Emma Barton Quotes

'All My Children' taught me a great work ethic; you work so hard on a soap opera!

Memorising my lines is actually something I do fairly well. I look at it a few times and it is pretty much there. When your shooting on TV, they do it in such a way that it is pretty easy.

Any actor working a long time should know how a shot is set up, where to place themselves, how to handle the lines. I'm a member of the crew, like the best boy, the electrician. What I'm good at is making eyes at the camera.

I can't do a one-camera show. I don't know how to do that kind of show where you count in your head and then you do the next line.

On 'Mad Men,' I have a bit of an advantage because I know who gets better as they repeat a scene and who's best at the beginning.

Any time you're in front of a camera and have them yell 'Cut, re-shoot the scene,' are you kidding me? That's a huge advantage.

On my last two days of 'Young and the Restless,' I had 120-something pages of dialogue. My last two days.

I think everything within film and TV helps inform every other role, so it's definitely helped my acting, being on the other side of the camera, and it's just given me a whole new appreciation for how hard everybody in the crew works.

When you have a full page of well-written dialogue that has a thought process to it, it is pretty easy to memorize. It's a lot easier to memorize than if you're in a scene and other people are talking, and you have maybe one word or one sentence that you have to interject at the right time and in a natural way.

Sitcoms are more like stage drama than anything else on film - more than a one-hour and certainly more than a movie. You get a script on Monday. You rehearse all week. And on Friday, you're on.

One of the cool things about getting to audition for things on short notice is that it teaches you to memorize efficiently. So I've never been afraid of getting text down quickly.

I got to express myself in a whole new way as a different person on camera, in a different way as an actress, and I loved it.

The thing about 'Veep' is that you never really know where the camera's going to be. So you're not really just saying your line and then just watching it: you're trying to act the whole time just in case the camera is watching you.

As soon as I have the script in my hand, I'll be up in my apartment room pacing up and down learning it because it's just such a lovely thing to do.

Being on a show like 'Fear the Walking Dead,' I started to learn more about camera work, learn more about the way the crew operates, and had more of a stronger opinion on how I think a television director can operate in the healthiest way.

I don't think I have the power to do more mythological shows, but I would love to if it's like a finite series. But doing that as a daily soap is not easy.

If there is a snobbery, then they haven't been on set to see how a show like 'EastEnders' works. Because I know for a fact that some of my favourite actors are still not capable of doing what these guys do.

Even though I was playing myself on 'NCIS,' it was so cool to see how everything works behind a camera.

Sometimes it's necessary for soaps to hang on to an audience by sensationalizing, but it's a beast I don't understand any more, an art form that has fostered extraordinary talent. It's a great arena to learn your craft before you move on.

Normally, learning lines is fairly easy for me, but when you add an accent onto that, it adds a complexity that I had not anticipated.

Performing in front of the camera is a different thing, and shooting a whole film is another.

'Hollyoaks' really is such a great place to work, and there was nothing bad whatsoever about my time there. I loved my job, I loved everybody that I worked with, and I was blessed with great story lines.

The experience with 'The Knick' is a singular experience. That experience taught me a lot about acting and about being on camera for extended periods of time to try to create a character arc that travels.

That was one of the amazing things about Doctor Who. Considering it is such an enormous charabanc, a centerpiece of international TV, it feels incredibly small when you are actually involved in it. It is very intimate, very small; it feels like a few people messing about with a camera.

I'm not an actor. I can show up for friends and improvise a little bit, but I'm not an actor. I can't remember lines.