Christopher Timothy Quotes

It's one thing to play a character that's fictitious - it's quite another to play somebody that is alive and well.

You're playing a character in a drama who happens to be based on someone who existed. It's never going to 'be' that person, but it's based on someone well-known, and you want to create enough of that person for it not to be a distraction.

It's always very daunting to play someone who actually existed. You have to honor that, and be specific and accurate and try to make people believe that you're that guy, which is really hard.

The Carrie in the plot was too much like the Carrie in the book. She smoked, she swore a lot, she was very hard, very cynical. I could never have pulled it off.

As an actor, you are always someone else's tool. You can have a connection with them, and you can share their point of view, but ultimately, you are helping them reflect.

Obviously, as an actor, when you re playing a real person, it is an extra challenge.

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

Whoever portrays me on screen need not necessarily be a look alike. Any hero could play my part.

None of the characters I've played are really like me. That would be boring. That wouldn't be acting.

If you play a real character who's famous and still alive, it makes things easier if you have the luck to have a good relationship with them.

I guess you should approach the roles differently when they're actual people who have been, this is the difference. Getting the accent exact, or the hair exact is less important in a situation like this.

You can't really judge characters, because that's when it gets really hard to play them.

In the case of Elektra I really wasn't sure I could pull it off. There were so many intellectual leaps. My character, Stick, is blind, but he can see better than most people. So I had trouble kind of finding the logic.

I think every role you take on, you should take on the responsibility of doing the best representation of that person or that character or that role. When it is a human being that has actually existed, and it is a person that people know of, yeah, you feel an even more amount of pressure to do a good job.

As an actor, you're sort of the court-appointed lawyer for the character.

That's what I love about acting, is playing different roles. I want to work for the character, and not make it work for me.

Well, from an acting point of view, I bear no relation, I don't look like Alfred Kinsey at all, but I thought somewhere in my artist's soul, my actor's soul, I could capture something of the spirit of the man.

To portray a maniac offers a compelling challenge.

There is a large element of me in every role I do.

When I was a young actor... the more different you were from the part you played, the more talent it reflected.

When you're playing a real person, there's a balance between playing the person in the script and playing the person as he was in life. You have to be respectful and true to who that person was, but at the same time tell the story in the film.

I have played 50 different kinds of fathers and villains. Only mediocre actors play the part the same way.

It's such a challenge to play a good guy - it's hard to be believable.

Each movie you do about a real person is like a painting, and you choose certain things in the painting that you want to pull out and you want to show.

When actors have the opportunity to play a larger-than-life icon - my wife did it with Tina Turner, and Jamie Foxx did it with Ray Charles - you have to make a decision how you go in. What do you start with? Where do you begin?