Kathy Baker Quotes

I just find it thrilling, especially when I totally lock in to the person that I am doing and I'm really flying... I suppose I am hiding myself when I sing as these other people.

The only way I know how to do something, as cheesy as it sounds, is to become that character, and it affects me in a not so healthy way.

Whenever I play a role, it's like I've been kidnapped inside my own body.

I bring so much of myself to each character that there's always a worrying point when I think: 'Oh no, I'm really that person.'

You hear stories of intense actors who can't shed their character and who don't know who they are for a week or two after. I'm not that guy, man.

I love diving into different skins, skins that make me feel deep emotions.

A strange thing happens to me that I'm sure happens to a lot of actors when the camera starts rolling. I'm not 'me' any more.

Actors use who they are to be someone else, but I would hate to ever think I'm playing myself. It's imagining being someone else that is the key motivating thing for me. So when people want to know about me, it makes me a bit unnerved.

I went into acting because I wanted to be seen being someone else, not me!

I always just felt more comfortable just kind of hiding behind a character than being myself onstage.

I like to be other people, not me. And when you're on the red carpet, it's like, 'Here's Tom Hardy.' I don't want to be me. That's why I play other people.

I love being someone I'm not for a period of time. I love every minute of being in someone else's skin.

As a young performer, I didn't know that you can have a great time playing someone in terrible crisis. The more you know it's not real, the deeper you can go into it. And the easier it is to let it go when it's done.

It is very hard to separate one's self from a character. Sometimes the people closest to me have to be very understanding.

I'm really not interested in showing me or playing me. My gift as an actor, given to me, is to be able to become other people.

In the moment of acting you don't feel like anything, you feel like the person, as much as you can.

When you have to get into the character each morning, give it your voice, your face, it was torture.

Between takes I find it difficult to switch off and then try and re-emerge myself in the part, so I try to stay in that frame of mine all day. It can be exhausting and you lose a sense of self, but it is the method that works best for me.

It's interesting to play a role where you don't really have to preoccupy yourself with any need to convince yourself that you're not acting.

I got into acting for the chance to be many different people and many different characters. I love hiding in a role and doing the research. If there is an opportunity to change my body, I will change my body. I'll slip in and disguise myself in a role. That is a really big treat for me.

One of the things I love about acting is that I can enter into these other people's lives. But going back to being me at the end of the day is very important, too. That process of remembering who I am.

You have to be completely in the character, and that's so hard to do. That's why, when they call, 'Cut!,' you often feel yourself shift. Unless you're Daniel Day Lewis, who stays in character all the time, there's a switch that happens.

I have to phrase this perfectly: I'm just not convinced that the attention we give to creating what we think of as a character isn't actually quite often the means by which an actor overcomes his own terror of standing there onstage and creating a mask to hide behind.

Actors who say they can dive inside a character are either schizophrenic or lying.

When you get a role, you completely lose yourself in it. That's one of the great things about acting - letting yourself go.