Nick Kroll Quotes

The process of creation goes on all the time. When I get through, I feel I know what the character will do in every situation. But the building up of the part is not mechanical or deliberate. It grows out of the text.

Acting is kind of difficult to intellectualize - it's a far more visceral experience. It's really hard to be able to think about and then employ these kind of esoteric notions of this person's backstory and try to weave it in somehow. It's just kind of impossible.

Acting is not just impersonating your character.

Acting is many things. Acting is playing lines, of course, but it's much more profound than that. Acting is truth-telling and trying to find the truth in a human situation, which will be sketched out by a screenwriter with all the skill that a screenwriter can do; but in the end, that's just the map of the journey.

If you are, as an actor, are just worried about looking pretty and being well liked, then I personally feel you are doing a disservice to your audience, the craft, the creative process, writers, and directors. Your job is to tell a story and to tell the truth, and we can't always be the most likeable character in every situation.

As a filmmaker I find it much more rewarding to work with actors who are classically trained. It's about the work and only the work.

I do not use any set methods, not even The Method. The character after all is in the lines.

I just love to be able to actually build a character.

As an actor, you try to bring as much of yourself to a part to try and create a feeling of authenticity and emotional truth and resonance.

I have just gained a deeper and deeper respect for acting and the whole art of it because you're really trying to live a life and to do the best justification for it.

For me, acting is a series of impressions rather than trying to find one line through to the end, which risks becoming more of a presentation.

Creating a role is an interesting thing - each show or each situation is different.

Early in my career, I'd plan something out for my characters. But I've learned that if you know who your character is and you go on instinct, it won't be wrong. It's never wrong. It's just different.

Performing, for me, has always been a very inner process.

Since I am first of all a character writer, that character's emotions are as vivid to me as my own. I always begin with an emotion after I have established a character in my mind. I feel what they feel. I guess that is why it comes across so strongly.

In acting, you have to pull from real-life situations, from people, to help develop a character.

To make a book convincing, it's less important that the right tree be in the right place than that the characters are emotionally real.

I believe that acting in any medium is the same thing, it's discovering the truth in where you are.

In every film, whether it's a fictional character or not, you create an idea of the character and for me I always do a bad impersonation to start with.

Any good production team is going to allow an actor to breathe life into the characters - that's why they hired that woman, that man, whatever the case.

The most fun part for an actor is the writing and the story and the character. That's very fulfilling.

Acting is different from stand-up. It gives you this ability to enter into another character, to create another person.

As an actor, you work to the script: that's our main priority. But you have to be aware and look around for things that help you bring that little bit extra, that touch of realism that rams the point home.

The way I write my shows, every character is its own organic thing. No character has a life at all until I see it played by somebody.

I am a method actor, but I'm also a film actor as well as a method actor. Characters that don't have humility, whether they are heroes or villains, are hard to relate to. All characters in every aspect of what we do should have humility. If they don't, then they're a cartoon character.