Jennifer Jason Leigh Quotes

I feel like, when I play characters, I create a space in myself that feels like the character and that doesn't go away. Somehow, you carry that with you. You let it go, but a little piece of it remains.

I find that if I hold your hand, it transfers an energy first. I have a sense of how you feel. That's important to me trying to become another person. I have a lot pressure to bring a character to life in any kind of real sense.

But today I felt different, today I forgot how long it takes to get into the skin of a character and I remembered it, because today I actually got into that skin and it felt so different.

When I finished 'Cocktail,' it took me a very long time to get out of Veronica's mindspace, behaviour, and zone. I had to reconnect with who I am. It is a similar story with 'Bajirao Mastani.' Some films demand that.

Some parts stay with me for weeks afterward. It's these people that I play. They get under my skin, and I just can't let go of them. I have immersed myself into their lives and into their beings so much that they feel like a part of me.

Sometimes you even start to sound like the character because you're living and breathing them every day on the set. It gets into your bones.

Once, during an interview in front of my wife, I was asked, "Are you one of those actors who brings your character home? Do you stay in character?" I said, "No, not really. I don't do that," and she started laughing. I asked her why. She said, "Well, you might think you don't bring characters home, but you do." So, while I don't feel like a character is lingering, it probably is.

Playing a TV character for seven years is almost like when you do a play. You live, breathe, and everything else with that character 24-7 for six months or four months or whatever, and that gets very deep in your blood. When you do a TV character for seven years, that's a long time. It becomes a seminal era in your life.

By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.

What I didn't realize about television was that's true of acting, as well. You have that space of time to develop who you are, and you can use more and more of yourself. The lines between that character that I'm playing and myself become more and more blurred and, after awhile, they just disappear, altogether.

I just like to inhabit a character really deeply.

There's a kind of acting that goes on in my head when I'm writing a character where I put myself in their place.

I try to put myself into whatever character I play.

I've been acting a long time, and I can play a Cockney gangster or a womanizer in my sleep or standing on my head. But what I try to do is I try to find characters that are as far away from me as I possibly can and then make them real. A French Nazi is about as far away from me as I can possibly get without actually going to Mars or something.

That's what I love about acting, you get to find little pieces of yourself in every character you play.

I take my time to get into the mindset of the character and say my lines. I really have to be the person that I am playing.

There's a lot of romanticisation of the intuitive actor and method acting and all kinds of notions about getting inside a character and coming out from there.

Any time you make a movie where you're living in a certain head space for an extended period of time, it's tough not to take a little piece home with you.

The only way I can be there and really get into the character is if I'm her.

When you take on a role, even if the character is somebody that you are dissimilar to, you have to identify with the role and look for an emotional connection even if there is not a biographical one.

Sometimes you can just step into the character, and you get all your feelings and emotions just from sympathizing with her and being her. But then, other times, you just have to resort back to anything that you've been through in your own life and try to play that.

Any time you play a character for a long period of time, regardless of how close it is to you, it infiltrates your life. It's impossible for it not to.

You use your emotions to try and find them in the character that you're playing.

I don't think I'm an actor who takes their characters home with him. But I certainly do take the preparation home.

There's a lot to be said for getting really comfortable in a character.