Patrick Warburton Quotes

With film, it's all about the actor being able to feel the things that the character's feeling. It must do some strange things to your mind. Music I find much easier because you're being honest about where you are as a person.

That's probably the biggest secret of acting: If the actor believes it themselves, they can make you believe it.

If I'm playing a bad guy, and I'm playing him evilly - I'm making him evil; I'm being evil because I want the audience to understand that he's bad - or if I have a line that's funny, I do it in a comedic way, that, to me, is a lie. It's dead when I watch it.

Even great actors who transform who they are still go to a really honest place; I think that's sort of that special skill that actors have.

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

As an actor you get categorized by other people, but it's not like I arrange myself into comedy mode or serious mode. If it's good writing you just have to play it true - if it's funny, it's funny. But obviously you don't want it to be amusing if you're playing Hedda Gabler!

The worst acting is about imitation.

Some actors get by with behaving, not acting. You've got to sell the effect. I act more in the 'Nightmare' movies because it's not like me. I'm acting, not reacting.

With big, emotional roles it's very easy, especially if you've grown up in the American school of acting, to exploit your own pain. You have to be careful about that, because 9 times out of 10, your pain is not appropriate to the character.

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.

Good acting comes from finding the essence of a character.

Yeah, I think the common denominator - and this is probably going to sound like Acting 101 - but the common denominator is belief in the character in the moment.

I don't make much distinction between being a stand-up comic and acting Shakespeare - in fact, unless you're a good comedian, you're never going to be able to play Hamlet properly.

I play guys who never smile, and I never stop smiling.

Honestly, I don't aspire to be a huge movie star. I really just fell in love with acting... Everything I do on-screen is very subtle.

In day-to-day life, our brain sends lots of signals. In acting, there are no signals. You have to believe in what you are trying to portray.

You take what you know, and you put it through your own prism. If I play characters that break down or cry, it's Gary Oldman crying; it's not the character crying.

You know, young actors say all the time, 'Should I use my own life experience?' And my response is, 'What choice do you have?'

Some actors can distance themselves from the parts they play, but I fall into the category who use bits of themselves.

I always think of the character as being me. But me wearing a 'coat', which may be a different way of speaking, moving or regarding other people. To me, acting is pretending, just like kids playing, only you pretend as if it were really, really real.

Obviously an actor draws on his own experience.

Actors are hard to photograph because they never want to reveal who they are. You don't know if you're getting a character from a Chekhov play or a Polanski film. It depends what mood they're in.

Acting is not acting. It isn't putting on a face and dancing around in a mask. It's believing that you are that character and playing him as if it were a normal day in the life of that character.

Actors who say they can dive inside a character are either schizophrenic or lying.

I think on 'Third Watch' that I was the comic relief on a lot of that. I mean, I definitely had dark moments, but people tended to think he was funny even if the character himself wasn't having a fun time.