Holland Roden Quotes

Actors will say, 'My character wouldn't say that.' Who said it was your character?

In my experience, it's usually up to the actor how a character is portrayed.

You have more creative freedom with writing, in certain ways, because you can create everything that happens. But, as an actor you also have creative freedom because you don't so much focus on what has to move the story along, and only on how your character is reacting to situations.

My job as an actress is to make things work and come up with reasons of my own and not just fill in the blanks for anybody else, you know what I mean?

Then they started pulling me in and I was very resistant. All the other actors would be saying write more, more dialogue for me, and I'd always be saying 'No, less, less'.

Every role is challenging in its own way, but the most challenging roles are the ones that are badly written - then it's completely up to you to come up with something that is interesting to the story and myself as an actor.

Actors are responsible to the people we play.

The interesting thing is, when you play a real-life character or someone based in a book, you always come up against people's preconceptions of what they have in their heads.

The whole chameleon thing about acting. That's why I'm moving towards directing - it's a much more healthy occupation.

I approach directing from an actor's standpoint.

I think being an actor makes me a better writer and vice versa. I know the kinds of roles I would kill to play, and I try to create them for others.

You have to get it in your brain that you don't belong to yourself as an actor, but that you belong to the director who creates the character.

Directing myself definitely made me a better actor. And, you know, I think actors have the best track record when they turn to directing. Writers, too. I knew how to direct actors because I've been there and I know what I like.

All actors bring something unexpected to the role because they have to translate what's on the page and make a real character out of the black-and-white text that's there in the script.

That's kind of the fun part about acting. We do get the right to kind of get from A to Z any way we want, as long as we start at A and end at Z.

There's a wonderful adage in acting that you're stuck with the character, but the character is also stuck with you.

You have so much freedom as an actor in your character's choices, and I really learned to take advantage of that.

As actors, we often look for the scene, big moments that say, 'This is why you have to do this role.'

It's the weird thing that actors do: You jumped across that building because the scene required it.

It's better to play negative lead roles than portray just any other character on the show.

Sometimes, as actors, we feel like we want to hold on and control where a character goes.

Even though the 'Shooter' character on TV is so close to the real-life me, I'm still playing with ways to creatively portray that character.

As an actor, you create a character from your understanding of what you have heard and your observations. Eventually, every film is an extension of the images that I have seen or what I have heard or read somewhere.

I just didn't want to get bored playing a character, and that's kind of the benefit of doing films; you've lived with a character for four or five months and that's it, and you walk away from that character and you feel like you told a story.

I am always more interested in performance and character depiction, and my direction says as much.