Kristin Bauer van Straten Quotes

When you are playing someone who is dealing with issues on a really personal level, if you don't bring your own issues into the equation, it's not going to feel really personal to the people watching it.

As an actor you bring some of your own experiences which can make things easier. You build off of it, but your imagination is always the best thing you have as far as creating things I think specifically for what that character is going through. But you're definitely drawing obviously upon things that you can connect to, and then you kind of mold the change that you're making into something that's right for the character.

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

Obviously an actor draws on his own experience.

In acting, you draw so much on your private life.

As an actor, you can't just imitate someone. You have to get under her skin.

For me, it is important to pick up characters which I can relate to. Or I recall an incident in my life or tap into my innermost emotions and try to bring that reality on to the screen.

I was someone who was out of control and not to be worked with. It was partly because method acting was a new thing in Hollywood then and Marlon Brando had gotten through and Montgomery Clift had gotten through and James Dean but beyond that there wasn't really anybody.

I think people pick up on that. You use personal stuff and mix it all in - I definitely pull on that stuff in my acting.

When you act, it's better not to fake the emotion. It's better to find the emotion within yourself and your experiences, and see if you can bring that back to the surface, so that you can then literally hand it off to the character, and then let him run with it.

I forget who said it, but someone said, your job as an actor is to communicate the most honest version of this character, and so the parts of you that you can use are obviously the easiest to access, because you live through them every day.

That's what acting is all about - it's all about bringing truth from your own life, and putting it into your characters. If you have the advantage of using your own life in your work, that's always the way to go.

When somebody is talking to you about something terrible on set with lines, and you believe what he says, sometimes it gives a strange vibe, because you wonder when that person is talking if he's talking about something that really happened to him and he's using the character.

I'm not a method actor per se, but if I'm playing a character that, at its core of its persona, has experiences I don't have, I try to search out and get firsthand experiences of similar sorts so I have something to fantasize about.

Good acting comes from finding the essence of a character.

What I find sometimes that is tricky is if actors are using too much of their own life in a picture, in a scene, they get locked into a particular way to play the scene, and it lacks an immediacy.

As actors, you play people who are not yourselves!

Actors pull from their own experiences to bring reality to the characters. I wouldn't want to play someone who's a lot like me. There would be no turning it on or off.

Sometimes you can just step into the character, and you get all your feelings and emotions just from sympathizing with her and being her. But then, other times, you just have to resort back to anything that you've been through in your own life and try to play that.

I've never been a method actress; I've never been that person that wants to imagine horrible things happening in your own life in order to exploit them for your emotional being in the movie. I'm just not good at doing that.

The trick to acting is not to show off, it's to think the thoughts of the character.

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.

I don't even draw on my life experiences when I'm acting. I just try and make it feel like I'm living through that person's skin.

I have no acting technique I act instinctively. That's why I can't play any role that isn't based on something in my life.

When you're watching a movie and find yourself getting emotional, it's because you're bringing something personal to the images. It's the same thing with acting. You're bringing the essence of your core emotional being to that moment.