Kevin Spacey Quotes

In theater, there's a lot of discipline involved in doing eight shows a week for a year and a half. It's nice to be able to bring some of that bag of tools with you over to the film world, where you don't have the rehearsal, you don't have an audience. You don't have a month of rehearsal to examine these words, and you meet the guy who's going to play your brother the morning that you shoot the scene. So you need a bag of tools.

Every actor just wants good writing.

I personally take cues directly from the script, then I like to surprise the other actors. But you must maintain control on a level and see how far you can go up, down or out emotionally. You have to balance the craft with spontaneity.

When I was a little younger, I realized acting is a wonderful craft, and it's wonderful when you are working.

Film acting is really the trick of doing moments. You rarely do a take that lasts more than 20 seconds. You really earn your spurs acting onstage. I needed to do that for myself. I would hate to say at the end of everything that I never did a stage play.

I think the first thing is don't give up. If you love the craft. If you love being a detective and discovering who a character is and the detail of how they walk and what kind of shoes they wear and what did they do yesterday and what's important to them. I definitely advise actors to learn about the craft.

In the acting world, you can really only become good by practicing and doing it, and I just think every time you walk onto a set you just become better and better. I think I'm in a totally different space than I was back then on that first movie set.

I love an acting challenge, and I love getting to sit down with my script and do all my drama work.

I'm an emotional actor. When I'm doing a scene, I really believe it. I live the part as long as I'm in the scene.

There is probably some great acting that goes on in movies from people who have never been on a stage, but if you are in for the long haul, you'd be missing an enormous part of what being an actor is if you're not part of theater.

I'm a grinding actor. That's how I've always viewed myself. You go from one job to the next.

I never even thought about being an actor. Somebody asked me if I'd like to learn the craft, and I said, 'Okay.' I was a gymnast in a show at that time, and somebody asked me afterwards one night. I performed as a gymnast for nine years, and then I did acting after that.

Movie acting is about covering the machinery. Stage acting is about exposing the machinery. In cinema, you should think the actor is playing himself, if he's that good. It looks very easy. It should. But it's not, I assure you.

Actually, I wanted to act even when I was still playing football.

I'm lucky enough to say my day job is acting. I cut my teeth as a theater actor and playwright in New York.

My experiences and training back at drama school were very enlightening. I always believe in improving, be it kathak or my acting skills, and would want to experiment more when it comes to work.

I find that the acting's getting easier - with experience, everything is more instinctual.

In England, when we're at drama school, we spend a lot of time learning the craft from playwrights and stage actors, who are very well trained in the basics of acting because they need to get it right the first time - you can't have second or third takes when you're in front of a live audience, unlike in film.

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.

For me, it's all I've wanted to do. I did local plays and productions, local theater groups and anything that involved it. And then, I went and studied it, attended drama school and got my first lucky break in the theater in London, and just went from there.

Stage acting is for me the basic form of acting. If you make films all the time, you have so few possibilities to rehearse. And it's important to rehearse, because it gives you the possibility to try things which are not good!

I really take acting seriously.

Concept is what makes actors raise their game.

I've done a couple of series before, and what I like about TV is, as an actor, you get that chance to practice all the time, and that's really how you grow.

Acting is the only medium were people think they can just stand up and do it because they can say lines, but that is not so much the case. You have to study styles and techniques.