Fred Willard Quotes

I never went to acting school, so improv was my training. Just being quick on your feet helps in everyday life.

I came up through Second City, so I'm used to playing 20 characters every night who are very different from each other. I wouldn't want my career to be any different.

I love improvising on the spot. I like that pressure.

Working with animals forces an actor to work harder because you have to be quick when it comes to improvisation, and you can't break character - at all.

I've always been an improviser. I was one before I knew even what the word was... And acting, that I've been doing since I was 5.

My act is sort of improvisational. I have a skeleton in my head, but no fat or skin on it.

I always improvise with the crowd. Sometimes it will be a 50 percent show, sometimes 70 percent, sometimes it's almost a whole show where I wing it. It depends on my mood, the energy in the room. For sure, a portion of it is just kind of winging it.

I got my degree in acting and theater, and then I had a teacher who told me to take a class with The Groundlings. And for a second, I thought, 'Well, I don't know about that. I'm a serious actress.' And then I did, and I loved it, and I said, 'Ah, well, I guess this is what I'm going to do now.'

I think by now if people hire me, they know I'm going to improvise. I'm an improviser by trade.

At Second City and improvising at iO, you're creating a character in an instant. All of a sudden, you're creating this history and this past for your character, and you're discovering it while you're doing it, and that's part of the fun of it.

Practice your improv more than learn your lines. 'Cause there's no way you'll be able to learn all those lines in a short time. You have to realize what you know and what you don't know - and what you don't know, just come up with three alternate lines or improv that you can put in that spot.

I had developed a survival skill of using my wit to score for myself. If a scene was dying, I'd lob in these little bombshell lines that would get me some attention and a laugh without really helping the scene.

Celebrity Apprentice' was something where you don't know what you're going to do the next day. Every two days, somebody goes home, and you don't know if the next day you've got to be the project manager or what's going to happen, so you can't really prepare. You really have to be on top of everything.

I'm not a big 'scripted comedy' person necessarily. I'm open for wherever comedy can be found.

I'm always an advocate of 'acting is reacting,' which can be difficult.

I love to think on my feet, and I love to be able to feel from a close proximity how things are going.

In the performance sense, I find that interpretation is improvisatory in nature. You can go anywhere with an interpretation on any given day.

For me, you have to do as much work as you can beforehand and, once you get on stage or set, throw it out the window because you need to be collaborative. You shouldn't have too many ideas about where it goes before you get into the room with the director and other actors.

Being in Los Angeles, I've had access to some of the best improvisers around and I really study them and what they do. It really it just about listening and what you can add to it.

I'm happy to play characters but comedy, as a space, has given me a lot.

When I direct - everything I've directed has had improv in it, because I think there's something special in a performance the first time it's said out loud that's hard to recreate.

I always just like to improvise, and that goes for my audition tapes as well.

I personally don't lock in a performance, because I do leave room for things to happen, so I just make sure I'm very intimate with what I'm saying and why I'm saying it so that no matter what happens, we can do whatever we want to do and leave space for play.

Every single performance of 'Fleabag,' I would learn so much from the audience reaction or how you could change it all the time, and I loved that sense that the performance is ever-growing and changing and could be affected by the audience.

You have to be able to improvise and respond to what's going on around you. Then you might get a good piece of work done.