John Hensley Quotes

Well, as an actor, at least from my standpoint, I can't not like who I'm playing.

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

Even when you are playing someone who is real, you get their mannerisms and you get their little quirks, but, it still has to be something inside of you that connects with the role, or else you will not be any good.

Good acting comes from finding the essence of a character.

If I'm doing my job as an actor, the audience knows everything I know about the character.

I think it's always easier to play parts that you have something concrete that you can relate to.

I always approach any character I do as being right.

Most actors will tell you this - I don't really know how to connect, empathize with, or make worthy of any revelation a character that doesn't have love in there somewhere, that doesn't have an idealism or an empathy in there somewhere.

When I act, I try to understand the character, why she's behaving like that.

Good acting is confused with good dialogue delivery. Acting is about all about performance, and the way we interpret and understand the character that we bring alive onscreen.

As an actor, you have to find reasons why your character made her decisions, and you have to empathise with her.

As an actor, you always have to love who you are playing.

I never do roles, I play people.

My acting style changes according to the way a character is imagined.

So much of movie acting is in the lighting. And in loving your characters. I try to know them, and with that intimacy comes love. And now, I love Voldemort.

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 feel like there are things I can relate to in every character. But I feel like when you read a script, you don't get to see the definition behind someone, you just get to read what the person goes through and find a place to come from to make it real.

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.

As an actor, you're sort of the court-appointed lawyer for the character.

Ultimately, the idea of acting is to understand the people you're playing, and then where they're coming from is not so mystifying. You've got to detox a bit after, though.

That's what I love about acting, is playing different roles. I want to work for the character, and not make it work for me.

When I approach any script, I always try to find what I would relate to most in it.

I don't think, there's no possible way for me, anyway, to play a character that I haven't found some sort of sublime compassion for and I related to Deborah on a way that almost, initially, almost in a way maybe someone in the audience might.

It's kind of up to the actor to deconstruct the scene and deconstruct the character and figure out how to make it real. That's what I love about this job: It's sort of a puzzle each time, and figuring that out is sort the key, whether I'm playing a cop or a killer.

I think the idea is to try and understand everything about the characters and where the character is coming from, from their point of view, why they say what they do. And not, 'Oh, but I would never say that. Why does the character say that?' But then making it as personal as possible.