Sigourney Weaver Quotes

Almost every character I've ever played - and sometimes this is very conscious and sometimes it's not - I need to find what they love.

I'm quite simple, really. I like to play and inhabit my character. I really like to inhabit the situation. It's the situation that intrigues me.

I try to do my best to differentiate each fella, each spirit, from the next one... and once it's exorcised it doesn't just go away. It becomes a part of you. So every role becomes a part of you.

It becomes very easy as an actor to immerse yourself when you're in the real places.

I don't worry so much about the audience. I want them very much to be involved and enjoy the movie, but I try to just inhabit the character in a full way, where I can create a personal stake.

What I didn't realize about television was that's true of acting, as well. You have that space of time to develop who you are, and you can use more and more of yourself. The lines between that character that I'm playing and myself become more and more blurred and, after awhile, they just disappear, altogether.

I don't think there's a certain part of a character I take with me. There's a certain part of me I leave with each character, though.

I never like to go out of character when filming starts. I fear that if I do, I might not be able to pick it up again.

It's really an organic sort of process. You start off with the character on the page. You fall in love with that character and you have to represent that character well and I think it's just an evolution there. Using the accent and speaking the lines with the accent in fact opens the door to who the character really is.

When you come onto the set, everything should be focused around your character and you should stay in the pocket, as much as possible. Every actor has their own process. For me, I really need to stay in the pocket.

With The Help, I knew folks involved in the project peripherally. I wanted to audition for Hilly Holbrook and part of the initial feedback was: "No, Bryce is too nice." That's part of the reason why I really love auditions as well - you get to try out a character and try out different versions of a character.

My own personal process with movies is to develop the characters with the actors and, when I've done that properly, you can't imagine anyone else, but that actor, playing that part.

Being an actor opened doors for me to explore my emotions as different people and characters, and expand my own inner soul.

It's like having children. You give birth, but then they take on a life of their own. That's what actors do for characters. It's pretty amazing.

I think everybody should act! I would encourage everybody to do one thing, join a theater class or something. It's so good to take a character that you think is wildly different from who you are, and to try to relate to that person and become that person is very helpful. It's hard to articulate what you learn, but you can feel the effect of these characters that you play and take with you.

In '7th Heaven,' more than 'Teen Wolf,' was that I got to learn more about my character. In 'Teen Wolf,' I'd always get a new arc for that character every season, which was discovery for me.

When you're playing a character, you don't really want to have an opinion about where you're going to end up. Otherwise, you can't really stay in the moment and in your character.

I guess I've just gotten to the point where I don't want to be bored by the characters that I play, and I don't want to feel like I'm having to make something more interesting or I'm having to force something that's not really there on the page.

I think there's a bit of me in every character. Basically it just depends on what happens with the character.

I'm drawn to real-life characters. A lot of the characters I play, I've had in me since second grade. I've been dragging them around my entire life, and then sometimes I marry them with different people. But seldom have I really come up with a new character. In my head it's like, "I'll pull that person out that I've been doing since sixth grade and see where they're at right now.".

There should always be that leeway because if you think of your character as sort of absolutely fixed, then you just try and find actors to come and do exactly that thing, then you're not gonna be working with that actor's own set of internal impulses and who they are, so the best work is always a coming together of the actor and the character.

As an actor, I would call it a role where you get to stretch out a bit.

Marty [Scorsese] knows that when an improvised moment comes out of a real situation, it's gonna have more life and more going on than anything you can imagine and that's how the character can become the story

When you do a film, you start to get the character, and then it disappears for a year before it's released and you get feedback.

At the end of the day, it's all one version of telling a story. I treated this as if it was a two million dollar independent film. I did a lot more physical work than I'd probably have to do for a two million dollar independent film with four months of training and stuff. But as far as the character's psychology or emotional life goes, I treat it just the same.