Emmanuel Lewis Quotes

In a weird way, I live vicariously through the characters I play as an actor.

Characters don't belong to anyone, not even the person who plays them.

It's fun to explore behavior that you can't explore in your own life, so you fool around with it in acting.

I've been doing this since I was 10 years old, inhabiting different people and playing different roles.

Something that I really enjoy doing is creating and being a part of very different characters and very different projects.

I think I first got into acting through church. I would go to these church retreats, and they would tell us to make a skit or make a video and present it to the rest of the group. And I started doing that. And I fell in love with it.

With any role, you're extending yourself and acting out things that never happened to you.

The idea of transformation - playing something I'm not - is the bit I enjoy most about acting.

I was Aladdin, and then I was Captain Von Trapp from 'Sound Of Music' when I was 7 or 8, and then King Arthur. I was always the lead. I've always enjoyed being onstage, acting obnoxious, being someone that wasn't me, hiding behind a character.

I love to act because I love trying on other people's skin.

I always think of the character as being me. But me wearing a 'coat', which may be a different way of speaking, moving or regarding other people. To me, acting is pretending, just like kids playing, only you pretend as if it were really, really real.

I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn't realize then that it's the same impulse. It's make-believe. It's performance.

Let me put it this way. There is more to acting than just acting like somebody. I like to act in such a way that other people get some notion of what it's like to be somebody.

I was always putting on plays for my family. Usually silly ones. I used my imagination a lot, and it was something that came naturally to me.

I enjoy playing different kind of people.

I've always been drawn to storytelling, and acting is the most immersive form of storytelling you can get involved with! You're actually in the story when you're acting.

Acting is the ability to dream on cue.

Of all the things I do, acting is the thing that grabs most, but there's another level on which it strikes me as being a little silly. In the end you're dressing up and deciding to be somebody.

It's one of the main things that I love about my job. You are never playing yourself, so I really love that I get to be someone else, play a different character and take on that persona, but I also have to take on their qualifications.

I think acting is a fun thing because you get to have so many lifetimes in one lifetime, being all these different people.

I love acting and really taking on another person, another life.

I want things to be characters and not me. Why would I want to play me?

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.

Every time you get on a stage or in front of a camera, the whole exercise is about imagination. You're constantly depicting something that doesn't exist, and trying to find the reality of it. Once you settle on that premise, everything else is a matter of degrees.

Being an actor is an extension of telling a story and I loved story telling as a child.