Michael Potts Quotes

When an actor commits himself to a role as fully as Russell Crowe does in the grandiose and silly 'Gladiator,' you may ask yourself why and at the same time thank him for his absorption in the part.

It's my privilege to work with an actor like Vikram who gets into the skin of the character he is playing, so much so that after the shoot it takes him quite some time to get back to his real self.

A lot of male actors are method actors and they become the characters which they both were.

Tilda Swinton is a great example of a person who completely disappears into a role.

When you have to get into the character each morning, give it your voice, your face, it was torture.

Actors will change their face, will change their hair, will change their voice, will disappear into the role. A movie star doesn't disappear.

I did 'Shameless' on Showtime, and I felt like I really tried to go super-method with that, and it would just make my days really hard to get in and out of character.

I could not be one of those actors who stays in character all day long. I'd go mad.

You're playing a role, but you're still feeling it. You can walk away from it after 'Cut,' but if you're playing a sad or mixed-up person, it's hard to stay in that place for these longish period of times. You kind of have to check out.

Acting is about covering up traces of who you are and just being the character. I think it's easier to accept people in roles if you don't know a lot about them.

As an actor, I think it's really important to be as anonymous as possible. It's your job to convince people that you are somebody else, and so any recognition I'd get away from the screen - well, it's not something I actively seek. To be honest with you, I'm surprised anybody does.

I usually can find a way to do a character to make it real and work. But sometimes it's a struggle sustaining that, because there's such a level of personal involvement and personal, physical, and emotional distraughtness.

When I act, a part of me goes into the character I am playing.

I know, because I tried all sorts of ways of being in character, and the best way is to be totally straight.

In the moment of acting you don't feel like anything, you feel like the person, as much as you can.

I don't believe actors who say they don't bleed into their characters. It's absolutely impossible not to.

The biggest compliment I can ever get as an actor is to have someone say, 'We didn't recognize you.'

You have to be completely in the character, and that's so hard to do. That's why, when they call, 'Cut!,' you often feel yourself shift. Unless you're Daniel Day Lewis, who stays in character all the time, there's a switch that happens.

Actors who say they can dive inside a character are either schizophrenic or lying.

I kinda lose my mind in 'Fringe,' or at least my character does. Whenever I'm acting, I tend to accidentally become unable to switch off the character. I'm a little bit of a method actor, but without really wanting to be.

The actors I respect are the real character actors, who are the real chameleon actors that completely change from role to role. I love Peter Sellers, Alec Guinness and Gary Oldman. They tend to be British, I guess. People who really disappear and transform, I really like that.

There are actors who are really fantastically talented at being natural on screen and appearing to be themselves, but I like the challenge of becoming somebody else.

The movie truism is that stars play themselves, while actors play other people - troubled or toxic, and memorably strange. By that definition, Philip Seymour Hoffman, who disappeared into the rabbit hole of his characters' souls, was our generation's anti-star and the chameleonic film actor of his age.

The actor is there to translate what's on the page onto the stage or the screen. So I find it important that an actor manages to actually get out of the way, vanish as a person behind the character, never to be seen or talked about again. That's my philosophy.

The only way I know how to do something, as cheesy as it sounds, is to become that character, and it affects me in a not so healthy way.