Idris Elba Quotes

It's been about ten years since I've worked with actors who knew their lines!

So, I certainly subscribe to what Bette said about acting being very hard work.

I've always approached acting from a very workmanlike perspective.

As an actor, your best help is just to shut up and get out of the way.

If you are a good actor, then all you have to do is give your best shot every time when you are in front of the camera regardless of who else is around you.

Film acting is one of the only industries where you're criticized for working hard. In any other industry, it's considered a quality and something to behold.

Mike Leigh taught me about making choices - as an actor, you choose between being honest and clever, and with Mike, it's always about being honest. I learned how to behave on a film set from Jim Broadbent. He was a great example of someone with a fantastic career who kept his feet on the ground.

My acting coach I've got here, Richard Lawson, he's been doing good, just telling me to calm down sometimes and just be me.

I love to take actors to a place where they open a vein. That's the job. The key is that I make it safe for them to open the vein.

I'm not a method actor; I hope you know that!

I started to see acting as a real science. That really helped me grow as an actor.

One of my main techniques for acting is I try to know almost nothing beyond the words that I have to say, because that's my zone of control.

Any acting job that I ever got, I always treated it like I was a neophyte; I didn't know what I was doing, and I was going to work just as hard as I do on my stand-up.

To be honest, there are so many things I learned in acting school beyond the method; it was a safe place to practice. So acting school was about exercising that acting muscle and doing it every single day - and having people tell you that you're bad every single day! Which pushes you to work even harder.

I found acting tough; it takes a lot out of you if you have no technique.

The one thing for an actor that is complete death is if you're bored, because that boredom will show in your work.

I think people are always trying to demystify whatever acting is, so they want to know what your method is.

If you only live in the world of the actor, and if you only live in the world of auditions, etc., then you don't really have a whole lot to offer when it comes to playing the humans that you're trying to audition for.

As an actor, I still don't really know exactly what I am doing most of the time.

I suppose I could be accused of taking acting too seriously and losing the fun of it. I do take my work very seriously; I take on the responsibility of it.

I feel that one of the hardest things in acting is the way you need to switch your emotions.

I feel like most actors just dig and dig and work and work in whatever way they do to try to do as much as they can to portray a character in the limited time they have to play it, whether it's six months or one month or one week of work, you know.

Honestly, soaps are great training. You're doing 90-plus pages a day. It was my acting class, where I built my foundation for showing up and being professional.

Every actor comes with their own experience, method, methodology.

As an actor, the only pressure I have is to just be truthful and to do my best work.