Mads Mikkelsen Quotes

An actor can give his best shot but the script and dialogues have to have punch to make it more effective.

Some actors just have a quality, a way of combining music and character and story, where everything just falls into place.

When an actor constructs reality, it has to be riveting and entertaining. There has to be an emotional connect with the audience.

The only thing we are as actors are messengers. That's all we are. Correct? We are delivering the playwright's intention through the concept of the director. And I come on stage; if I feel confident in the role, then I give it away.

Theater is about language, so characters have to define themselves through language for an audience.

As actors, you do have to be aware of your audience. You can't act in a vacuum, even if that audience isn't exactly present with you.

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

One is just an interpreter of what the playwright thinks, and therefore the greater the playwright, the more satisfying it is to act in the plays.

The great lesson in theatre is that you live the story every night, and that is a wonderful vehicle for getting to the richest places in a performance or investing a character with the richest life.

Our job is to unleash the play. It's not just about your character or interaction with the other characters. There's an energy in all good plays which you have to find. And that is part and parcel of ensuring that an audience gets what it's about.

The fundamental job of the actor is to tell about the human condition, to be a voice for the truest ideas and deepest emotions.

I think actors are very obsessed about looking different and behaving differently, but all people need is just a different film. They don't want a different you; they want a different story.

It's down to the actors to show the writers the potential of the character.

After 'Mulk,' I figured it's your voice that people are connecting with. So then my voice became of prime importance to me for my films.

For me, a story has to have characters, and my role should be meaningful. At the end of the day, people should say that they like my performance.

When I watch an actress say a line, I watch how they deliver the lines with gestures.

I've spent years on stage adjusting the timing of a line to infinitesimal degrees.

You have more creative freedom with writing, in certain ways, because you can create everything that happens. But, as an actor you also have creative freedom because you don't so much focus on what has to move the story along, and only on how your character is reacting to situations.

I put a lot of time and energy and thought behind what I do and the characters that I create, and I don't want to do anything peripheral that is going to make an audience see me up there on the screen rather than who I'm playing.

The storytelling in a movie is in the cut; it's in the edit. It's not an actor's job, really. Your job is such a tiny little thing, and I love the feeling of juggling or tightrope walking.

I don't have a favorite genre. I love to work and live vicariously through every character. It's all about trying to bring the character to life and get the story across in a way that resonates with the audience. It's always interesting and challenging in a gratifying and unique way.

I'm just a hired actor who was hired for a particular job, but I think one of the joys of reading the script was the way that the personal and the global are woven together.

A stage actor has to be 10% aware of the audience as he's performing.

When you think about Broadway, you think broad and big, but the fact is there are so many plays that are very intimate, but fill a 1,500-seat house. Plays like 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' have deep moments of silence and intimacy to them.

People often argue about this. Obviously one of the skills in performance is acting, and you can't expect every Romeo to really be in love with their Juliet!