James Badge Dale Quotes

I just think that wigs and makeup and costumes completely transform me.

When I am in front of the camera or on stage, I am not me.

Once you put a mask on, if you allow it to, it can really transform you, and that's what a costume does.

I love being someone I'm not for a period of time. I love every minute of being in someone else's skin.

One of the best ways to change is to act as if you are the person you want to become. When you behave as if you are a different person, you change on a very basic level - even your physiology changes. When actors and actresses perform, their body chemistry is altered by the roles they play.

The first time I made myself up, I was looking at my reflection in the mirror and it wasn't me looking back. It allowed me to do things I couldn't do as myself. I found out how powerful that was and how much that can mean to an actor.

I shall refract myself, yes, I shall no longer be known as the prism.

Maybe a theme that touches all of my work is people reinventing themselves.

I love roles where I have to transform myself.

Some of the great characters that I've played had to be transformational.

I think I've probably re-invented myself three or four times now, if that's what one calls it.

I suspect, for a lot of people who become actors, there's a feeling of wanting to be someone other than who they actually are.

Human beings are the only animal that thinks they change who they are simply by moving to a different place. Birds migrate, but it's not quite the same thing.

I think everybody, or the great majority of human beings, have this aspiration to become other: to live a different identity, at least for a while.

I'm a totally different person in training.

Once I have a wig on, I become a different person. You can't get Tierra back until the wig comes off.

Even if there was an opportunity to school yourself in different characters - characters that have distinct personalities which may be totally different from yours, you have got to completely divorce your own personality to be able to go over to the other personality.

Are we not like the actor of old times, who wore his mask so long his face took its likeness?

Having been trained as a stage actor, and then you go out there and you're on 40,000 acres and you have a horse under you and you're shooting a real gun, you almost don't have to act. It's just really amazing.

To have been always what I am - and so changed from what I was.

What does it take to change the essence of a man?

While, as I recall, conservative little boys practice quick draw with their cap guns while playing cowboys and Indians, apparently liberal little boys practice how fast they can throw up their hands to surrender to the guys in the black hats.

Hats have power. Hats can change you into someone else.

My grandpa was a cowboy. He roped cattle out in Texas and Arizona. Growing up, I'd see him maybe once a year and he'd always get me on a horse at some point. But each time I'd have to learn again.

I never considered myself a cowboy, because I wasn't. But I guess when I got into cowboy gear I looked enough like one to convince people that I was.