Michael Welch Quotes

You can't follow another actor's performance. You can't be Robert DeNiro, because you're not Robert DeNiro, and, you know, he is.

I have less than no interest in trying to replicate another brilliant actor's work, thank you very much.

I played Othello, but I didn't sit around thinking how Laurence Olivier did it when he played it. That wouldn't do me any good.

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

Of course you can find something exciting and dynamic in any character you want to portray.

When people give you a writing assignment, they're asking what you think. That's the very opposite of being an actor. When you're an actor, no one wants to hear what you think.

With every character, I just bring something that I can make my own.

Literature is an easier way to study acting, because then you can take any kind of spin.

You'd never play Hamlet if you started worrying about who's played it before you.

I wasn't trying to do a play or do what Kevin Spacey did. I was trying to do my own thing with it.

All performances are different. I don't think it's necessary to compare one with another. I am just me playing the role of Lear. You're bound to get a Holm approach to it, whatever that may be. I just got out there and did it. I'm very much a doer in my acting.

The worst acting is about imitation.

What is important to me as an actor is that, even if I have to spread my arms, take my shirt off on a mountain top with my heroine in a chiffon sari, it still has to be me and my twist or my funny take on it.

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 was the moment I learned acting is not acting out. After that light went on, I spent the rest of my life trying to figure out how to make other people realize it.

It's really hard to copy another actor and be successful. In fact, that's usually the reason people are not good, because they're copying something they've seen, but, for some reason with their face and their body, it doesn't work.

It was interesting doing impressions as somebody else doing impressions. Normally, I'll do a voice, and it's me doing the voice. To have to be Robin Williams doing the voice was an interesting sort of study in getting into somebody's head.

Everything, I think, about acting is based on imagination.

Even if you try to copy a film shot by shot, you still can't. It's still your own film.

There were times in my career when I would try to write songs like Bob Dylan... Artists get hooked up in that. To be a follower, you lose.

See, that's the thing: I'm not one of those actors who thinks, 'God, I've got to improvise and make it my own.' No, my first job as an actor is to take what's written and make it work. And then, if they want me to improvise, I'll do that.

I always try to make each character my own.

I just play him as myself, I don't ease myself into any role really. I stick a beard on and play me.

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

As an actor, you never try to be someone else. You can't.