Mark Pellegrino Quotes

I never judge the characters I'm asked to play, and I don't need to feel that they are a part of me.

My school of thought with going into a character is that you have to understand where they come from, and you have to empathize with them.

I think it's always easier to play parts that you have something concrete that you can relate to.

What I mostly do is take the script, analyse the hell out of it, see what's in there, see what kind of person I'm dealing with, and then forget I'm playing a father and just play a person who exemplifies all those things.

To play any character, you have to have a total understanding of why they do what they do.

Part of an actor's job is to find correlations between your own life and the life of the person you are playing.

I think when you play a role, you always have to be a defense attorney for that character.

Every actor turns everything round to their character.

Every time when I start preparing my character for a movie, I always try to make up and create my own background story for the role in order to fill it with life.

If I prepare myself for a character, for a role, I always try to understand her.

If I wasn't an actor, I never would have known who Debbie Gallagher was. I never would know how her feelings are or how her emotions are, or her family.

For me, as an actress, you are playing a character, and to play that character, you have to get into that mindset.

Even when you are playing someone who is real, you get their mannerisms and you get their little quirks, but, it still has to be something inside of you that connects with the role, or else you will not be any good.

In 'There Will Be Blood,' my character was someone who was an actor himself almost. He had a rehearsed quality about him. He was a performance artist in a way.

Being an actor myself I realize that all actors believe they are qualified to play any role. If you showed me a script with a black woman character I would tell you that I could do it. That is what we do. We act as if we are someone else.

As an actor, one's role is very much to respond and react to the situation within the context of the character and his world.

I am a professional actor, and I don't go about moralizing about what the character does. Otherwise, seriously, why be an actor? You're not making some kind of social statement. That's not what actors do.

Ultimately, the idea of acting is to understand the people you're playing, and then where they're coming from is not so mystifying. You've got to detox a bit after, though.

When I get a role, I try to delve as deeply as possible into the character.

If I'm doing my job as an actor, the audience knows everything I know about the character.

I don't have any training as an actor, but I guess I'm an intense pretender. When you read something over and over, it gets into you a little bit. You can't help but begin to feel it, even if you're a healthy person as I think I am.

It's not a matter of learning lines. It's a matter of getting into the ideas and the will of the person. It's a matter of, 'What does he want to do? What does he want to achieve?'

Well, when you're playing a role, you have to think, 'What is ultimately motivating the character?'

Any sort of role requires a certain amount of research and embodiment of the character and psychological investigation.

As an actor, what you dream of is being able to portray people that people empathize with and understand and really feel for.