Roger Allam Quotes

Acting is an imaginative leap, really, isn't it? And imaginations prosper in different circumstances.

I think for me, the imaginary world was always exciting. I started in New York doing theatre, from having just one person in an audience to performing for a full house. I think I've always enjoyed playing different characters, blending into different environments and such.

The whole thing about acting, the draw for me, is the opportunity to do things you don't get to do in real life.

With films, you completely immerse yourself in a character, get into who they are, live it and then release it.

What made me fall in love with acting, which is my life, was watching other people perform. It made me hunger to do that.

I'm quite simple, really. I like to play and inhabit my character. I really like to inhabit the situation. It's the situation that intrigues me.

Actors, their greatest tool, their greatest resource is imagination. You can take things, power objects, you can recruit your dreams, you can access your memories and get there. So the idea is not to act but to just be.

Seriously, my music really does help my acting, and, like, getting in and out of a character from a different lifestyle and writing a song about it. Likewise, my acting inspires the music because I can write a theme that I wouldn't necessarily approach at all in life.

Sometimes I can't get out of the character because the story is very intense.

With acting, I started very young, and I'd performed for a lot of children in boarding schools, late at night after the dormitory lights were out. I'd have a flashlight, and I'd be Count Dracula, or Shakespeare, or Yogi Bear, and leap from bunk to bunk. I loved the laughter; I liked the way it made people feel.

One of the things about acting is it allows you to live other people's lives without having to pay the price.

Acting is the most communicative thing I can imagine doing.

I think actors always retain one foot in the cradle. We're switched on to our youth, to our childhood. We have to be because we're in the business of transferring emotions to other people.

When I was acting, I got trained in creating a character as a three-dimensional person. If you're doing it right you should be able to draw an audience into the character's world and make them feel their fears.

To me, part of the fascinating profession of acting is to participate in all these strange situations, to try to understand all these interesting characters, fictitious or real, their human nature... It's extraordinarily fascinating.

A passion for any novel, and any character, can crystallise your ideas when you really need to be as open as possible as a performer.

When you do a play, you do it for a couple months, and it just gets in your bones. You can learn about somebody that way.

I love the process of discovering a new world - that's why I'm passionate about acting. It's just discovering life, feelings, ideas and thought.

I think what's so attractive about acting is that you get to live several lifetimes in one.

At a young age, acting was so inspiring and exciting, because to me it was play - make-believe, pretend.

Acting is invigorating. But I don't analyse it too much. It's like a dog smelling where it's going to do its toilet in the morning.

The magic doesn't come from within the director's mind, it comes from within the hearts of the actors.

Songs are like movies to me, and so you put yourself in the movie. You become a character in the movie.

You can keep yourself alive. That's the magic of being an actor.

Acting is a nice childish profession - pretending you're someone else and, at the same time, selling yourself.