Lisa Edelstein Quotes

If a movie is really working, you forget for two hours your Social Security number and where your car is parked. You are having a vicarious experience. You are identifying, in one way or another, with the people on the screen.

Part of the success of the show is that the audience sees themselves in the characters, becomes the characters. The more they inhabit the characters, the more they see.

I love reading for a character I have no business reading for.

The more time you spend with any character, whether it's from a comic book universe or a really naturalistic universe, the more time you spend, the more that character just becomes another aspect of yourself.

To be an actor is to be ambiguous in every form, which is a very hard way to live. You represent desire: the desire of the director and the desire of the audience, even if it's a subconscious desire. If a director is to work with you for two months, he must be in love with you in some way or another.

I'm so deeply interested in what it feels like to be other people that I get to operate under the illusion when I'm writing fiction that I'm not really revealing that much about myself. But, of course, I am, and I know that I am. And yet there's this sort of membrane that I get to work behind as I write my fiction, and I love it.

I was worried for a while that it was some sort of reflection of me that all I seemed to be getting were these characters that were a tad bit loony. But I love it. Those are the most fun characters to play!

One of the benefits to television is that you're with these characters for years, you know them so well.

When I read a character that I really, really love, I know immediately what they look like. It's like I want to 100 percent become that person.

It's people politics, people dynamics that make a show really good, whether it's 'Desperate Housewives' or 'Lost' or 'The Sopranos.' It's the people we've grown to love or otherwise.

If you can't laugh at your own characters, or shed a tear for them, or even get angry at one of them, no one else will either.

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.

I think often times on Joss Whedon's shows he can make you hate a character for a period and then love the character. He does it effortlessly.

If I don't fall in love with my characters, I cannot shoot.

In my acting, I have tried to do this - to present to audiences a living creature in whom they can recognise themselves or someone they know.

Ultimately, physical resemblance isn't as important as whether this person can bring this character to life in a way that's compelling and makes me care about what happens to them.

What made me fall in love with acting, which is my life, was watching other people perform. It made me hunger to do that.

We willingly enter fictional worlds where we cheer our heroes and cry for friends we never had.

We are Disney, in a sense. When you've been there for 20 years, there's a certain heart and soul to one of those films, and you inhabit that to a certain degree. So if it feels true to you, then your audience will hopefully go for it.

I love to be a vessel through which characters can come through. And if I can move an audience with my work, then I've done my job.

Acting isn't like being an athlete. There's no real quantifiable measure. It's just a bunch of people feeling things.

One result of moviemaking - and a side effect of moviegoing - is familiarity. If an actor is particularly good, familiarity opens into something deeper: care, concern, identification, empathy. Yet even those concepts can feel inadequate for some actors.

Acting is an expression of imagination. No firsthand knowledge is necessary.

When I think of all the Hamlets I've seen, there's been a load of different styles, some marvellous. You like the Hamlet you saw when you were the right age to think you could be Hamlet.

When a story is told really well and is real, even if it's not about their own lives, people can apply it to themselves.