Matthew Lillard Quotes

When you're doing a play you get to go full speed ahead, all night, in front of an audience. It's a roller-coaster ride, responding to other actors, it feeds you.

Those differences are what color the performance, but in the movies you don't get a chance to rehearse.

As rewarding as a good film role can be, there is just nothing like getting up on a stage and taking an audience for a ride.

I want to be able to play trailer-bound fatties in a Judd Apatow comedy.

I enjoy making films, but my heart is in the stage. Every night you have to be on. There's no second take.

As a film actor, you don't often get that opportunity to meet with your audience and take your applause on stage.

A live audience with live reactions feeds a different sort of acting that will then inform your film work, and vice versa.

It's fun to play the character and then watch him later.

I was born to do sitcoms, where you get an immediate response from the audience.

Why do you act? You act for an audience. In the theatre, you're in their presence. Film stars don't know what it is to have an audience.

People prefer doing films. That is not the case with me. I don't do theatre because I have to but because it makes me feel alive. I enjoy the whole process of rehearsing, though repetition can make it tedious.

I really enjoyed multicamera comedy. You film in front of a live audience, and it's kind of the best of both worlds. It's like doing a one-act play every week, but if you screw your lines up, you get to do it over.

When you're doing sketch comedy and you're pregnant, it's like wearing a giant sombrero in every sketch.

So what's so enticing about doing a play is that you get to do that thing that got you into acting in the first place... There's a real attraction to being able to play, to just play. And that's something that theater affords you.

In the theater, you go from point A to point Z, building your performance as the evening progresses. You have to relinquish that control on a film.

In theater, you get to rehearse several weeks, you memorize everything, and by the time you open, you know what the play is. In film, it's almost the opposite. You do your work on your own and maybe have a couple of minutes to rehearse. When the camera rolls, you generally don't know what's going to happen.

On the stage you develop a character that's different from yourself. In a film they're always saying, 'Walk over here. Say this line. Be you.'

I think theater will always be my first love. I've been doing it since I was nine, and there's nothing quite like being on stage, having the immediate intake of energy and exchange of ideas.

I never thought about movies. I never thought about Hollywood. It was just being on the stage and being in New York.

I would rather do a play because it's instantaneous. You go on the stage, and you know whether it's happening or not. Somebody asked me 'What is acting?' And I said, 'Acting is listening.' And if you ain't listening, nobody's listening.

I really like doing television shows, and I anticipated doing a comedy, because that's the place I feel the most comfortable - those are the risks I want to take.

Doing a play, you have a little bit more time, obviously. You rehearse for a month before you get up in front of people. It's a totally different energy. With film, TV, you want to try to capture lightning-in-a-bottle moments. I don't try to rehearse as much with that stuff, because you want those sparks of something to come out, if they do.

Live stage is being made as you go along. You feel the energy. There's nothing like a live audience.

I have, I think to do a play a year is very good if you can afford the time and the energy because it's difficult to do, it's really the actors medium of course, because you're really out there and nobody's yelling cut so, yeah I have.

I studied theater in college, and I really wanted to be an actress and play a lot of different roles. Then I made landing on a television comedy my main focus.