Shaheer Sheikh Quotes

Good actors, you always know what they're thinking. That's why they're good actors.

In day-to-day life, our brain sends lots of signals. In acting, there are no signals. You have to believe in what you are trying to portray.

I went through this realization that acting, at its heart, is the ability to manipulate your own emotions.

For me really good acting is about subtext.

In acting, you draw so much on your private life.

I think with the best actors, emotion is something that has no kind of check in them.

It's a fine line. If you withhold too much, you come across as wooden - as I've often been described in some movies. Fair enough. I believe that the best performances are the ones that an audience has to search for.

You can't perish because of your own feelings; you have to embrace those things as an actor because it's part of your palette.

That's one of the things that's great about acting. You can play all the different aspects of a human being.

An actor's job is to find variations of the same emotion in his being so that every time he expresses grief or joy, it doesn't look the same.

The better I am at observing moments in life, the better I'll be at showing them in my acting.

I'm very in love with the fact that the camera is revolted by acting and loves behaviour.

Some actors get by with behaving, not acting. You've got to sell the effect. I act more in the 'Nightmare' movies because it's not like me. I'm acting, not reacting.

Actors are part of a certain percentage of people on this planet who have an emotional vocabulary as a primary experience. It's as if their life is experienced emotionally and then that is translated intellectually or conceptually into the performance.

If you start to disrespect the character you're playing, or play it too much for laughs, that can work for a sketch, it will sell some gags, but it's all technique. It's like watching a juggler - you can be impressed by it, but it's not going to touch you in any way.

With big, emotional roles it's very easy, especially if you've grown up in the American school of acting, to exploit your own pain. You have to be careful about that, because 9 times out of 10, your pain is not appropriate to the character.

Sometimes I think of movie acting as advanced pretend.

When actors are talking, they are servants of the dramatist. It is what they can show the audience when they are not talking that reveals the fine actor.

When you perform, you can convey emotions differently, and your look can reflect each of those emotions.

I think you can really tell a good actor if you can put a camera on them and they can just talk and emote and react and you don't have to keep cutting away from them, because they are the language and the behavior. It's all a tour-de-force performance.

I spend a lot of my time trying to draw the attention of actors to the minute and subtle details of human behavior, which was the sort of thing I was looking at when I was a neurologist.

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.

When I went to acting school, the kids that got the best grades were the kids that could cry on cue. But it didn't really translate into careers for any of them, because the external is the easy part.

What's interesting about the process of acting is how often you don't know what you're doing.

With film, it's all about the actor being able to feel the things that the character's feeling. It must do some strange things to your mind. Music I find much easier because you're being honest about where you are as a person.