Michael Gambon Quotes

I know, because I tried all sorts of ways of being in character, and the best way is to be totally straight.

I never do roles, I play people.

For me, personality acting is not that interesting. I don't want to just be myself.

When you watch me on the screen, you should not be able to recognise me. If people say, you're a natural and an organic actor, that's an insult. If you're being yourself all the time on screen, that means you don't know how to act.

I never improvise. I create the character and transform into it.

Yeah, I think the common denominator - and this is probably going to sound like Acting 101 - but the common denominator is belief in the character in the moment.

I always enjoy impersonating my characters in the first-person singular.

When you are developing a character you have to bring so much of yourself to the role.

There are a lot of actors who will sit here and talk to you about characters - 'He does this, and she's a really interesting character because she does this.' I'm not like that at all. I'm not an actory actor.

You take what you know, and you put it through your own prism. If I play characters that break down or cry, it's Gary Oldman crying; it's not the character crying.

In acting, you have to pull from real-life situations, from people, to help develop a character.

With most British actors, it's amazing. I think they start with the character on the outside and work in.

Some actors can distance themselves from the parts they play, but I fall into the category who use bits of themselves.

I'm a method actor.

You have to be completely in the character, and that's so hard to do. That's why, when they call, 'Cut!,' you often feel yourself shift. Unless you're Daniel Day Lewis, who stays in character all the time, there's a switch that happens.

I've always done method acting. I'm a method actor, and I've done that for years. I never did acting and decided to take it seriously because all the parts people want me to do were playing the pretty role. If I want to play someone pretty, I'll play myself.

Acting is different from stand-up. It gives you this ability to enter into another character, to create another person.

You try, as an actor, to wear a mask; you're serving a story.

The actor is there to translate what's on the page onto the stage or the screen. So I find it important that an actor manages to actually get out of the way, vanish as a person behind the character, never to be seen or talked about again. That's my philosophy.

Acting is not just impersonating your character.

Actors act... Their job is to become this character. And I have, in fact, seen Sam Heughan become Jamie and Caitriona Balfe become Claire right before my eyes. It was an astonishing transformation.

The actor's job is to put themselves in the shoes of the character they are trying to portray as truthfully as possible.

You normally either get bitten by a character and decide that is the way to play it, and then that begins to inform everything you do, or you decide, 'I don't need to use much character in this - I have basically got to be me'.

Playing a real-life character, as an actor, gives me real high because there is so much of research material available in front of you.

You're always trying to find common ground with whatever you do, but you want to not be thinking about yourself when you're performing a play. The job is getting yourself out of the way and letting the character go about the scenes.