Rebecca Hall Quotes

Ultimately, the idea of acting is to understand the people you're playing, and then where they're coming from is not so mystifying. You've got to detox a bit after, though.

My job as the actress playing Hanna Schmitz, as the actress playing any part, is to understand the character, and to ultimately love the character. And I did love Hanna, absolutely, because I understood her as profoundly as I did at the end of the day.

I've never disliked a character I've played. I've always tried to find the humanity and the reasons for what he does.

After a while, the person who knows the character best is you, the actor.

Playing a character is an illusion, and I feel that when you know too much about a person, possibly part of that illusion is disrupted.

I'm not the kind of actor who goes into exhaustive research for each role.

I never wanted to become an actress because I'd read great literature or seen great Shakespeare. It was more just wanting to understand what the people were really like, why they said all the strange things they did.

I'm not interested in playing characters who see the world through my prism; I think the journey of understanding any character is to see how they tick and how they differ from you.

For me, when I'm making a movie I like to stay in character throughout the day.

When you play a character you have to ask yourself, 'Can I make sense of what's happening here? Is this authentic?'

It sounds maybe a little old fashioned, but the parts I want to play and I do play, you don't want to inject too much of your own personality. What you sacrifice then is a slight mystery.

Even when I'm reading a script where I'm supposed to be looking at the lead role, I'll find myself gravitating toward some small weirdo in a few scenes instead. I'm very instinctive like that and I love the challenge of not having a lot of time to create someone who feels real.

I was raised in New York City and raised in the New York City theater world. My father was a theater director and an acting teacher, and it was not uncommon for me to have long discussions about the method and what the various different processes were to finding a character and exploring character and realizing that character.

I've never been pigeonholed and I've experienced so many different kinds of skin - what man will do and won't do, what you should do and shouldn't do. This is what's exciting about being an actor; where philosophy majors sit in classrooms or write books about human behavior, we're actually acting them out in front of cameras.

Making a film of a work you've played for six weeks gives you intimate knowledge of the character. By the time you go in front of the camera you've worked out the behavior and life of a character.

I think humans are fascinating in general. We're so weird. We do so many quirky things, and we don't even know it. There's just so many layers upon layers of nuances in everything we do, and the most fun part as an actor is trying to get into all those nuances, whether they're conscious or unconscious.

I think it's my job to like any character I play - to understand and appreciate a character, to look at the world as much as possible from their point of view. I don't look at it just technically: learn the lines, figure out what gestures I want to bring and play, and that's it. I like to learn as much as I can about the person, and see what happens.

I feel there's so much still to learn about acting. But there is some magic in the capturing of performance and in the process of editing a performance. The psychology of human beings and what's coming through the face... that fascinates me.

I'm interested in human nature. That's why I chose to become an actor. Whatever people are struggling with, the struggle is often where the drama is.

I don't feel like you can fully find the true character until you're in his wardrobe, on set, and really getting into the scene. And that's when you really find out who your character is.

There is a sort of knowledge beyond the power of learning to bestow, and this is to be had in conversation; so necessary is this to the understanding the characters of men, that none are more ignorant of them than those learned pedants whose lives have been entirely consumed in colleges and among books; for however exquisitely human nature may have been described by writers the true practical system can be learned only in the world.

It's fun to act, but for me, it's more fun to actually create the character and act it out knowing that I know everything about this character. That's more fun to me than just reading lines.

I'm very interested in people, so if a character happens to be real, there's that much more to look at.

Acting has helped me understand people, not only because you are acting as a character, but also because you are watching other actors work. That really helps you identify in life when someone is acting, not being true.

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.