Ralph Fiennes Quotes

I feel that once you go into rehearsal, you need to focus on the show in the room.

And that's one thing that helps me is I learn it blandly, vanilla, then I don't try to act it too soon because you start to act it, and you kind of go away from what the next sentence is, what the next paragraph is. So get it down so it kind of can - it's in there so you can then, as I call it, dance on top of it.

I do not use any set methods, not even The Method. The character after all is in the lines.

A lot of what acting is paying attention.

Whenever I am acting, it's everything, you know. If I'm researching a role, I'm completely consumed in that and, between action and cut, I live in this suspended time.

The least amount of info actors get, the better. Actors are always like, 'What is my motivation for this?' You didn't write it. Just say the lines.

A different script calls for different things. It always takes me a long time to get to know the part, and know the logic behind the words. I have to be with the script for quite a long time before things start to fall into place, before they become part of the character.

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.

My process is I try to learn my lines so they're so solid I don't have to think about them or how I'm going to say them.

I'm one of those lazy actors; I like to take what the playwright wrote and work with that.

I'm just always learning lines. I've learned to flag the really crucial scenes, and I start figuring them out and committing them to memory as soon as I get them.

Training is vital. You need to know the technical aspects of acting, just in case someone hands you a monologue and simply says, 'Cry here and laugh here.' You have to be able to make sense of it all.

The play is on top of me all the time, and I am constantly thinking about it. Even when I leave the theatre, I'll mumble the lines to myself or think about the way the character walks or holds himself.

The rehearsal time is almost my favourite part of being an actress, particularly if you're working on a play that hasn't been done before.

The process of rehearsal means you learn so much and really get the chance to develop your work on a character.

I don't worry too much about learning lines per se. The memorization is the easy part for me, usually. For me, it's more about working on the context, back story, intention, motivation, etc. Once that's in place, the lines come pretty naturally.

When I'm acting and I have to remember my lines and put my mind in concert with my body, I don't tic.

It's funny because, if you're not an actor, people always tend to say, 'How do you memorize all those lines? Is that really hard?' I'm always like, 'That's just a small part of it. I have to seek my craft and my emotions' - you know, all this gross, actor-y stuff.

I've always approached acting from a very workmanlike perspective.

Honestly, soaps are great training. You're doing 90-plus pages a day. It was my acting class, where I built my foundation for showing up and being professional.

I've taken that with me since working with him; in order to be William Hurt, you have use every moment like he does.

Any actor would love to just pick up a script and be like, 'I can connect to this person, and I can see myself playing him.'

Acting is about portraying something... that dedication or learning the script of it is really important in really getting to know a topic.

You make a decision whether you just work on the script and believe in every moment and pick out every moment, or if you sit down and memorize lines. Once you really dig into a script, learning lines becomes almost second nature.

For any role, I pretty much always go to the script, first and foremost.