Maxine Peake Quotes

Actors are pretending for you, but they're not lying. They are not putting on a guise instead of themselves. They are finding things inside that they have experienced.

I hate acting when I see it. I don't want to feel it, I don't want to see it, I want to be taken away with the story - I don't want the actor's ego in front of me. That's what I try to live when I do the work.

To be able to be a good actress and portray other people's stories, you have to be true to yourself.

With acting, a lot of it has to come from that real, honest place.

I believe in the fact that to portray a character convincingly, you need to live that character, own that character. You have to be earnest with every line that you deliver. However, it doesn't mean that you have to cut off your true self.

It was important to have a similar energy in my performance. To make the character too different would have just been about my ego because it didn't need to be drastically different.

In every character you play, as much as you hate to admit it as an actor, but there's an element of you that you bring to it.

The worst acting is about imitation.

Sometimes in Brazil, I work harder to make characters different and believable and to overcome the persona I have.

I'm disappointed in acting as a craft. I want everything to go back to Orson Welles and fake noses and changing your voice. It's become so much about personality.

Actors walk around wearing these little tool-belts of acting skills. And I just don't find that interesting to watch. I never want to see someone who clearly can cry at the drop of a hat. That's so uninteresting.

Yeah, I think the common denominator - and this is probably going to sound like Acting 101 - but the common denominator is belief in the character in the moment.

If you catch me saying 'I am a serious actor', I beg you to slap me.

For me, personality acting is not that interesting. I don't want to just be myself.

When people give you a writing assignment, they're asking what you think. That's the very opposite of being an actor. When you're an actor, no one wants to hear what you think.

You can't generalise, of course, but there is a school of American acting where there is a kind of pride in the number of takes you can do.

I don't like to intellectualize about my acting.

I think 'method acting' is a widely abused term.

For me, acting is a series of impressions rather than trying to find one line through to the end, which risks becoming more of a presentation.

A lot of my work has to do with not allowing my characters to have an ego in a way that the stomach doesn't have an ego when it's wanting to throw up. It just does it.

I never personalize anything because I think that can be dangerous. For me, the best way is - this may sound pretentious - but it's to breathe the character and get into the psychology of it.

People use the Method as a shield; it shields them from being vulnerable. I hear all these young actors who are like, 'I'm Method, I'm gonna go live in the house, you know, I totally get it, I've done it, I've been there', but one thing I know is it kills spontaneity.

I'm an actor; I have made my living by acting, and I almost think I owe it to the public to express my feelings and not as a character on a screen but as myself.

I think it is very important to be a method actor.

An actor is someone who pretends to be somebody else. A movie star is somebody who pretends that somebody else is them.