Paul Thomas Anderson Quotes

None of the characters I've played are really like me. That would be boring. That wouldn't be acting.

You can't really judge characters, because that's when it gets really hard to play them.

That's what I love about acting, is playing different roles. I want to work for the character, and not make it work for me.

There is always pressure playing a real living person and even pressure developing a character from scratch.

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

To me, there are things you're good at and things you're not so good at. For some reason, I'm good at darker characters. It has to do with how you look.

As actors, that has been challenging for us to pick up the nuances of the living legends we are playing.

I was not wary of playing a mother on screen but wasn't sure if I could do justice to it. Would I be able to showcase that kind of overpowering love without being a 'real' mother?

Well, as an actor, at least from my standpoint, I can't not like who I'm playing.

As an actor, you can do what you want with your role. That's why they hire you; to take the role and make it real.

Always when I directed the play, I was always trying to cast people not who were necessarily like the characters, but people who I felt had the essential component that the character had, some kind of soul for it.

I didn't have to audition. That's common, but it had never happened to me before. Normally, I hate auditioning. I need to stew and think... let the character develop and grow inside me.

Good acting comes from finding the essence of a character.

There's nothing worse - I don't like listening to actors talk about the process, especially when - I mean, for me I've played a lot of guys, dudes, boys in a sense and this was a challenge for me just to play that official character.

I played Romeo when I was younger, and I think I did a couple kind Romeo-like parts after that, and I kind of went, 'I mustn't do this again. I must always choose something that I don't know if I'm a good enough actor to play.'

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

I definitely think it exercises an interesting muscle, auditioning for bad parts and trying to figure out how to make it real. I don't know what I'm talking about now.

I'm almost tempted, when I'm playing a real person, not to meet them. Afterwards, maybe. But, the job is the same. You still have to show up on screen and be alive and real and all that stuff.

People often ask me, was it hard to play this person or that person? Well, no, not really. Acting is what I do. It's my job.

I'm not an instinctive actor.

Disney acting is a little more difficult than many people think it is. People feel like the characters aren't deep, but as an actor, you try to do everything you can do the best of your ability.

I've given every maid I've portrayed soul and heart.

I like playing characters with as many emotions as possible. I'd love to play a really crazy person - someone truly out of her mind.

And I thought, you know, I have to say that maybe the whacked out mother is my new favorite role, but I don't want to just do it and become Nurse Ratchett.

Here's probably a short answer - I never feel in this piece that I'm stepping out and being Andrea Martin. I always feel like I'm Golde, so whatever Golde would do within those realms, that's what I would do.