Billy Boyd Quotes

I forget who said it, but someone said, your job as an actor is to communicate the most honest version of this character, and so the parts of you that you can use are obviously the easiest to access, because you live through them every day.

Obviously an actor draws on his own experience.

Bad actors try to cry, and good actors try not to. Bad actors try to laugh, and good actors try not to.

As an actor, your main goal is to tell the truth.

I just try to be honest and true to the character and play the part.

The actor has to have some degree of craft, along with the talent. No one tries to laugh except bad actors. No one tries to cry except bad actors. How a character hides his feelings tells us who he is. Most people don't know that, and most actors don't do that. Therefore, there are a lot of actors who put me to sleep, that are considered good actors, but they're predictable and boring. I know how the scene is going to end before it ends.

All you really have when you're acting is the confidence and your ability to manage and tell a story by creating a character.

That's what acting is all about - it's all about bringing truth from your own life, and putting it into your characters. If you have the advantage of using your own life in your work, that's always the way to go.

Work for the actor lies essentially in two areas: the ability to consistently create reality and the ability to express that reality.

I always thought that if you don't feel the breath in the actors' bodies, you lose all the intimacy and truth.

When you're trying to paint a portrait of a very specific world, you're trying to show what makes the world different. So, sometimes it means exaggerating certain kind of aspects, but I don't think it's that important or it's that much of an issue as long as you get an emotional truth across.

That's probably the biggest secret of acting: If the actor believes it themselves, they can make you believe it.

That's what acting is - it's about... having the courage to allow your audience into the private moments of your characters' lives.

Even great actors who transform who they are still go to a really honest place; I think that's sort of that special skill that actors have.

That's where everything starts, as an actor: you've gotta have great writing and great character development, and then you have really great materials to work from.

I don't see any difference in the craft of acting, in film or television. It's absolutely the same. It's different storytelling, playing a character over multiple hours, as opposed to two.

You see I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across, not just to depict life, or criticize it, but to actually make it alive.

Playing a drunk doesn't mean being a drunk, only bad actors try to be drunk. A real drunk tries to be sober, he wants another drink. How a character hides their feelings tells us who they are, no one shows their feelings except bad actors.

The work for the actor is always the same. We're looking for a human being. We're looking for believable human behavior.

After you read the script, then you actually just have to be in the moment you're in, in order to make it believable. You can't give it away. You can't tip it off. For me, it's always about being truthful in the moment I'm in. Hopefully, being able to reveal what I'm feeling, you have to believe it.

Learn your lines… plant your feet… look the other actor in the eye… say the words… mean them.

What I really learned from Tim Burton is that it's important to have your own person in a role because you can't play a character unless there are elements of human behaviour that you yourself understand. I was really struck by how Tim Burton would like to sit and chat about you... or question things which then you had never thought about. It is a good thing to always step back a bit with things like that. But I try my damned hardest to learn something from everything I do.

The actor must know that since he, himself, is the instrument, he must play on it to serve the character with the same effortless dexterity with which the violinist makes music on his. Just because he doesn't look like a violin is no reason to assume his techniques should be thought of as less difficult.

I feel like I express myself, as an actor. Whatever the character is put in front of me, I try to bring truth to it, whichever way it lands. I try to bring as much truth to it and make it as believable as I can. I think that's the job of an actor.

One of the beauties about being an actor is that nothing really has to make sense. You just do it and live it and hope it comes out and try to find the truth in what's in the text in your own way and hopefully you can find truth in the text and everything else just comes.