Eric McCormack Quotes

Jeff Bridges taught me a lot about how to keep a scene fresh.

When you're studying drama, when you're a young actor, there are simple rules about acting. "Why am I here? What prevents me from leaving? What am I trying to get? How do I hide something?" So when you're making a film like Abel's movie, you want to be thinking about those things all the time. And you wanna be armed with those things, and you hope the other actors you're working with have the same understanding of drama and scene and acting. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

By the time I got to the Fox studio for my first major film, I knew how to hit a mark. I knew how to memorize lines. I knew how to pay attention.

With 'Taxi Driver,' I had this eureka moment. I realized that acting could be much more than what I had been doing. I had to build a character that wasn't me.

The actor cannot afford to look only to his own life for all his material nor pull strictly from his own experience to find his acting choices and feelings.

When I'm given a role, I'm consumed by a passion to bring to life a character that exists only on paper. I mull over the character for days and internalise his feelings.

[On being asked, 'Did you ever say that an actress needs to be able to laugh and to cry and that when you need to laugh you think of your sex life and when you need to cry you think of your sex life?':] No.

I take acting very seriously. I put everything I have and know into it.

I really love being a character actor. I have to say I wish it were a little easier. There are still a lot of things that I don't get, like I do wish I had more of my own.

I love talking about acting. I'm just such a fan of actors and filmmakers, and I try to choose roles where I get to talk to great actors about acting and learn.

I've been in front of the camera a million times as a musician, and even directed a few music videos. So, I know a lot about spacing, focus, blocking, etcetera. So, acting isn't totally new for me. Still, I find it fascinating, because you actually get to be another person.

I think a lot of that is what helped me develop my character. I wouldn't say it was Method, but it was definitely a little more in depth than I've done before in terms of acting. With the other kids, we all were such good friends by the time we started shooting. Because of that, it allowed us to trust each other more to push the dynamics of the relationship to places which you might not be able to had you not trusted that person.

I knew how to act and had studied acting and enjoyed it, but I'd never pushed myself to really perform as an actor, and create a role, and have the whole character's backstory.

You're an actor, you want to do a scene in class. But one of the things I've always had is I've always had a really good memory. So I would go and watch a movie and then I would see a scene in the movie and I go, hey I'd like to do that in class this Wednesday.

Usually I don't get specific advice from certain actors or actresses I work with.

Learning about acting for camera is really quite exciting to engage with and deal with.

You spend your life training to be an actor, observing people's characteristics so that you can design characters around what you've seen.

I have always wanted to do a book about actors because I think that the death of a character is a tremendously emotional experience.

I think acting for sure takes a lot of dedication, especially when you're starting out, because it's so much rejection and it's so important to really study and know your craft.

Every movie is different. Sometimes with movies, there are roles you should just leave alone and relax with and keep it light. And there are other ones where you want to work with an acting coach and really delve in there.

The same thing I applied to football, I applied to trying to be an actor and hopefully it came off well.

With acting, there are a lot of subtleties and non-verbals involved. If someone is over there, getting eaten by a shark, there's a non-verbal way of how to act that. There's a certain nuance to acting that does not come intuitively to me. It's something I still have to learn.

Working on camera is a different ballgame in the sense that it's far more intimate work, but the basics and the foundations of being able to create something that isn't necessarily your own instincts - is a character that you have inside your head - whether you're talking about television or film or theater, that still has to be the grounding work.

A lot of times, you're not necessarily off the page because you haven't been able to take the time to prepare a character. It's very easy to find even great actors reading it more like a reading. Things aren't really coming alive yet, even though you know they will.

I started doing roles and working with people that I really respected and became passionate about the art form of acting. And I'm still trying to figure it out. Still learning.