Colin Farrell Quotes

It's so funny, you go to acting school thinking you're going to learn how to be other people, but really it taught me how to be myself. Because it's in understanding yourself deeply that you can lend yourself to another person's circumstances and another person's experience.

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.

When you take on a role, even if the character is somebody that you are dissimilar to, you have to identify with the role and look for an emotional connection even if there is not a biographical one.

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

You have to like the characters you play.

I always considered myself as a character actor. I always try to be versatile to show different sides of human experience.

I get to actually experience what it would be like to be a psycho, which is not a fun one, or to be a cowboy, or to be a weird character of some sort. For me, it suits me. It suits my personality. I'm an emotional kind of person anyway.

I like to try to make the characters I play be as human as possible.

After I play every character, I always walk away and feel a little different. I've experienced something that's not my life, but I've made it my life.

When I act, a part of me goes into the character I am playing.

My job as a human being as well as a writer is to feel as thoroughly as possible the experience that I am part of, and then press it a little further.

I've read all the 'Game of Thrones' books many times over, so I sometimes find it easier being on set, because it can be hard to get out of character.

But today I felt different, today I forgot how long it takes to get into the skin of a character and I remembered it, because today I actually got into that skin and it felt so different.

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.

One of the fun things about being an actor is stepping outside yourself and outside of your own experience. It's challenging yourself to totally commit to something that in your core is so wrong.

To act, no matter how the character is, you have to love and have compassion for the character you're playing.

I'm really not interested in showing me or playing me. My gift as an actor, given to me, is to be able to become other people.

You have to believe that you are the character or the thing or whatever the hell you're playing.

I can't just say the words, do a lot of one-liners. I love each person I play; I have to be that person. I have to do him true.

When you are portraying somebody that has a very specific emotional weight, you feel like you're really starting to abandon your own body and go to someplace else.

I got into acting for the chance to be many different people and many different characters. I love hiding in a role and doing the research. If there is an opportunity to change my body, I will change my body. I'll slip in and disguise myself in a role. That is a really big treat for me.

You use your emotions to try and find them in the character that you're playing.

I've done teaching and things like that because if you're acting, you're becoming other human beings, and you need to have time to find who you are as well.

A really useful quality to have as an actor is a lack of self-awareness. I try and get into the character's thinking, and some of them just aren't really that bothered about how they come across or aware of how they come across.

Keats himself spoke about how Shakespeare was capable of erasing himself completely from the characters he had created. As an actor, that is what I'm trying to do.