Hilary Swank Quotes

It's a great challenge to get to play a real-life character. Every actor would love to get a chance, at least once in his life, to play a real-life character.

It is my job to step into different characters.

I'm really loving acting. I want this as a career. I'll still write music and collaborate with people, but I'm focused on the acting path.

If I'm playing a murderer, I don't go out and start murdering people.

I've been acting my whole life, which people don't realize. I just haven't had the opportunities that I've had with my dancing.

It wasn't until after I received my education that I seriously looked at sports entertainment as a way to make a career for myself. And they've got to take it in stride. It's very much like acting or playing professional sports: One percent of one percent of the people who try out for it can actually say they make their living off of doing it.

I expected that most of my career would be in dramatic acting. My hero was James Dean.

When I watch people like Cate Blanchett act, I don't know what is going on in her life, you just get lost in her performance and that's what I hope to do as well.

I'm happy to try any genre, from drama to comedy and anything in between. Although, to be fair, for most of my career, I've been at the mercy of what people are willing to put me in.

Acting is so much fun. It is a different ball game and I want to concentrate on that at the moment. I'm really passionate about what I do. I love entertainment and telling stories to people and I am very lucky that I am doing what I want to do.

What I do is to collaborate with each actor and work one-on-one to create a character. And that is a matter of huge complexity and is a combination of a great deal of discussion and a lot of practical work. It involves a lot of consideration for the real people out there, and all kinds of sources of real people. The result is the character. But I'm not supposed to talk about what it is we do, because it's nobody's business.

I always made up my own acts; built them out of my knowledge and observation of real life. I'd had wonderful opportunities to study people; and every time I went out on the stage I tried to show the audience some bit of true human nature.

I've tried most of my career to transform myself towards characters.

The real challenge of acting for me, I suppose, is just getting to know a character very, very well and just applying what I know about them to every single scene. That's what it can be broken down to.

Acting careers are very interesting things. They come with a lot of ups and downs. You just have to ride the waves and bide your time during the lulls, and enjoy the high times when they're there.

It's really important to take time for yourself because if you don't know what it is like to be a real person and spend time with a sense of normality, how can you play normal people in films?

The great exception to that, of course, is Johnny Depp, who is absolutely the ultimate character actor. Johnny Depp is the future of the character actor and thanks to his success maybe we will see the return of an era when my sort of actor is back in vogue. It's not in vogue for me to be in Hollywood movies as lots of different people.

I'm going to become a real professional actress.

People watch me when I get into these characters that I have in my head, so perhaps I should try acting. So I did.

Playing is no challenge; every time that you get a role you get to go play with other people in the sandbox and so there is no challenge, real challenge. The challenge, the major challenge is getting the work, finding the sandbox.

I've never thought of myself as an actor, so somebody recognizing me for that would be a real shock.

I was such a huge fan of Harry Potter books. That's how I got into it. I had never really thought about acting or a career. I just wanted to be Ron, really. It was a very unusual introduction into the industry, and we learned so much. It's been a real education and an evolution. I really, really enjoy this.

There's things that I can do as an actor that I couldn't do in any other form of life and I've got a strange personality. But film requires strange people, so I've got a nice comfy home.

It's really weird to be in more than one franchise because an actor's life is so nomadic, and so it's a real privilege to get back together with people.

I do as much research as is physically possible when I'm playing a real person, be they alive or dead.