Trieste Kelly Dunn Quotes

It was the moment I learned acting is not acting out. After that light went on, I spent the rest of my life trying to figure out how to make other people realize it.

An actor is someone who pretends to be somebody else. A movie star is somebody who pretends that somebody else is them.

Actors have to make you believe that it's happening for the first time and all that jazz and make it human and at the same time entertain you.

Everyone seems to think they know what acting techniques are. Techniques just help you get to a certain place, but if the thing is happening just by itself, you don't need those techniques.

If I do a scene with an actor who doesn't have much experience, I say, 'I tell you what we're going to do: You just listen to me, and then you respond. We don't have to do any acting.' And that's good advice because you shouldn't see the acting.

I like to learn the lines and not get any precontrived things in my head about the part. Just get on stage and see what the other actors are doing, and respond to them as honestly as I can.

I love acting. It is so much more real than life.

I want to be in a more natural state while doing acting.

The most fundamental important thing for me as an actor is maintaining a sense of play. It's so important.

You're always trying to find common ground with whatever you do, but you want to not be thinking about yourself when you're performing a play. The job is getting yourself out of the way and letting the character go about the scenes.

A lot of really good actors are able to go straight from life to their work. They don't treat it as something that's an unattainable, weird thing that they have to aspire to and reach for in a scene.

Theatre gives you wings as an actor.

All performances are different. I don't think it's necessary to compare one with another. I am just me playing the role of Lear. You're bound to get a Holm approach to it, whatever that may be. I just got out there and did it. I'm very much a doer in my acting.

It was important to have a similar energy in my performance. To make the character too different would have just been about my ego because it didn't need to be drastically different.

I never wanted to be an actor, and to this day I don't. I can't get a handle on it. An actor wants to become someone else. I am a song-and-dance man, and I enjoy being myself, which is all I can do.

In every character you play, as much as you hate to admit it as an actor, but there's an element of you that you bring to it.

I love acting and really taking on another person, another life.

And once you cease to be a real person, you stop being a good actor.

Acting isn't that hard, really. I mean, I think that people make a big deal about it, but you just kind of try to say your lines naturally.

The worst acting is about imitation.

I have this assemblage of small facts, which looks like intelligence but no real depth of knowledge about anything. That's why I'm an actor.

I put a lot of time and energy and thought behind what I do and the characters that I create, and I don't want to do anything peripheral that is going to make an audience see me up there on the screen rather than who I'm playing.

The further away you can get away from yourself as an actor, the more fun you have.

Good acting comes from finding the essence of a character.

That's what acting is. You're pretending to be someone else.