Amy Jackson Quotes

When preparing a role, I work first on the body language and physical aspects of the performance; the psychological dimension comes naturally once I'm in character.

I don't do method acting. If I play a farmer, I'm not gonna spend 3 weeks on a chicken farm. That's a bit too much for me.

I'm interested in the acting and staging of specific emotions, and so I work with actors. It's a small proportion of what I do, but it's always what people seem to focus on.

I'm not the kind of actor who goes into exhaustive research for each role.

I'm a technician. I don't go for the get-into-the-role stuff. I read the lines and play the scenes.

An emotional performance is usually more instinctive to an actor.

There are two schools of thought: There are those actors who explain to you that they know exactly how they're going to do the part... And then there is the other method, which is to have no method at all. This is mine.

I do whatever I need to do to get into character. Sometimes it's being incredibly quiet, and sometimes it's being loose and goofy.

I'm not a method actor; I hope you know that!

My mentor Jon Simmons introduced me to the Stanislavski system, which is so heavy on back-story. So you write and write and write these back stories about a character and then you throw it away. So then on set, if it doesn't come, then you didn't do your work.

I'm not a method actor, but I'm a big research kind of actor.

No, I'm not a very methodologically pure actor.

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

Part of an actor's job is to draw up a back story.

I have to start with elements of myself, which is what you always do as an actor.

Now that was one thing, but from an actor's point of view, this poor young man, crying from the moment I opened the door to the moment he left. Now if an actor did that they would say he's over-acting.

You have to come in and be that character when you walk into the room. That's what one of my first acting teachers taught me. You know, don't go in there being Jennifer and then expect to flip and change, because they're not going to have that imagination.

I'm not really into method acting - the way I was taught was the good old-fashioned British way of just doing your research and getting on with it.

I try to create as many circumstances outside of set that help me fall into character when I get onto set.

As an actor you make choices that are either right or wrong, and you find the ones that are right for you. As an understudy, the choices have been made, so you have to make those choices right. Going into the role, you can't really question it.

There were time when I was into method acting that I did have moments of residual character emotions, because the method bases your emotional responses as a character on emotional experiences from your real life.

I was raised in New York City and raised in the New York City theater world. My father was a theater director and an acting teacher, and it was not uncommon for me to have long discussions about the method and what the various different processes were to finding a character and exploring character and realizing that character.

I consider myself an actor that tries to have as many tools as possible in the bag. And I think that includes the method, then of course it includes some improv techniques, and includes all kinds of different things, because you never know when you're going to have to work on something and in what way.

Method acting is a label I don't really understand, because there's a method to everybody's acting.

You have to find it in the moment, and that's one of the challenges of being an actor - especially a film actor - is that you have to maintain these heightened emotions for long periods of time. There's no trick to it. You just have to do.