Teyonah Parris Quotes

I still love finding the soul of the characters I play and defining who they are. This to me is my paint set, and the colors are always exciting to choose.

I've approached every character I've ever played with a poem, first and foremost.

I'm an artist - I'm an actor - so when I'm looking for something, I'm looking for stories.

I don't have a favorite genre. I love to work and live vicariously through every character. It's all about trying to bring the character to life and get the story across in a way that resonates with the audience. It's always interesting and challenging in a gratifying and unique way.

It's kind of up to the actor to deconstruct the scene and deconstruct the character and figure out how to make it real. That's what I love about this job: It's sort of a puzzle each time, and figuring that out is sort the key, whether I'm playing a cop or a killer.

Part of an actor's job is to find correlations between your own life and the life of the person you are playing.

Well, when you're playing a role, you have to think, 'What is ultimately motivating the character?'

My theory is that everything an actor does, from the way he looks at his watch to the way he moves across the stage, is in the service of advancing a story, and in that sense, it's all writing. In that sense we, while acting, write.

When I act, I try to understand the character, why she's behaving like that.

I rarely do any back story. I often get a thick bible of back story, but I can't use it. The back story is a tool of the writer. But I can only act what's in the scene.

There's no set rule, but when you look at the script, you start thinking about this person and how to create this human being on screen. You dig deeper into a script.

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

I had to focus and create a character in Bagger Vance, not just do my 'Will Smith' thing and get paid.

I find it easier to play someone who is so far from me because you create someone - you build this person based on the story and the script, with the director.

I am a professional actor, and I don't go about moralizing about what the character does. Otherwise, seriously, why be an actor? You're not making some kind of social statement. That's not what actors do.

What I mostly do is take the script, analyse the hell out of it, see what's in there, see what kind of person I'm dealing with, and then forget I'm playing a father and just play a person who exemplifies all those things.

That's what I love about acting, is playing different roles. I want to work for the character, and not make it work for me.

In the work that I normally do, you have a whole script, a whole arc, that you play. And I do believe a good actor will play every bit of information they're given.

Actors will say, 'My character wouldn't say that.' Who said it was your character?

If I'm doing my job as an actor, the audience knows everything I know about the character.

Part of an actor's job is to draw up a back story.

I do build my own backstory as an actor. It's important to know where your characters have come from in order to know where they're going - in order to exist in that state of being.

Well, with each character that I play in my life as an actor, I try to figure out how to find the challenge.

I think sometimes actors are drawn to good television because you have more time to sell it, you have more time to shape a character, and to tell a story, and that's really appealing.

I find all of my performances come down to mathematics in a sense - how do you approach the problem of this character? Sometimes I crack that problem, sometimes I don't.