Jurnee Smollett Quotes

As an actor, I'm more interested in characters the longer I have lived with them.

I've had some marvelous parts, but I'm also asked to play characters who are kind of superficial people.

Having done a lot of theater, I'm used to sustaining characters over long periods of time.

Every actor has to love and loathe the character he plays.

When I get a role, I try to delve as deeply as possible into the character.

Soaps are the best. They really are. If you can do a soap, well, you can do anything. You have to learn pages of dialogue very quickly.

For me and for I'm sure any actor, each role is a different challenge to prepare for in a different way.

Well, I've always been a character actor, you know, and you always get your share of character actors who are bad guys. So it never surprises me. And if it's good writing, you can find your way into the part well enough.

My character in 'Hollyoaks' went through absolutely everything! There's not one emotion where I'm going to go, 'I don't know how to play this.'

Luckily, on 'Kyle XY,' I had great training in being tough and vulnerable at the same time.

I don't prepare myself for any character unless it is really different.

There's acting, and then there's auditioning; mastering auditioning is sort of the first thing an actor really needs to nail down when he or she wants to get a part.

In 'There Will Be Blood,' my character was someone who was an actor himself almost. He had a rehearsed quality about him. He was a performance artist in a way.

Working with a great director is like getting a master class in acting.

The better I am at observing moments in life, the better I'll be at showing them in my acting.

I get very competitive, mostly in acting though. When I'm going out for a role or something, that's when I really get very territorial about things.

I usually can find a way to do a character to make it real and work. But sometimes it's a struggle sustaining that, because there's such a level of personal involvement and personal, physical, and emotional distraughtness.

It is definitely a challenge to play Nathan, but the more different he is from myself, the more interesting the character becomes for me.

When you are developing a character you have to bring so much of yourself to the role.

In my career, there have been three things that were challenging: playing gay; playing a Jewish woman; and playing Chekhov. The scariest part was playing Chekhov!

What I truly get excited about is not the genre of a movie or the size of a part - it's character. I like to find characters.

There are always practical decisions to be made about any character you're playing.

Basically, the actor's job is to pay attention to the script.

When I do film, I really take on roles and I take on characters.

They did cast me as an ingenue once, and the novelty was nice. But I said, 'There is nothing here to play!' I really like getting into the meat of a role.