Jesse Eisenberg Quotes

That's kind of the fun part about acting. We do get the right to kind of get from A to Z any way we want, as long as we start at A and end at Z.

Whenever you have a role where you don't get to know anything about the character, you have to invent it yourself. You have to feel like it came from somewhere.

A lot of actors, whatever movie you're working on, you make up a back story just for your own, to work off, even if the audience doesn't have it revealed to them. I think it's important that the audience makes up their own mind.

For me, that is the craft of acting: literally creating something from nothing.

You have more creative freedom with writing, in certain ways, because you can create everything that happens. But, as an actor you also have creative freedom because you don't so much focus on what has to move the story along, and only on how your character is reacting to situations.

For me, acting is a series of impressions rather than trying to find one line through to the end, which risks becoming more of a presentation.

Performing, for me, has always been a very inner process.

Honestly, I'm a shallow performer. I just go with the text and feel my way around it. There's not a whole lot of shaping.

I have a journal, and every character that I play, I write as the character: how I feel about things and how I'm going to play it.

Everything that I am going to do as an actress doesn't matter where it's coming from. It just has to be interesting.

I'm not really a guy who draws on things from my own past. I think if you're a competent actor with a good imagination, and if it's on the page, it makes your job a lot easier. If it's well written, it allows your imagination to run wild and draw inspiration from that.

I think sometimes you can think up a story, but it's because you're comfortable doing that, but when you're an actor, one of the things that you have to do is take yourself out of your comfort zone.

I rarely do any back story. I often get a thick bible of back story, but I can't use it. The back story is a tool of the writer. But I can only act what's in the scene.

There's nothing more liberating about starting with something that is not written. You pretty much create the history of that character and that character's life story.

'Heirs' became an emotional experience for me. I had a hard time bringing out my emotions in the series. I used all my physical and emotional energy to bring out all that acting.

So many actors get caught up in their technique, and to be honest, I see it really getting in the way. I see them forcing things. I definitely do my best work when I'm free of that. But I think as an actor, I work really hard in preparing the roles.

I try to think what the character is thinking. Then, hopefully, I begin to feel it. I act and react not because I'm recalling a dog killed by a fire engine, but because I'm concentrating on what the character is going through.

A novel is utterly your own creation, a very private process. I think of a novel as a noun and a screenplay as a verb. In a novel, very little needs to happen; you can explore a person's memories and thoughts and fantasies. In a screenplay, it's all action; you must push the story on.

The joy of acting for me is to be able to experience emotions in a safe environment. You can't scream and cry in the street because everybody will look. If you do it on a movie set, you get applauded.

All good actors are unpredictable, and a little crazy in a good way, because they feel more secure playing other people than themselves.

I put a lot of time and energy and thought behind what I do and the characters that I create, and I don't want to do anything peripheral that is going to make an audience see me up there on the screen rather than who I'm playing.

With acting, I always feel conscious of what I'm doing.

As an actor, our very palette is one of imagination. So it is a walk onto an empty space and then imagine the world beyond it is what we do.

It's your job as an actor to fill out the blanks. I love doing that. To fill in the bones.

When you're acting in a scene, you're focused on doing the scene. You can't break character and go, 'Oh my God, I love what you're doing!'