Michelle Monaghan Quotes

Actors are always looking for ways to build a character.

The first thing, the main thing, about how I work is I need to understand the character.

I don't see any difference in the craft of acting, in film or television. It's absolutely the same. It's different storytelling, playing a character over multiple hours, as opposed to two.

As an actor, anything that you have to help get you into character is helpful.

I'm not the kind of actor who goes into exhaustive research for each role.

It's kind of up to the actor to deconstruct the scene and deconstruct the character and figure out how to make it real. That's what I love about this job: It's sort of a puzzle each time, and figuring that out is sort the key, whether I'm playing a cop or a killer.

I don't do method acting. If I play a farmer, I'm not gonna spend 3 weeks on a chicken farm. That's a bit too much for me.

My first film, 'Like Minds,' was with Toni Colette, who was extraordinary. I mean it was basically a mini-masterclass for acting on film at a time when all you could probably see were my eyebrows bouncing up and down on screen.

I was raised in New York City and raised in the New York City theater world. My father was a theater director and an acting teacher, and it was not uncommon for me to have long discussions about the method and what the various different processes were to finding a character and exploring character and realizing that character.

Every actor turns everything round to their character.

The way I approach acting when there's a real life character, it's sort of like a Venn diagram. What I come up with is some amalgam of the two of us.

I don't think I'm an actor who takes their characters home with him. But I certainly do take the preparation home.

The idea of an actor is that you should be able to play anything.

As an actor, you don't want to ever get too comfortable where you're like, 'I know this character,' and you don't do the work anymore.

Every actor comes with their own experience, method, methodology.

In film, there are always things that could conceivably create artificiality in any performance.

If you're playing a real person, then you want to do a certain amount of research, but that's only going to be so useful to you. Each role requires a different kind of approach to get ready.

My favorite acting books are Stella Adler's 'The Art of Acting' and 'Sanford Meisner on Acting.'

I'm no Method actor. I've tried staying in character, and it's just exhausting.

I wouldn't call myself a method actor, but I have my own method. I do my own research. I come up with a background for the character. I'm not a club man. I don't like isms. I've never really studied Stanislavski.

I believe in method acting. Whenever I'm working on a character, I start behaving like him. I start doing these things which the character would normally do. Maybe that's the way I function as an actor, and I believe in it. And that's how I try and portray a character.

For me, as an actor, the challenge is mostly before the film starts when you have to get into the psychology of the character.

Whatever character you play, whatever film it is, whatever story it is, for me, in my training it's always something that gives you a layered character, it's understanding the secret of that character, and so whatever comes up as "Oh, I thought that person was that," you are always carrying that within you. So actually what you're playing all the way through is both and it's just what comes out in the scene or the circumstance.

As an actor, you use the things from yourself that you can apply to the character.

It's the same kind of preparation you do for something like this you do for anything. It doesn't matter if it's a drama or a comedy, the need to get the emotion and the character arc across is way harder in something like this so was more of a preparation.