Rami Malek Quotes

Whatever headspace you need to live in for your character is sort of where you stay in between scenes.

I love to work this way - I love the time of preparation. If you feed yourself with all the information and you get to understand who the character is then you can really be her.

I make a playlist for every character I portray. Music plays a huge part in helping me understand a character. Every time I get a new role, I will take a chunk of time to just sit and listen to a bunch of songs and select the ones that make sense in my mind for that character. I can't even explain how much it helps me.

I wouldn't say I'm a Method actor, but I do try to focus very deeply on what character I'm playing, and everything else goes out the window. I forget about everything. I try to get everything else out of my head.

I'm not a method actor, but I'm affected by the life I share my life with during shooting. It's always a very strange and special period for me.

I find that I kind of have to sink into the character.

If I'm not writing, I can download a newer album everybody's making a fuss about. But when I'm writing, I keep myself in my own zone - I worry about listening to new music that'll inform me too much. I'm the kind of person who goes to another country and starts speaking in an accent after three days.

When I was on the set, I was not talking on the phone or reading anything else. I was just reading things, listening to music and watching things that had to do with the state of the scene. So it would be a constant, maintaining for the whole day that state. If I had an hour off for lunch, I would put on a movie or something that would help me stay in that area. And at the end of the day, I was like a zombie.

I sometimes listen to music to get into some place that I need to get. I don't think it's because I have a musician as a father that I do this - most actors do.

I've always kind of ripped from real life to some degree or at least how I'm feeling in the moment. In fact, maybe that's really it. In anything I've ever written, all the characters sound like me, which I don't think is a bad thing.

I had to focus and create a character in Bagger Vance, not just do my 'Will Smith' thing and get paid.

There are so many factors that go into how you feel, as a performer, on any given movie, that it's really hard to identify which things are the things that help you be good, and which are the things that hinder you.

No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.

I am inspired just by the way a scene can be interpreted by the actors. It can make a huge difference on the type of music that you write. It's best for me if I don't work at all on a project until the movie is shot and I have some sort of edit in front of me.

When I'm working, I don't wake up and say, 'OK, time to go be intense.' I just look at whatever scenes we're working on that day and break them down - just real intense everyday work.

I've found that when I'm having trouble solidifying a character or a scene, that music will often free my subconscious just that last little bit to allow me to move forward, and often it's in a direction that I didn't expect, but is 100 percent true to the character.

Whenever I am acting, it's everything, you know. If I'm researching a role, I'm completely consumed in that and, between action and cut, I live in this suspended time.

Music actually inspires me a lot. I listen to a lot of music, and often I find that if I can associate mentally a song or a piece of music with a particular character or scene, it helps me get back into the head of that character.

Acting is about animality. It's great to be allowed to be animal. But I feel more alive as a director. Every morning, I have to write.

As much as I know people love the method and what you can draw out of yourself, a lot of acting is very imaginative.

I try to create as many circumstances outside of set that help me fall into character when I get onto set.

You draw on whatever's relevant to the part you're playing; it makes it more personal.

In terms of jumping into a character's skin, I try to immerse myself in the role as much as possible to bring me closer to them. All I do is what's required to achieve what I want to achieve.

Whenever I work on a part, I look at the world through the filter of the character and I pick things they might use through my observations of real life.

I keep getting amazing things to bring to life. There's always something to discover with 'Dr. Bailey,' something that brings her home to the audience, something that makes people say, 'I know that woman. I work with that woman.' It's incredibly flattering and I'm still finding new things with her all the time.