Anthony Mackie Quotes

The thing is, even if you're playing sort of a heightened character and playing inside sort of a heightened reality, you can still apply your own truths to those characters.

After you read the script, then you actually just have to be in the moment you're in, in order to make it believable. You can't give it away. You can't tip it off. For me, it's always about being truthful in the moment I'm in. Hopefully, being able to reveal what I'm feeling, you have to believe it.

It is the writer’s job to make the play interesting. It is the actor’s job to make the performance truthful.

Actors are pretending for you, but they're not lying. They are not putting on a guise instead of themselves. They are finding things inside that they have experienced.

Acting's not about nose jobs and liposuction. It's about being truthful to what you're doing.

What I try to do often when I'm acting and what I like when I'm seeing good acting is how authentic it is. How true is this to what I know of the world that's been created for me? The ultimate test for me is, like, if I heard a clip of it on the radio, I'd like the audience not to know if I'm acting.

The perception of the audience is the interesting part. If the audience doesn't hear what is going on, is it going on or not?

To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with.

You'll very rarely find that you can enhance a performance to give it a real emotional centre and truth... after the fact.

Emotional honesty transcends reality; it's what allows disbelief to be suspended and yet what makes a story stay true.

It is not wise to neglect the present for the future, for who knows what the future will be.

To me, acting is simple. People put other things in front of it, but it's staying in truth.

As an actor, I believe that acting is actually behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances.

If you're going to play a brain surgeon, you just have to learn how to say the words. You don't have to go and learn how to cut open somebody's scalp. I think acting is acting. Being is something else.

There are parts that you can do them all your life, and no one knows you're even acting, and there are other parts which somehow - I think they say they 'pop' - people notice that you're in and you become an actor from the movies and people take you in a whole different way. Whether or not I can keep that ball rolling is another matter.

As an actor, your main goal is to tell the truth.

As an actor, I only play what is in the moment, rather than in the future, but sometimes the past is more important than what is coming up in the future.

In rehearsals I get so completely wrapped up with the reality that's occurring on stage that by the time the play has opened I'm not usually quite as aware of the distinctions between what I'd intended and the result. There are many ways of getting the same result.

As an actor, you have to just think about the truth of your character. You have to think about how to play the character in the way that you know it needs to be played in your heart and why you were hired.

Theater is such a different ballgame than film. And that's really why I stayed in film, because I really love the reality of connecting with your own feelings, and really putting that across in a realistic way. In film, the smallest muscular movements in your face, that are produced just by sheer feelings, you're not controlling them in anyway, can be seen by people in the audience because your face is sometimes, frighteningly, 40 feet wide!

I don't mind reminding people it's a movie, or that you're telling a story. Everybody knows this, but for some reason, we want to be real. I don't get it, I like the fakeness of my craft. I don't think the audience minds-they all know we're making a movie.

I want to regard my public as infinitely intelligent, as understanding notions of the suspension of disbelief and as realising all the time that this is not a slice of life, this is openly a film.

So many times, you get a script and it says, "And then, the character cries," and you read the lines and think, "That would never make me cry. Those lines are so untruthful." My approach is just to be honest to the situation.

One of the great tools we use in acting is the idea of immediacy, that the audience gets to see you witness something apparently for the first time, so you create a lot of tools to kind of trick yourself into making it appear something is happening for the first time.

I used to need the character but as I've gotten older I need it less and less - I prefer to play some version of myself. To approach any acting job as me just being me.