Josh McDermitt Quotes

You spend your life training to be an actor, observing people's characteristics so that you can design characters around what you've seen.

In acting, you have to pull from real-life situations, from people, to help develop a character.

I'm not a reality TV star. I pride myself on witnessing, watching people, studying people, and being able to recreate that and create a human being.

It's my job to look at other people's humanity and it's my job to, 24/7, look at my life and listen to everything everyone says, watching their faces, the little idiosyncratic aspects of human beings - it's like a sponge, I take it in.

Acting has helped me understand people, not only because you are acting as a character, but also because you are watching other actors work. That really helps you identify in life when someone is acting, not being true.

I love to kind of people watch; that's part of what I do as an actor and creative person and sort of step back and watch others.

I take from people all the time. I didn't ever go to acting classes or anything. You can just watch people.

Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.

To play any character, you have to have a total understanding of why they do what they do.

One of the reasons I love acting is because I'm so interested in other people's lives, and I often incorporate things I hear or observe into my work. I've become a bit of a 'person addict,' and so I like brushing up against lots of different characters.

Every time you play a bad girl or guy in a movie, you really come from a place of pain.

Actors look at life in a different way. When I meet people, I know that one day I may portray that person or someone like them. It may be a cop or a homeless guy. It helps you to pay more attention to people. Everyone I meet, I retain something from them, something from their personality. It helps me to portray realism in my work.

As an actor, you pay attention very closely to everything that happens to you, and you're constantly watching others as well, trying to just find out where everything comes from.

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

I am an observer, I like to watch people. I am into psychology and people - how they act and such.

One of the most important things for an actor is to observe humanity.

I think any role you need to play not so much transforms but I like to think of it as understanding the psychology of another character.

The thing about being an actor is that you turn into other people. You have to hide yourself a bit in order to let that other person come out.

What makes characters so interesting when you're an actor or a dancer is to watch and observe how people walk and move and speak. Are they cat-like? Are they walrus-like? Why does that person bother me, and why do I think they are the way they are?

As far as 'Jane Pittman,' I don't know that I could verbalize, to this day, what I felt once I got into that role. I did a tremendous amount of research. I need to feel as though I am in the person's skin.

Trying to be a good actor has to be involved with placing yourself imaginatively in different people's circumstances.

I've always been a keen observer of people.

I love observing people. Each face tells so many stories. It lets me understand emotions, and that, in turn, helps me apply my skills as an actor.

One of the many joys of being an actor is to understand the human psychology.

If you worry less about what people think of you, you can pick up an astonishing amount of information about them. You no longer leave conversations wondering what just happened. Other people's minds and motives are finally revealed.