John Leguizamo Quotes

Actors are pretending for you, but they're not lying. They are not putting on a guise instead of themselves. They are finding things inside that they have experienced.

Nobody "becomes" a character. You can't act unless you are who you are.

I try to have a true line in every character I play.

Acting is not just impersonating your character.

Being an actor opened doors for me to explore my emotions as different people and characters, and expand my own inner soul.

I think that some people like to be someone other than themselves when acting, while others are most themselves. I fall into the second camp. For me, acting is a great exercise in getting to the truth about myself.

I'm disappointed in acting as a craft. I want everything to go back to Orson Welles and fake noses and changing your voice. It's become so much about personality.

For me, personality acting is not that interesting. I don't want to just be myself.

It's true I have a hard time with the notion of creating a character. And I feel it's a limit. I'm always really impressed by actors who are able to construct a character, like Johnny Depp.

The best advice my dad ever gave me is that acting is believing. Acting is not acting. It isn't putting on a face and dancing around in a mask. It's believing that you are that character and playing him as if it were a normal day in the life of that character.

When you are developing a character you have to bring so much of yourself to the role.

When people give you a writing assignment, they're asking what you think. That's the very opposite of being an actor. When you're an actor, no one wants to hear what you think.

Every time you play a bad girl or guy in a movie, you really come from a place of pain.

Find out who you are and be that person. That's what your soul was put on this Earth to be. Find that truth, live that truth and everything else will come.

Any actor who is being honest will admit there's always a small or large part of the real you in every character. It's impossible not to have that.

I love to act and put on a show, but you're playing a character all the time. For music, it's really just me being myself.

That's a song about reaching deep inside yourself where you can completely be who you are.

I just play him as myself, I don't ease myself into any role really. I stick a beard on and play me.

The big difference with Juliette and the others in that film is that she goes beyond acting.

In acting, you have to pull from real-life situations, from people, to help develop a character.

Some actors can distance themselves from the parts they play, but I fall into the category who use bits of themselves.

Acting is trying to be absolutely truthful; to get audiences to believe that you are a dean, when, actually, not only are you not the dean, but if you walked into the building they'd probably throw you out. That's very hard.

For me, acting comes straight from the heart. In that sense I don't act at all. I think that to feel the character's pain I have to be myself. Somewhere audiences see that.

Feelings or emotions are the universal language and are to be honored. They are the authentic expression of who you are at your deepest place.

The thing about being an actor is that you turn into other people. You have to hide yourself a bit in order to let that other person come out.