Sophie Okonedo Quotes

You have to love the guy that you play, even if you play the villain, you've got to love him.

Some parts stay with me for weeks afterward. It's these people that I play. They get under my skin, and I just can't let go of them. I have immersed myself into their lives and into their beings so much that they feel like a part of me.

With films, you completely immerse yourself in a character, get into who they are, live it and then release it.

Every character I've played is like family to me.

I think that you can sort of have your own personal journey and you know, you can just kind of apply that to whatever characters you're playing.

Sometimes you become friends with the characters you portray.

There are elements of myself in every character I do, just because you take from your real life experiences and sprinkle those into your character.

Well, as an actor, at least from my standpoint, I can't not like who I'm playing.

That's why I enjoy acting: getting in the mind of someone else.

Sometimes I can't get out of the character because the story is very intense.

I care about all the characters I play, and I get quite defensive about them.

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 act, a part of me goes into the character I am playing.

I love to be a working actor, and I love to read scripts as they come in. If I find the script or character that is interesting, I want to transform myself into that character.

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

A passion for any novel, and any character, can crystallise your ideas when you really need to be as open as possible as a performer.

I try to allow the spirit of the character to live through me. That's the only way I know how to approach acting. I have to live it.

As actors, you play people who are not yourselves!

Keats himself spoke about how Shakespeare was capable of erasing himself completely from the characters he had created. As an actor, that is what I'm trying to do.

You have to love the characters you play, even if no one else does.

I think that's just a natural instinct as an actor is that you want to just keep exploring humanity and finding different facets of it.

Acting is an imaginative exercise. It would be odd if you didn't try to identify with the roles you play, but I think I can differentiate between where my imagination is leading me and where I actually am.

I'm quite simple, really. I like to play and inhabit my character. I really like to inhabit the situation. It's the situation that intrigues me.

The characters I've portrayed may outwardly be quite different from one another, but I've found that they're also intrinsically linked.

I've always felt, even with sketches, that if you don't care about these people, then it doesn't matter.