Hugo Weaving Quotes

A part of my job, when I'm playing a character and approaching a role, is to rationalize and to not judge whatsoever.

You use your emotions to try and find them in the character that you're playing.

You have to temporarily be the character in order to understand him. It's sort of what they used to call 'shape-shifting.'

I want to play so many different characters. I want to, like, understand so many different people, and psychoanalysis, everything. I love that about my job: getting into the character and understanding it and doing the psychoanalysis and creating that character.

To play any character, you have to have a total understanding of why they do what they do.

To act, no matter how the character is, you have to love and have compassion for the character you're playing.

When you take on a role, even if the character is somebody that you are dissimilar to, you have to identify with the role and look for an emotional connection even if there is not a biographical one.

A really useful quality to have as an actor is a lack of self-awareness. I try and get into the character's thinking, and some of them just aren't really that bothered about how they come across or aware of how they come across.

Studying acting has been personally enriching because it has taught me to take the time to imagine what someone else's life experience might be like. To look deeply at how our pasts and the circumstances of our early childhoods mold us as people.

Trying to be a good actor has to be involved with placing yourself imaginatively in different people's circumstances.

Any decent actor knows you can't judge the character you're playing.

Being an actor requires a lot of self-analysis and reflection. The better you know who you are, the better you are at becoming another person.

I think the two main tools actors have are the imagination of what other people have gone through, to connect with and through research, and there's one's own experience.

I just try to put myself in the minds of all the characters.

That's why I enjoy acting: getting in the mind of someone else.

I try to play characters who are different from myself, so I feel like this character is someone who is really different. I actually think that if I did what he did in this movie, I would get a restraining order put against me.

I really do literally put myself into a character's shoes.

Sometimes acting is really cool because it forces you to exercise certain muscles in your personality that you wouldn't normally be called upon in life.

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

Don't think for a moment that I'm really like any of the characters I've played. I'm not. That's why it's called 'acting'.

I don't have any training as an actor, but I guess I'm an intense pretender. When you read something over and over, it gets into you a little bit. You can't help but begin to feel it, even if you're a healthy person as I think I am.

My school of thought with going into a character is that you have to understand where they come from, and you have to empathize with them.

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.

When I step into a character's shoes, I don't judge them. I make a conscious effort not to look from the outside in but look from the inside out, and when you do that it allows you to feel and sense things more, and act and react from a core, you know?

I don't want to discredit people's individuality, but I think people are pretty much the same. People are very similar. If you have a good enough imagination then you can feel things that you personally have never done before. That's acting.