Jacki Weaver Quotes

When you're doing a character, you want to know the full landscape. You want to know them spiritually, mentally and physically.

If you're playing the bad guy, you have to find what you like about them.

I mean one of the basic rules when you're acting is that you mustn't stand in judgement on a character, you mustn't say Hitler was a bad man because you can't act in that way.

Every time you play a bad girl or guy in a movie, you really come from a place of pain.

In terms of jumping into a character's skin, I try to immerse myself in the role as much as possible to bring me closer to them. All I do is what's required to achieve what I want to achieve.

I'm not a method actor. I try to stay separate but to imagine what they'd feel, to put myself in their shoes.

You can't understand a character intellectually, you have to become one with its emotional core.

If I wasn't an actor, I never would have known who Debbie Gallagher was. I never would know how her feelings are or how her emotions are, or her family.

I always play outsiders. I think I'm carrying a lot of those characters and I wonder if I play them because those characters need an extra element of thought to bring them to life.

It's never very useful to see your character as a villain. You have to play them the way they see themselves.

I think it's necessary to identify with anything - with any character you play, there's got to be something in common, so you can link up to that person, even if it's like one tiny thing. But it's equally fun to play somebody completely different, and trying to find what that thing is to make it.

When I do a character, I try to base it on someone I have met or an experience I've had.

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

I try to think what the character is thinking. Then, hopefully, I begin to feel it. I act and react not because I'm recalling a dog killed by a fire engine, but because I'm concentrating on what the character is going through.

That's why I enjoy acting: getting in the mind of someone else.

I'm the guy who plays human beings. I understand why the characters are doing what they're doing. When you play a villain, you don't play a villain: you play a human being doing what he thinks he needs to do to get what he wants.

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

All good actors are unpredictable, and a little crazy in a good way, because they feel more secure playing other people than themselves.

When you play a character, you get to see the world through their eyes. Whether it's a fictional world or a real world, you do get to see somebody else's point of view, whether he's a good guy or a bad guy.

As a young performer, I didn't know that you can have a great time playing someone in terrible crisis. The more you know it's not real, the deeper you can go into it. And the easier it is to let it go when it's done.

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

I like to try to make the characters I play be as human as possible.

Ultimately, the idea of acting is to understand the people you're playing, and then where they're coming from is not so mystifying. You've got to detox a bit after, though.

When I act, a part of me goes into the character I am playing.

When you are developing a character you have to bring so much of yourself to the role.