Michael Ealy Quotes

Like any other actor, I draw on life experience.

As an actor, your life experience is just as important as studying.

I don't personally look to my own life experiences for answers about how to play a scene.

It's not like every actor needs to train, but an actor will either develop their process through training or through working.

Your job as an actor is to piece together whatever you've learned in your training, or whatever you have experienced in your life, to piece together a person.

I have nine years of scholastic actor training, and what I've learned is that training does not an actor make. You have to have an artful way of looking at things. You have to have a certain point of view. And you get that point of view through experience.

I was trained by Method acting teachers and we were taught that aside from whatever gift you may or may not have or the level of that gift, that you were obliged to know how to build a table. It's a craft. It's like being a ballerina or a violinist.

Because I came out as a singer, I took the time to get an acting coach.

I am a proud participant of the Spencer Tracy School of Acting: Know your lines, don't bump into the furniture.

In order to be a good actor, I'm a firm believer that you need to bring something to the table.

Drama school can't make you a brilliant actor, but you can do stuff for three years - you're not going to be fired. You should just go for it all, even the stuff you think is codswallop.

Your primary tools, as an actor, are observation and imagination. You can pretty much get everything you need from that, and you do. It brings back that element of pretend.

I pick up a lot of stuff from them, but I don't think there's any great trick to acting.

What's interesting about the process of acting is how often you don't know what you're doing.

It's a funny thing. You sort of never figure it out with acting. You're always learning.

I think sometimes soap acting gets an unfair label for being bad and over the top. The lessons I learned there were so valuable. Seeing yourself every day on television, you learned what worked and didn't work, what was bad acting and what wasn't. Memorizing scripts became second nature.

As an actor sometimes you can be a bit emotional and forceful, and that's not always the way to be.

And at NYU, I went to the Atlantic Theater Company, and they have two main points. One of them is to always be active in something instead of just feeling it. And the other is figuring out your character.

I trained as a stage actor and was given a lot of technical tools to play with.

I really think that studying theater early on really helped me to be able to identify how to get into a character, because it's such a mysterious thing. Learning objective acting in the beginning of my career was the best thing I could have ever done.

I've not taken like acting lessons or anything but it doesn't mean I don't need to because I'm sure I do.

I would be the worst acting coach ever, because I have no idea what I'm doing.

I'm interested in the acting and staging of specific emotions, and so I work with actors. It's a small proportion of what I do, but it's always what people seem to focus on.

I thought acting was all about natural instinct but I've realised, through working with so many talented actors on 'Wild Swans' and 'Run,' that I can see the training. That's why I am back at drama school.

To be a good actor you have to feel life and observe life.