Michael Rooker Quotes

There are always practical decisions to be made about any character you're playing.

I do not use any set methods, not even The Method. The character after all is in the lines.

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

I feel I should never do passive characters. They don't work for me.

I don't like the way some actors, when playing a nasty character, will try to grab hold of something good about them.

There are a lot of actors who will sit here and talk to you about characters - 'He does this, and she's a really interesting character because she does this.' I'm not like that at all. I'm not an actory actor.

Basically, I only play one character; I just play him at different volumes.

I have a tendency as an actress in general to ground my characters. Even when doing outlandish characters, that's my instinct.

When you get to set, you don't try to play the plot; you just play the character.

Vijay Sethupathi looks a film as a film. He never looks at what kind image he is going to get out of the character.

I am trained in theatre, and so I take time to study and get into the skin of a character.

It's down to the actors to show the writers the potential of the character.

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.

I had an acting teacher tell me once that if you're playing a car salesman, you don't want to be an OK car salesman, you want to play the best car salesman.

I never really thought about what characters I play. I always just wanted different characters.

As an actor, it's more interesting to play a nerd than anything else. It's a lot more fun - you don't worry about 'what's my hair like?' in the morning or 'which is my great angle?'

I love it and it is a blessing to be able to have seventy-five to eighty episodes to develop a character and find your voice. You have a similar through voice, and yet you are making different decisions, and so you act differently and you make different choices, as that is what your character would do.

That's what I love about acting, is playing different roles. I want to work for the character, and not make it work for me.

As actors, we want to choose somebody who has conflicts. I can't be always playing the girl next door. What's the challenge in that?

A while ago, I did a television adaptation of 'Bleak House,' and the character I played, as far as I was concerned, had no redeeming features whatsoever. I wasn't about to try to find any; I didn't need to.

When you have a book as material as it is, it's a lot easier to create a character because you have so many resources to draw upon when acting.

You take what you know, and you put it through your own prism. If I play characters that break down or cry, it's Gary Oldman crying; it's not the character crying.

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

I feel like my responsibility as an actor is to make characters as compelling and believable as possible.

Well, with each character that I play in my life as an actor, I try to figure out how to find the challenge.