Nicolas Cage Quotes

Being an actor gives you a chance to play all kinds of roles, very moving and dramatic on one project, silly and girlish on another. That's the most interesting thing out this business, you get to keep reinventing yourself.

I'm always telling students when I do a master class on audiobooks: 'Watch Meryl Streep. Watch her disappear into a role; watch what she does.'

A good actor is somebody who can be truthful and fascinating and interesting and enlightening.

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

You know, the truth is that us actors would all like to believe we re-invent the wheel, every time we play a character. But, we're human beings and our instruments are not violins, they are our bodies and our consciousness and our collective life experience.

If I have anything to offer as an actor, it's only my ability to make the person real.

Every character is challenging because, at the end of the day, you have to make something out of it.

I like to play non-cardboard characters. I try and bring out the many complex layers in the personality of the characters I play.

The number one job of an actor is to be a character and never let the acting show.

It is a tough job to portray a character and make it believable on screen.

An actor's job is to find variations of the same emotion in his being so that every time he expresses grief or joy, it doesn't look the same.

I can't do an accent unless I'm on the set. I forget how to do it until I'm on the set.

As an actress, I'm drawn to emotion and expressing the human condition in all its forms, and I'm fortunate to have thoughts and feelings at my fingertips.

The darker, more complex and emotional the part is, the easier it is for me. But I don't take any of that stuff home with me at the end of the day.

None of the characters I've played are really like me. That would be boring. That wouldn't be acting.

My job always is to play a person, not to judge her.

Maleficent was always so elegant. She always was in control. And to play her was difficult. I worked on my voice a lot. She's bigger than me. She's on a different level of performance that I have never done.

Acting's not about nose jobs and liposuction. It's about being truthful to what you're doing.

I had to focus and create a character in Bagger Vance, not just do my 'Will Smith' thing and get paid.

For any actor, it's a great privilege to play a character that is very distant from yourself.

The most fun you can possibly have as an actor is to walk that line between what's real and what's interesting.

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

Interestingly, the actress who, in her own persona, may be gentle, shy, and socially awkward, someone whose hand trembles when pouring a cup of tea for a visiting friend, can convincingly portray an elegant, cruel aristocrat tossing off malicious epigrams in an eighteenth-century chocolate house.

To me the voice has always been the way to start any character. Once I find that, I'm good to go.

It's always very daunting to play someone who actually existed. You have to honor that, and be specific and accurate and try to make people believe that you're that guy, which is really hard.