Leonardo DiCaprio Quotes

There is such a cliche to certain roles that all I can do is to try to make them realistic and work for the times, and so the audience actually won't see me as a caricature of something, but rather as an actual person.

I've played all these extreme guys, but playing an everyman type has its own challenges.

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!

Everyone's surprised when they meet me. I guess it's because I've played tough cookies for so long... It's what I do best. I'm not sure I could pull off a genteel Southern belle.

In 'Hell Ride,' I play a biker - it's about the bikers. It's with Dennis Hopper and Michael Madsen, Larry Bishop and myself. We're bikers, and I play Billy Wings; I've got all sorts of wings, and you have to watch the movie to find out what the wings are about.

Hell's Angels

I have played a mentally challenged person, a quadriplegic - but blind, I realised, is the most difficult because eyes are the most involuntary muscles in our body. Like, our pupils and their dilations are involuntary.

In general-like not just in fiction but in life-it doesn't work out well when someone imagines someone else as a manic pixie dream girl or an Edward Cullen or anything other than a full, complex human being. That said, while I've tried to reflect that in my books, I don't think I've always succeeded, because I am always running up against my own insufficiencies and biases etc.

When you're on a movie and the production department says, "We need old photographs of you - your character - when you were 20-years-old." I usually tell them it's in storage or I had a fire. I go back to these old photos and there's never a good photo or they're of times that I'm so glad I'm out of. They have nothing to do with the character that you're playing, so it feels false. That's one of the hardest things for me in terms of looking back.

There's nothing hard about acting except the long hours.

I'd always wanted to write a song about a leather jacket and how wearing it makes you feel. I love leather jackets, and I've got a big collection of them.

The toughest part of acting is never a single thing. It's more like a whole character. I find film really difficult - trying to make it feel like a consistent character when you're filming everything out of order.

To play Bond, though, and then for the world to perceive you in a certain way, is very different from playing Superman. Bond is not this ideal figure.

The minute I'm in a little pain ... your rough, tough, scary bad boy image totally falls apart.

You know what's more difficult to do organically? Laughing. It's actually one of the hardest things to do on camera.

I worked so hard on that role [of Debra in Dexter]. And I barely worked on Rita. But I read for casting - both parts - and they said, "That's great, we're going to bring you in for producers." So I read for some producers - both parts - and they said, "That's great, we're going to bring you in to meet the creator." And I went in, and as soon as I walked in the room, he looked at me and he said, "Oh my god, you're our Rita!" And I said, "No! I'm Deb! I'm a total Deb!" "No, you're Rita!".

Acting in general you just feel kind of stupid doing it anyway, but when you're pretending to be rolling around and dodging a foot or riding an ant, you're having to really do it seriously and there's nothing there. You've got to put faith in the process.

I think directing yourself is a monumental task. Just to self edit as an actor, you work for some directors who don't give you a lot of feedback so you have to do that. That's a difficult thing to do as an actor.

A lot of times, it gets weird when some guy is playing your dad. It feels weird to you. It feels like they're forcing sentiment. It's disgusting.

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.

When I get hired as an actor as opposed to a writer, one of things that's exciting for me is doing stuff I wouldn't normally do myself. So whether it's a kid's movie or a voice in animation or in this case - where I just get to be silly, it's a different kind of comedy for me. As a performer, it's a different pleasure than when you're writing or directing. As a performer, you're just in the hands of the director and you go with whatever they want to do.

Harley-Davidson," she said. "Sweet.

With voice acting, it liberates you to play characters you'd never do in a million years because you're physically not right. You can show up looking like hell, you don't have to memorize your lines because you can read them right off the page, and you get to play the most fun parts. You come in and you kick everyone's ass and you get your own ass kicked, and then you go home.

Playing Elizabeth Taylor was probably the hardest job I've ever done.

I have a certain energy on screen, and it's either needed or it's definitely not needed. I know that I can stick out like a sore thumb, and there are some women I'm not ready to play.