Sam Neill Quotes

As an actor, I love working with directors. As much as I love working with other actors.

I'm an actor and my job is to interpret.

Writing and directing might be a red herring, and really I'm just re-examining what it is to act, to do it well and do it properly.

I'm interested in the acting and staging of specific emotions, and so I work with actors. It's a small proportion of what I do, but it's always what people seem to focus on.

Actors are observers of human life, of human behavior.

One of the things I love about acting is that there is always scope for growth.

Good actors can tell you more about your play than 1,000 hours alone at your desk.

Film acting is one of the only industries where you're criticized for working hard. In any other industry, it's considered a quality and something to behold.

Nobody should expect an actor to have these wonderful ideas and concepts about the world: they pretend to be other people for a living.

As a filmmaker I find it much more rewarding to work with actors who are classically trained. It's about the work and only the work.

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

Acting is an aesthetic career, which is annoying.

Well, I do lie for a living. I'm an actor.

I went to NYU Tisch for undergrad, and it was amazing. My life then was extremely experimental with acting. I did crazy theater where we would be rolling around on the floor. I would be playing grandmothers, and clowns, and all this crazy stuff. Then I would be doing Shakespeare eight hours a day.

There's something really amazing about watching an actor like Michael C. Hall or Jennifer Carpenter, who are completely professional and do everything so brilliantly, but yet can have a really great time on set.

People really don't understand what actors do.

I've always been very comfortable in a set environment. All the collaborating going on, seeing how actors work - it all excites me.

When you work with actors, what you're hoping to absorb is good ways to be an actor as opposed to how to handle being famous.

You know, back in acting school they always teach you, 'Make bold choices and look for activities that are interesting.'

I'm sort of a reverse Method actor. In my personal life, I become my characters. After 'One Tree Hill', I started dressing in Converse and ripped jeans and hoodies. On 'Awkward', it manifests in how I speak.

I like going in to different styles of acting and exploring stuff I haven't done before.

I don't honestly think people know what acting is.

Acting is still, of course, what I love to do most. The beauty of it is that by changing characters, it never gets boring.

And at NYU, I went to the Atlantic Theater Company, and they have two main points. One of them is to always be active in something instead of just feeling it. And the other is figuring out your character.

I love actors, and I love the casting process. It's funny, like, some writers don't like actors because, I think, they are the faces of the show, and so you feel sort of secondary, but I love actors because they elevate the material; they make it better.