Morgan Freeman Quotes

I think if you play characters, it's very important not to ever tag them with any sort of disorder, or diagnose them, or whatever. You have to normalize the behavior to get inside the character.

Obviously an actor draws on his own experience.

Acting is not acting. It isn't putting on a face and dancing around in a mask. It's believing that you are that character and playing him as if it were a normal day in the life of that character.

That's my way in the very beginning - how to enter it [a role]. Very quickly in the process, I don't think about voice being separate from the way you hold your head or the way you sit or the way you put on lipstick. It's all a piece of a person, and it's all driven by conviction.

It's fashionable for modern actors to talk about getting 'inside' a character. But you can't get to the inside without getting the outside right first.

Playing a drunk doesn't mean being a drunk, only bad actors try to be drunk. A real drunk tries to be sober, he wants another drink. How a character hides their feelings tells us who they are, no one shows their feelings except bad actors.

It's our job as actors to make it look like it's not manufactured. If you have two actors who understand their characters - and therefore what they are trying to portray - then all they need to do is be the characters and there's a chemistry there.

I play a lot of characters where I don't even speak in my own voice. I learned about focus and I learned to trust that things can work when they're not heightened and that it's interesting when things are pared down.

Sometimes I'll read things in the script and think, "That's not how humans behave," or "I don't understand how to do that role and make it seem like I'm not some kind of strange alien or on a sitcom." I don't get it, and when I feel that way, I have to listen to my instinct. My initial instinct does lead me in a direction that I can trust.

I think in every character there are aspects of yourself that you bring to it. But then it would be really boring to just play yourself.

Movie acting is harder than doing a play. You have to be entertaining but completely natural, like Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant. They weren't doing anything. Do you have any idea how hard that is? That's how good they were. It's crazy hard to be convincing and real. It's the most subtle, hardest thing there is.

Actors walk around wearing these little tool-belts of acting skills. And I just don't find that interesting to watch. I never want to see someone who clearly can cry at the drop of a hat. That's so uninteresting.

You take what you know, and you put it through your own prism. If I play characters that break down or cry, it's Gary Oldman crying; it's not the character crying.

I can't act, and so I have to live that particular character in my real life and then exhibit it on screen.

Actors who say they can dive inside a character are either schizophrenic or lying.

Actors don't need a lot of talk beyond the first few sentences. They may say they don't draw on their own life, but all actors do.

I don't have an 'actor cry.'

Actors like Daniel Day-Lewis, Gary Oldman, they totally immerse themselves in their parts.

When you see my performances, even people that you might have known, like Nicky Barnes in 'American Gangster,' you have to get over the fact that I look like Cuba Gooding, Jr. But once you find truth in the performance, if I'm doing my job right, you believe everything.

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

There is an art to acting, and there are techniques that are acquired. You can be as emotional as you'd like, as a person, but figuring out ways that you can bring specific emotions at specific times and have them be true, and relating to someone as someone that they're not, is a lot.

I am trained in theatre, and so I take time to study and get into the skin of a character.

I think, for every actor, the most challenging part of playing a character, specially a real-life character, is to convince yourself that you are the character.

The actor's job is to put themselves in the shoes of the character they are trying to portray as truthfully as possible.

For an actor, it's not like you have to go crazy to do an intense role.