to think they know what acting techniques are. Techniques just help you get to a certain place, but if the thing is happening just by itself, you don't need those techniques.

There's a large chunk of me in all the parts. As an actor, I got involved largely because I want to let things out. The best acting is that that is most real and the only way to do that, is to genuinely feel it.

For me, what makes great actors, always is how truthful they are to the character and the story and the emotion that they're trying to tell.

I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.

That's what acting is all about - it's all about bringing truth from your own life, and putting it into your characters. If you have the advantage of using your own life in your work, that's always the way to go.

I feel like I express myself, as an actor. Whatever the character is put in front of me, I try to bring truth to it, whichever way it lands. I try to bring as much truth to it and make it as believable as I can. I think that's the job of an actor.

Now if I cry on screen I think it's mint. Because I think that's how that person would feel at that time. And if it doesn't, then it just doesn't happen.

Work for the actor lies essentially in two areas: the ability to consistently create reality and the ability to express that reality.

I've been in scenarios as an actor where you have to manufacture an emotion that's not really there, but it wasn't hard with Halle because she's a great person and very beautiful, so it ain't a tough job at the end of the day.

Very often, when you're playing people who love each other, or who hate each other, you manufacture those feelings. You have to do that a lot.

It's much easier to cry or be angry, but to really laugh and genuinely be buoyant and laugh. That's hard if you don't really feel that way.

When your writing is unselfconscious, when it comes from your heart, that's when it's powerful.

The hardest thing to do as an actor is to be simplistic, and to just be.

Playing a drunk doesn't mean being a drunk, only bad actors try to be drunk. A real drunk tries to be sober, he wants another drink. How a character hides their feelings tells us who they are, no one shows their feelings except bad actors.

If I cry on telly, I'm genuinely crying. If it's a gritty scene it can come naturally.

One of the great tools we use in acting is the idea of immediacy, that the audience gets to see you witness something apparently for the first time, so you create a lot of tools to kind of trick yourself into making it appear something is happening for the first time.

Acting is everything to me and it's at the core of every decision. Whatever importance costumes, details, lights, camera, dialogue and everything else have, if the acting is bad, cheap, or overdone everything else is just gone.

In interviews, on the set, talking to people, I'll just start talking about my parents' divorce, and go on and on. My mom's always like, 'You don't have to be that honest. You have to be more fake.' You see some of these actors, they have a permanent smile on their face. How can they do that? It really fascinates me.

It's so great as an actor to get the opportunity to do something that's incredibly truthful.

When you act, it's better not to fake the emotion. It's better to find the emotion within yourself and your experiences, and see if you can bring that back to the surface, so that you can then literally hand it off to the character, and then let him run with it.

As an actor, I feel like I'm somebody who, when somebody gives me a mark, I don't want to hit it. I don't like that. But then, without even knowing it, I just hit it.