Ryan Murphy Quotes

People like to think that actors are terribly worried about ghosts of other actors in the parts they play. But you just have to get on with it.

It is very satisfying for an actor to be able to play a historical personage.

I'm not the person in person that I am on stage.

I'm almost tempted, when I'm playing a real person, not to meet them. Afterwards, maybe. But, the job is the same. You still have to show up on screen and be alive and real and all that stuff.

In my career, there have been three things that were challenging: playing gay; playing a Jewish woman; and playing Chekhov. The scariest part was playing Chekhov!

It's always challenging to go into a role.

You're playing a character in a drama who happens to be based on someone who existed. It's never going to 'be' that person, but it's based on someone well-known, and you want to create enough of that person for it not to be a distraction.

When writing about historical characters I try to be as accurate as possible, and in particular not to misrepresent the view they held. With a real historical figure you have to be fair, and this is not an obligation you have in dealing with your own creations, so it is quite different.

It's more difficult playing a real-life person than a fictional character - you can go easy on yourself with a fictional character.

I hate going into the audition room. I find it the most nerve-wracking, inhumane experience, and I think it's such an inhospitable environment to give an honest account of the character and, I guess, your ability.

Doing 'Mamma Mia' was scary full stop, so playing a young Colin Firth was even more intimidating. I just had to keep reminding myself that I was playing Harry and not Colin Firth, which psychologically felt better.

You can't play history and you can't play historical characters. You just have to reduce it to the ordinary.

With acting, it [auditioning] is very frustrating. I'm not very good at auditions. Sometimes I audition for a role and I'm like, I'd be really funny in that role, but I'm not good at auditions so I guess I'm not getting that role. It's a very frustrating job.

The danger of course is always is caricature. The biggest challenge was to sound like Nelson Mandela. Everything else is easy to do, walk like him. He has a few ticks and things I noticed that I picked up. I didn't have any agenda, as it were, in playing the role other than to bring it as close to reality as I possibly could.

Everything that you do is a challenge. And acting is just building up your concentration and being able to listen and to do the ridiculous.

I wouldn't want to try to make a living as an actor. I think actors... I give them a lot of credit for what they go through, but putting myself on the line like that would make me crazy.

History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.

People say, "Why is it that you love to act?" And you want to say, "Well, most of acting is sitting in your trailer, either bored or worried about the scene coming up." A lot of it is about things you don't really like, so it's a wonder why acting is such a huge draw, why everyone loves it so much.

This is sort of inflection-free acting [playing Maigret], and I really wasn't sure if I could do it - you make your mind up on whether I've succeeded or not. But yes, I found it difficult when we were shooting; it was a couple of weeks before I settled into not worrying - to finding a way of delivering those lines - so my worries of many months before I think had been justified. I found it a difficult way of being.

The terrible thing about acting is the stops and starts.

When I was in acting class, we did a lot of really serious scenes, and we didn't do comedic scenes. I felt like doing those scenes, it didn't come out of my mouth the right way. I don't know if it's because my voice is different, or what it is about me, but it just seemed a little off.

And it [acting] was exciting to me. And scary.

I've never been able to read for anything, and every time I have, I've never gotten the part. And I don't know why that is. I just can't. Reading or auditioning for something... It's like it's this mental block in my brain, and I just can't do it. But when people ask you to do stuff without making you go through that, it's a much more pleasant experience.

As an actor, that's nerve-wracking enough [drunk and doing coke] because you have to do it at the right level.

Great historians can make the discovery of the real story more exciting than the romantic myth. Stacy Schiff, a great historian as well as a wonderful writer, peels away the layers to reveal the true Cleopatraa much more interesting woman than the Hollywood version and, as it turns out, a formidable queen after all.