Michael Mando Quotes

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.

As an actor, you always want to find a piece of who you are in every role you take on.

Oh my goodness me, Daniel Day-Lewis - huge, huge fan of his. I've always loved his philosophy on acting: he always talks about returning to a state of play.

Actors are always the last to see what they have created.

An actor is an actor is an actor. The less personality an actor has off stage the better. A blank canvas on which to draw the characters he plays.

You can't follow another actor's performance. You can't be Robert DeNiro, because you're not Robert DeNiro, and, you know, he is.

A lot of actors like saying, 'Don't judge a character; you might fall in love with him!' Not me.

There's a wonderful adage in acting that you're stuck with the character, but the character is also stuck with you.

I'm coming from the notion that acting is an art. It is not a business. It is about building characters, not about selling personalities.

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

I'm not a critic. I'm an actor. I see the role I get given on the page. I try to bring it to life as best as I can.

Every actor believes in his way of performing.

Well, as an actor, at least from my standpoint, I can't not like who I'm playing.

As an actor, you can do what you want with your role. That's why they hire you; to take the role and make it real.

All performances are different. I don't think it's necessary to compare one with another. I am just me playing the role of Lear. You're bound to get a Holm approach to it, whatever that may be. I just got out there and did it. I'm very much a doer in my acting.

I tend to get comfortable with the dialogue and find out who the person is in the script and try to hit that. People are sort of independent of their occupations and their pastimes. You don't play a politician or a fireman or a cowboy - you just play a person.

Actors are part of a certain percentage of people on this planet who have an emotional vocabulary as a primary experience. It's as if their life is experienced emotionally and then that is translated intellectually or conceptually into the performance.

What is important to me as an actor is that, even if I have to spread my arms, take my shirt off on a mountain top with my heroine in a chiffon sari, it still has to be me and my twist or my funny take on it.

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. Either the character helps you discover that element of you or the other way around, where that element of you helps you discover the character.

All through college, I was searching for characters that would make me unique and set me apart from the typical ventriloquist with the typical dummy that was the little boy, cheeky hard figure like Charlie McCarthy.

As long as you have the acting chops and the desire to get inside a character, you can play anything.

Hollywood is something imagined... acting is something crafted.

I definitely think it exercises an interesting muscle, auditioning for bad parts and trying to figure out how to make it real. I don't know what I'm talking about now.

That's what I love about acting, is playing different roles. I want to work for the character, and not make it work for me.

People often ask me, was it hard to play this person or that person? Well, no, not really. Acting is what I do. It's my job.