Betty Gilpin Quotes

Every role is physical to a certain extent, but as a viewer, I don't respond well to actors doing more than they need to tell a story.

Acting coaches in Hollywood were always telling me to use my hands and body more. But that was never me. I just breathe and sometimes it doesn't look as if I'm doing that.

As an actor, you have many tools - your body, your voice, your emotions, mentally. In film, you have your eyes because they communicate your thought process. In fact, generally in film, what you don't say is more important than what you say. That's not so much the case for stage.

It's a fine line. If you withhold too much, you come across as wooden - as I've often been described in some movies. Fair enough. I believe that the best performances are the ones that an audience has to search for.

There were a couple times with close-ups where I tended to overact. I would use more of my face than I needed to. I learned how to be more subtle.

I move my face so much because I'm very much expressive. I'm told a lot, 'Stop moving your face'. Because on camera, the tiniest movement tells so much, and it looks really hammy.

I use my hands a lot while acting.

You learn to control every aspect of your muscles, your face, your toes, your fingernails. And that is how you tell a story, through movement.

Everybody thinks performance capture is about thrashing around and doing a lots of movement, but it's actually about being able to contain and think and be believed in a close-up, as much as anything else.

Some of the best actors in the world are very exterior actors, Anthony Hopkins being one of them. He knows exactly how to turn his face to get a certain expression. He knows exactly what to do with eyes, and with his voice. It's very exterior.

One of my favorite actors is Paul Newman. He could tell so much with a single look, whereas some actors would need an entire five page monologue to give off the feeling of what he could say with just a single look.

Playing a robot is possibly the most difficult role you can have as an actor, because you have to take all your innate emotional responses and completely suppress them. Even the way you walk is affected.

When actors are talking, they are servants of the dramatist. It is what they can show the audience when they are not talking that reveals the fine actor.

Good actors, you always know what they're thinking. That's why they're good actors.

I spend a lot of my time trying to draw the attention of actors to the minute and subtle details of human behavior, which was the sort of thing I was looking at when I was a neurologist.

There are times when I consciously give the character something physical - a walk, the way he sits, how he talks, or his lack of physicality, which is like a physicality.

The prosthetics were interesting because the artist was so good that they could just put a Hitchcock mask on me, but you don't want to do that. You're an actor playing Hitchcock, so it's about how much of that you're going to do.

Directors have a tendency to use their hands like orchestra conductors. They don't realize that the actor is looking at their faces, anyway.

I discovered that silent film is almost an advantage. You just have to think of the feeling for it to show. No lines pollute it. It doesn't take much - a gaze, an eyelash flutter - for the emotion to be vivid.

There is this miraculous thing I heard Hugh Grant talking about - the thing about screen acting is that you can read people's thoughts. You are trying to register something inside and usually the eyes in cinema are where you will register that.

I found out was, by the rhythm of my chewing, how I chewed fast, slow or what have you, I could tell the audience what my character was thinking and feeling.

I play guys who never smile, and I never stop smiling.

It's hard to act with just your jaw.

You don't have a face to work with, so your voice has to do all the work until you see the animation. So, a lot of it I had to pull back because it was too big.

If I get the walk of a character, that helps me find them. So I'm constantly looking at airports and train stations, registering walks.