Ajay Mehta Quotes

Every role you do is kind of a side of yourself. That's why they give you the part.

I guess you should approach the roles differently when they're actual people who have been, this is the difference. Getting the accent exact, or the hair exact is less important in a situation like this.

I think every role you take on, you should take on the responsibility of doing the best representation of that person or that character or that role. When it is a human being that has actually existed, and it is a person that people know of, yeah, you feel an even more amount of pressure to do a good job.

My job is to tell a story, and the decisions about the casting have to be honest.

Every time a director calls me and says, 'If you practice a lot in two months, can you be an American?' And I always tell them, 'Well, maybe but I'm French. So it's going to be hard to be someone else.'

The closer a part is to you, the harder it is to play. Anything else is just imitation. If I'm playing a Russian countess, I get the hat, the accent, the outrageousness. Easy. Playing a murderess? Perfect.

I don't aspire to just play things that are like me. Whether the accent is Taiwanese or British or Canadian - that is the very craft in which I was trained. It is my absolute privilege and honor to do that.

Weirdly, when I'm playing an English person, I feel like I've got nothing to hang on to, and it feels a bit strange and exposing.

I've played American characters before, so I've naturally become more at ease. Still, there are some American words that I cannot get my tongue around, but if you keep it flowing, you are never too far away from the truth.

When you're playing Marilyn Monroe, you have a responsibility to look and sound like her that you don't when you're playing people who weren't ever in the public eye.

When I play a gay character, I want to be as believable as possible. And when I'm playing a straight character, I also want to be as believable as possible. So the less that people know about my personal life, the more believable I can be as a character.

I think there's a responsibility to any character that you play that was a living persona.

It's part of my challenge as an actor, not only speaking English but speaking Spanish with a Mexican accent.

I find it terribly distracting in movies when people do accents, I must say, unless it's terribly serious and the story is rooted in South Africa and you're doing a South African accent. But in period movies I think nothing can be more distracting than people doing accents.

When I do an accent I commit fully and take it very seriously.

I can't do an accent unless I'm on the set. I forget how to do it until I'm on the set.

If you play a real character who's famous and still alive, it makes things easier if you have the luck to have a good relationship with them.

It's an acting job - acting natural.

I've got to tell you, I've played real characters before and people always bring up this word 'impersonation,' and I'm never entirely sure what it means.

I'm an actor who plays an intriguing character, not a political pundit.

You've got to be honest with yourself aesthetically about who could you play. You want to artistically be true to that character.

Acting has to do with saying it as if you meant it, so for me the words are always very important. It's very important for me to know my lines, know them so well that I don't have to think about them.

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.

Being an actor, you are recognized for being somebody else, whereas these books are distilled from me.

As an actor, you try to put a little bit of yourself in everything you do.