Rosemary Mahoney Quotes

I think, first of all, every time you want to play somebody who is real is always challenging and always scary, because you are given a responsibility of someone's real life.

I always find the more you can draw on real life characters, people, situations, it works better. Certainly for designing a character, I prefer to draw on real people rather than other guys I've seen in movies, rather than 'here's my version of Clint Eastwood' or whoever.

Researching real people and doing them, I think, is harder than anything else. You don't want to do a caricature of them and you don't want to do an impression. You just want to do the best you can, in terms of presenting their views and a general impression of the guy. That's the hardest thing to do, real people.

I want to try and portray characters that are in real life, that you see day-to-day. If I were to just stay in my little village in Wales, I would have gotten a very small taste of a very big plate.

I think every role you take on, you should take on the responsibility of doing the best representation of that person or that character or that role. When it is a human being that has actually existed, and it is a person that people know of, yeah, you feel an even more amount of pressure to do a good job.

Even if you're drawing a cartoon and exaggerating, you want to capture something true about the person.

I do truly believe that the smallest stories can wind up being the biggest because it's through the specific that a writer can best access the universal.

I can't do a role or character unless I have lived that character. For me, the best teacher is life.

We're all flawed, and we all make mistakes, and we all have weaknesses. And those are the kind of people I want to see onscreen, the ones that feel like real flesh-and-blood human beings and not the weird, whitewashed, Hollywood stand-ins for people with the rough edges sanded off that I can't connect to because they just don't resonate with me.

My job is to tell a story, and the decisions about the casting have to be honest.

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.

I have a lot of real life experience that I can draw on. And I think that shows in the characters that I play because I'm always trying to find somebody - or find characters to play that I can identify with on a personal level or relate to. And I think it makes for a little bit more of an honest portrayal.

If life's lessons could be reduced to single sentences, there would be no need for fiction.

In order to represent life on the stage, we must rub elbows with life, live ourselves.

I hope that doing truthful portrayals of people in a variety of circumstances gives people a kind of subterranean link to those characters.

It's challenging to take on something else that is not you and make it very real and have others be able to associate with it. It's wonderful to provoke thought.

My search is always to find ways to chronicle, to share and to document stories about people, just everyday people. Stories that offer transformation, that lean into transcendence, but that are never sentimental, that never look away from the darkest things about us.

If I have anything to offer as an actor, it's only my ability to make the person real.

One thing I think is least realistic is that there were five people that made decisions in the fictional 'West Wing.' In real life, there are about five million people that weigh in.

It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life.

A writer is not a prophet, is not a philosopher; he's just someone who is witness to what is around him. And so writing is a way to... it's the best way to testify, to be a witness.

As first and foremost a character actor, I've always resisted the temptation to cure any of the people I've played or make them lovable in any way; you've just got to celebrate them for what they are.

That's, to me, the ultimate goal - to disappear inside another character and bring them so fully to life that I've convinced other human beings that it's a real person.

I think that always, as an actor, I don't want to overstep or pretend that I'm doing anything more than I'm doing.

What was important for 'Broken Bread' to do was show real life.