Cate Blanchett Quotes

I love accents - I wish I could find an accent for every one of my characters. It makes it so much easier when I don't have to hear my own voice.

It's funny because when I'm outside Australia, I never get to do my Australian accent in anything. It's always a Danish accent or an English accent or an American accent.

Every time a director calls me and says, 'If you practice a lot in two months, can you be an American?' And I always tell them, 'Well, maybe but I'm French. So it's going to be hard to be someone else.'

I've pretty much played every regional accent you can play in the U.K. I've played German, French, Arabic; I've been Jordanian, Lebanese. I've covered a lot of ground.

I can do so many accents that I'll never be able to use. There aren't casting calls for a black guy to play a Scottish highlander. I can hope. I've got my brogue ready. I just need the opportunity!

When we started on 'Power,' I was committed to respecting the differences among Spanish dialects: Dominican, Nuyorican, Mexican, etc. I wanted the language our characters spoke to be as specific as possible, to reflect New York as it is.

You spend so much time writing a character the way I did with Buddy Baker and then Green Arrow that you start to care about them. And you almost think of them as people, you know?

So much of what I do... is coming up with new characters and trying to invent voices for them, and to have people fully fleshed out in my head and to know who can say what in the scene and who these characters are... I love it.

You draw on your own childhood every time you tee it up as an actor.

The thing with being able to do accents is that it's still completely separate from being an actor.

I think all characters are facets of the writer. In a way, they have to be if you're going to write them convincingly.

That's so different in Hong Kong when I'm using my own mother language, I can treat the line in one thousand different ways, with many different reactions.

I'm developing more stuff in my voice, more Nick Swardson. It's me as myself in a sense and kind of in my voice, no accent no affectation. I'm growing into my own persona.

Accents can be a great tool to tell a story - but if you do it wrong, it pulls you right out of the movie.

I don't aspire to just play things that are like me. Whether the accent is Taiwanese or British or Canadian - that is the very craft in which I was trained. It is my absolute privilege and honor to do that.

Weirdly, when I'm playing an English person, I feel like I've got nothing to hang on to, and it feels a bit strange and exposing.

That's acting for you. 'White Queen' has English playing Welsh and vice versa.

I try to represent specific experiences of specific characters, and that's all I want to try to do. I don't ever try to think about representing a culture, because its impossible, and someone will fault you. And it just doesn't interest me.

The voice is always the starting place for me with a character.

I've played American characters before, so I've naturally become more at ease. Still, there are some American words that I cannot get my tongue around, but if you keep it flowing, you are never too far away from the truth.

Every time when I start preparing my character for a movie, I always try to make up and create my own background story for the role in order to fill it with life.

When I'm playing an American, I don't play Lennie with an American accent. They're American characters who look like me, but they have different voices.

I don't believe you just create a character out of thin air, there's always something of yourself you bring.

Colossus' voice is not much different than mine, as Tim loved my natural color and range of voice, so we kept it and worked more on the Russian accent. The best note I received was to be authentic.

Actually, between Colombian and Mexican Spanish, there's not a huge difference, but it is a different accent.