Cate Blanchett Quotes

Shakespeare gives you these clues - these little pieces of gold dust, I call them. They tell you so much about the story, the character, the drive, the intentions. It's like a gift.

Also, in my acting, I feel very much like a storyteller, exploring the flaws of the characters that I interpret. I look for the imperfections, and I love a character that is just so flawed.

You just play what a writer writes, in terms of what a character chooses to do and how a character chooses to deal with their various relationships.

I cringe at backstory. Because it never quite explains or gets into some psychological thing that is never quite right and never quite the truth and who knows why someone is some way.

The interesting part of the process is developing the character, you know, why did he become that? Why is the guy a murderer, or why is this guy a pervert, or whatever he is. So that's the fun part for me to delve into the abyss.

I believe that as a writer and a director, you're only providing the skeleton of a character, and you're hiring actors to fill it out.

I would say what Mad Men has taught me has been a super elevated evaluation of text in general, and understanding subtext, and understanding where a character comes from - what he means by this or by that.

Some film actors want to sit back and look at every scene and all that crap. No, you're an actor - tell the story, and when it's told, there's another one to tell.

The darker the character, the more interesting.

Same job, whether it's comedy or drama. Regardless of the weight of the role, I feel like the job is always kind of the same. Who is this person? What's this guy here, and how is he playing with this thing, and what's he trying to say? And what's the volley with all these other people around him?

Dialogue is what a character's willing to share and reveal to another character, and the 90% they aren't willing to share is what I do for a living.

When I read something, first I have an instinctual, emotional response to it. But of course, acting isn't only just feeling an instinct for what's going on in the moment with the character. You have to be able to carve it out and consider, follow, and create the whole journey that the character you play is going through.

As an actor, you don't really have a say or a voice in what the conversation of the show is going to be. So, as an actor, I'm just trying to make sense of why the character is making these choices, and somehow, in that way, you can sympathize or root, at least not detest, what this person is doing. That's, at least, my job in telling that story.

If you believe - which I do - that acting is a bit like advocacy for your character, then of course I want to find the positive points.

For each character, I try to understand what is driving them.

Actors need to know why they're saying what they're saying, more than just learning their lines.

I love the novelist's freedom of going into different people's subjectivity and being able to work with them as characters.

For me, playing a really bad character is about figuring out what brought the person to where we need him.

I always like [while filming] to have a sense of what led this person to this point.

My job as an actor is to serve the script. If I'm looking at it as to see what the best character is, then it's not really looking at the big picture.

Readers no longer need novelists to tell us what it's like to cross the world on a ship or fight a war. In the twenty-first century, we get that information in other ways. The thing that's still a mystery to us is the human heart. What we want is to understand people, what they're doing, and why they're doing it.

I am not one of those actors who dwells on the histrionics and the subtext and future text of the character. I deal with the scenes that I'm doing at that specific time, because if I do that, they play in more of a real way.

I think Aaron [Sorkin] did a remarkable job of plucking Andy [Hertzfeld] out of [Steve] Jobs' story, to perhaps reflect back on Steve a sense of maybe some things that were missing in Steve's life. Andy, just by nature, is one of these straight shooters.

If you're dealing with a character that actually exists, there's an awful lot of information there. So, you can put together, from the information, motivations, insecurities, reactions. Where does that seed get born, if you like?... What I do is put that together.

I am very interest in the human condition. That is what I love about acting. I like studying different people and their psychosis. I like discovering what makes them tick. I always find that with any character I play. I need to find out what makes them tick.