Lin-Manuel Miranda Quotes

It's sort of cliche, but when you're playing drunk, your character is trying to appear sober.

When I work, I really try to get absorbed in the character. Unless I want to do something playful with the camera, I'm not too worried about where the camera is or positions.

I play a crazy talk-show host, but that's not me. It's like an actor playing a role.

I started out doing multiple characters from day one, when I got my fist job in 'Dumbo's Circus.' I'm used to getting in an argument with myself, throwing myself off a cliff, patching myself up and brushing myself off with an arm around my shoulder.

I'll have you know that as a young man, I spent an entire year as a woman in a world tour of 'As You Like It.' I played Celia.

There's a great tradition of actors taking on parts of much less obvious sympathy.

When a character has so many secrets and so much inner life, it's a joy to play those characters because you can use your craft.

Sometimes I'm playing somebody that I may have a problem with. Your job as an actor is not to go only play things that make you look good.

As an actor, if you want to explore something new inside you, you need to do something different that you don't do in your regular life. You need to think in a different way. It is my duty to think like the character that I am given and believe in his mindset; only then I will be able to portray it.

To give a successful character portrayal on stage or on film, the part has to be played inside of you.

As actors, that has been challenging for us to pick up the nuances of the living legends we are playing.

Denzel had made it apparent that he wanted me to bring my own interpretation of 'Cory'. I was definitely aware of Courtney B. Vance's performance in the original production, as well as that of Chris Chalk, who performed the role onstage with my cast back in 2010.

The goal, when you're playing a character that's super beloved from a movie, is to honor what the actor before you has done and then really just expand, which is what you get to do in a musical because you have songs, choreography, and everything is happening in real time.

Playing a real-life character, as an actor, gives me real high because there is so much of research material available in front of you.

It was new to play a woman who plays with her sincerity, and who is a seductress, a manipulator and a liar! I was able to compose a character as opposed to being very natural, so it was very interesting for me. It was great to realise that I could be this kind of real woman!

When real actors are approaching their work, we could be on a little stage somewhere, doing community theater. It's all the same. They're just trying to make the scene work. They're just trying to do the best they can and figure it out.

There's a rule in acting called, 'Don't play the result.' If you have a character who's going to end up in a certain place, don't play that until you get there. Play each scene and each beat as it comes. And that's what you do in life: You don't play the result.

Unless you're playing a real character based on a real person, if someone else has done it before, you're probably better off not watching it as an actor. Otherwise you end up trying to copy someone else.

I always try to do something very different with each character because that's why I like to do this, because I can become someone else completely and it's fun.

You can make an interesting character in a small portion of a movie, for a character that doesn't have that much on the page, if you just find the contradictions. That's something that I try to bring to my performances.

Theatrical times are different from concert times, to put it simply. Taking a figure like [Mahatma] Gandhi and setting him on a stage requires thinking about what theater is about and what the whole experience is about and what we're trying to communicate in that way, so you get into certain less abstract considerations.

The first thing, the main thing, about how I work is I need to understand the character.

I would tell any actress that the trick is to play all the female characters on your show, and then all the men are yours.

I don't see any difference in the craft of acting, in film or television. It's absolutely the same. It's different storytelling, playing a character over multiple hours, as opposed to two.

I've just never been the kind of actor that things have stayed with. I've never needed to carry a character off stage.