E. G. Marshall Quotes

For me, I always have to establish a reality for the character. In very actor-y terms, you just have to understand his reality.

If I wasn't an actor, I never would have known who Debbie Gallagher was. I never would know how her feelings are or how her emotions are, or her family.

If I'm doing my job as an actor, the audience knows everything I know about the character.

If I don't fall in love with my characters, I cannot shoot.

What happens with every role, you have to trick yourself, you have to creatively find ways to explore the mental state of your character.

I used to watch dailies and felt I had to keep on top of the character, but I don't feel that any more.

When I look at a character, whether he's good or bad, one scene or 10 scenes, I just have to find my way in.

I have a journal, and every character that I play, I write as the character: how I feel about things and how I'm going to play it.

My job is to see the world through the character's eyes.

You can start imagining all kinds of things characters would feel, but you have to have a sense of whether those imaginings might be right.

As an actor, you use the things from yourself that you can apply to the character.

As an actor you bring some of your own experiences which can make things easier. You build off of it, but your imagination is always the best thing you have as far as creating things I think specifically for what that character is going through. But you're definitely drawing obviously upon things that you can connect to, and then you kind of mold the change that you're making into something that's right for the character.

As actors, you don't actually need to know the future of the character. You just need to know the backgrounds.

I think that different actors go about their preparation differently, but when it comes to acting, I use my imagination.

So much of movie acting is in the lighting. And in loving your characters. I try to know them, and with that intimacy comes love. And now, I love Voldemort.

The first thing I do when I read a part is see if I can identify emotionally with a character. If I make that connection, everything else is just working on knowing their life circumstances and manifesting those through practice and research.

I feel like there are things I can relate to in every character. But I feel like when you read a script, you don't get to see the definition behind someone, you just get to read what the person goes through and find a place to come from to make it real.

Sometimes the director will want you to write about the character, sometimes he'll want you to live in the location that the character is from or something like that, but I don't usually make a lot of notes or anything like that.

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.

I don't really prepare for each role the same way.

Well, first of all, you read the script a million times. Because what the script gives you are given circumstances. Given circumstances are all the facts of your character.

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 spend a lot of time with my characters.

Sometimes you can just step into the character, and you get all your feelings and emotions just from sympathizing with her and being her. But then, other times, you just have to resort back to anything that you've been through in your own life and try to play that.

Part of an actor's job is to find correlations between your own life and the life of the person you are playing.