Omari Hardwick Quotes

Part of an actor's job is to find correlations between your own life and the life of the person you are playing.

When I prepare for a role, I try to get inside the character's head and understand him.

There are so many ways to approach a character. You have to figure out the similarities between you and the character, build on them, and at the same time, blur the dissimilarities. Since you do it day in and day out, it becomes a process and a part of you.

The first thing, the main thing, about how I work is I need to understand the character.

I do not use any set methods, not even The Method. The character after all is in the lines.

I had to focus and create a character in Bagger Vance, not just do my 'Will Smith' thing and get paid.

In many ways, acting is really like a science to me to figure out the human behavior of any character that I'm playing.

Whenever I work on a part, I look at the world through the filter of the character and I pick things they might use through my observations of real life.

Every time when I start preparing my character for a movie, I always try to make up and create my own background story for the role in order to fill it with life.

When you write a script that you've felt in your soul for a long time, you can't ask the actors to go through the same emotions. You have to do part of the job to make things as easy as possible for them.

I find that I kind of have to sink into the character.

I have a journal, and every character that I play, I write as the character: how I feel about things and how I'm going to play it.

As an actor, you use the things from yourself that you can apply to the character.

I love to work this way - I love the time of preparation. If you feed yourself with all the information and you get to understand who the character is then you can really be her.

In 'There Will Be Blood,' my character was someone who was an actor himself almost. He had a rehearsed quality about him. He was a performance artist in a way.

I make a playlist for every character I portray. Music plays a huge part in helping me understand a character. Every time I get a new role, I will take a chunk of time to just sit and listen to a bunch of songs and select the ones that make sense in my mind for that character. I can't even explain how much it helps me.

I try to think what the character is thinking. Then, hopefully, I begin to feel it. I act and react not because I'm recalling a dog killed by a fire engine, but because I'm concentrating on what the character is going through.

The first thing I do when I read a part is see if I can identify emotionally with a character. If I make that connection, everything else is just working on knowing their life circumstances and manifesting those through practice and research.

I wouldn't say I'm a method actor. I do research when I feel I don't have enough experience for the part I'm playing.

I would make the tea on a Daniel Day-Lewis set just to observe how he crafts roles like he did in 'My Left Foot.' That was the equivalent of seeing Haley's Comet for me. I just couldn't understand how that was possible.

I find it easier to play someone who is so far from me because you create someone - you build this person based on the story and the script, with the director.

What I mostly do is take the script, analyse the hell out of it, see what's in there, see what kind of person I'm dealing with, and then forget I'm playing a father and just play a person who exemplifies all those things.

I love an acting challenge, and I love getting to sit down with my script and do all my drama work.

I think you have to draw from any character and bring it to yourself as much as possible.

My approach to acting is that I am totally intuitive. I read the script and I get it. If I don't get it, I can't do it.