Forest Whitaker Quotes

Acting is not just impersonating your character.

Even great actors who transform who they are still go to a really honest place; I think that's sort of that special skill that actors have.

Acting is about being real, being honest.

If it makes you cry, it goes in the show.

If you start to disrespect the character you're playing, or play it too much for laughs, that can work for a sketch, it will sell some gags, but it's all technique. It's like watching a juggler - you can be impressed by it, but it's not going to touch you in any way.

I'm disappointed in acting as a craft. I want everything to go back to Orson Welles and fake noses and changing your voice. It's become so much about personality.

Actors are pretending for you, but they're not lying. They are not putting on a guise instead of themselves. They are finding things inside that they have experienced.

All I've ever tried to do is play real people.

Good acting comes from finding the essence of a character.

Nobody is more truthful when he's acting than De Niro.

As an actor, you try to bring as much of yourself to a part to try and create a feeling of authenticity and emotional truth and resonance.

I look at scripts really for whether they can be moving or penetrate some kind of truth. You are constantly chasing that feeling as an actor when every part of a production comes together.

The real actor has a direct line to the collective heart.

Even when I'm playing a lawyer or a doctor, I want to play a person. A human being.

You'll very rarely find that you can enhance a performance to give it a real emotional centre and truth... after the fact.

I think with the best actors, emotion is something that has no kind of check in them.

If you don't have a certain amount of stage fright, then it's not going to be that interesting. It's not going to have the inner vibration. I think screen work needs inner vibration.

I write to music, and Nina Simone is always on my playlist to write to. I mean, she's inspiring. She's truthful and real and raw.

Emotion is messy, contradictory... and true.

Emotional honesty transcends reality; it's what allows disbelief to be suspended and yet what makes a story stay true.

Whether it's a very dramatic part or a comical role, I feel I need to create the same thing: a full-fledged, three-dimensional character that the audience can identify with.

I'm a full-contact actor, meaning that I love to act in my toes and in my fingers, and I just try to keep it surprising.

Sometimes you read things that people don't even notice in a performance, that you just are moved by or understand that this actor is really living his or her life on the screen. The first time I realized that was when I watched Brando in 'On the Waterfront.'

My approach is always the same. I try to be as honest as possible. Find the real honesty and humanity in the character because even a fictional character is supposed to feel real. And my job is to find that reality and bring it to the screen.

Be it 120 frames or 24 frames or film or theatre, you're trying to be a fully formed human being and trying to be honest.