D. W. Griffith Quotes

As an actor, you need everything you can get to be truly scary and truly memorable.

I would absolutely recommend for actors to start in the theater because it establishes a foundation in your craft that you can build off of.

The trick to acting is not to show off; it's to think the thoughts of the character. I was lucky because when I started acting, it was doing jobs above pubs. I learned to act in anonymity, so by the time people saw me, I knew what I was doing. I was crap for years, but no one saw me being crap. It's a trade you learn.

The more you perform and get out there, I guess the more practice you have at it and the better you are and the more comfortable you are on stage.

I become a better actor after I step on a stage in front of, like, 500 people when it's just me, a microphone and my guitar. You don't get as nervous walking into a room in front of 3 or 4 people and to do a scene or to walk on a set. You gain confidence.

My advice to young actors is probably to do some theatre; definitely do that. I keep running into these actors who have never been on stage, and it's invaluable for an actor. What you will learn about yourself is huge.

A solid theatrical education can only improve a screen performance. It gives you a fuller capacity to read a script and understand a character, for one thing. It's important to alternate between the two activities.

I think it's really, really good for me to be on stage once a year. It keeps your chops good. There's nothing else like it.

My background is in acting, so I enjoy being able to show what I'm looking for. With acting, it's very immediate when you show someone what you're looking for, and the feedback is instantaneous as well.

I think there's a lot of mythos about what's required in acting.

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.

As an actor, the first thing you're taught is, 'Don't look into the camera; ignore it.'

You can't learn how to act; you can only really learn it through experience and practice and really finding what your voice is and what you want to be as an actor.

If you're not doing something right, you can feel it on stage, and if it isn't going well, the audience will tell you. A teacher can teach you sense memory and this and that, but until you get in front of an audience, you don't really feel it.

The single most important thing in learning my craft was being on the stage.

From the time I was five years old, theater was all I knew. I did community theater; I went to theater school. It's like going to the gym as an actor: every single night, you have to recreate the illusion of the first time, so you really have to listen and connect and stay in the moment for an hour and a half - with no breaks.

Performing live was something that I had to really work at.

It is important for an actor to learn how to face a live audience.

You do some acting in a room for a few minutes, hopefully get something out of it that makes you a bit better at acting, and go home. Maybe the people in the room with you liked the acting you did. Maybe they didn't! Either way, it's not the end of the world; you'll be doing this again soon.

Theatre has been a sort of hobby. I regret that I am not active, but given my job that is difficult. But those were learning days. The learning curve was the level of confidence, maturity, and reflexes that theatre teaches you is fantastic. You are alone in front of an audience for two hours and that gives you a different kind of confidence.

To perform on stage, you have to run through your paces till you are perfect. Despite the script and director, the actor makes or breaks the play.

For the actors, the talent is to serve the demands that I ask of them, to do it with naturality and truth, and to be honest when we were terrified.

There are two main jobs in acting - the first one is to be a good actor, and the second one is to convince everyone that you're a good actor.

I love doing theater so much - being in front of an audience and seeing how a character grows and develops with every performance.

The art of acting is to pitch good. You do the pitching and hope that the other person catches the ball and does some good pitching back to you.