Joseph Fiennes Quotes

As an actress, I'm drawn to emotion and expressing the human condition in all its forms, and I'm fortunate to have thoughts and feelings at my fingertips.

As an actor, you try to put a little bit of yourself in everything you do.

You've got to trust your instincts, your judgment and trust the storytelling that came before and the quality of the acting with the emotion.

Listen, acting is not surgery, it's entertainment. You're doing something to hopefully move people, to make them laugh, to transport them. But actors are vulnerable, and the reason we're vulnerable is that we're always trying to recreate human behaviour.

You have to learn to draw the same emotion you had when you wrote a song every time you perform it. Acting is the same way: You have to find those emotions and bring them to the surface, and then put them back when you're done.

There's the argument that you can relate to someone who's completely unrelatable. In the way that a director shows you his imagination on a film, then I get to show you my imagination in a big dumb character.

Every time I look through the lens with Denzel, I'm like a 12-year-old kid. It's hard for me to look at the monitor because the fun is in watching him.

Acting is not rocket science, but it is an art form. What you are doing is illuminating humanity. Or not.

The most important thing I learned from Dad about show business was never take myself seriously and never stop having fun with my craft.

Doing voiceover is so much fun because you can play with the lines as much as you want. You can put a whole bunch of energy into it, jump up and down, whatever you got to do.

I love telling stories and acting and entertaining people. I don't want to make fun of people.

Acting is my way of investigating human nature and having fun at the same time

I sing as an actress. Whatever I'm singing about, I just become the story.

Everything evolves naturally in life. It's not limited to beauty or music. The more experience you get, the more you find out about yourself. Everything becomes more and more an expression of the real you. I can play different characters. Sometimes I feel tomboy or glam or playful. When you perform, you can convey emotions differently, and your look can reflect each of those emotions.

It is the function of art to carry us beyond speech to experience.

Being singer is different than being an actor, where you call up sources from your own experience that you can apply to whatever Shakespeare drama you're in. But an actor is pretending to be somebody, a singer isn't. And that's the difference. Singers today have to sing songs where there's very little emotion involved. That and the fact that they have to sing hit records from years gone by doesn't leave a lot of room for any kind of intelligent creativity.

Art is born out of an ill-designed world.

My family has to be very patient living with me, if you're playing a part that's not you. You have to get it right.

It's always interesting to play characters who are vulnerable and how you display that vulnerability and what it's going to mean to people who watch it.

Part of what makes me love acting so much is, I love the mystery of the universe and the human experience, and storytelling is a great way to perform that, and that is always inspiring to me.

I was entirely wrapped up in the idea of becoming an actor. I learned how to write on the job, basically out of necessity. I always thought it'd be fun to write something, but it never was an ambition of mine, per se. I just thought, "Well, maybe I'll do it one day just for the hell of it and see if it works."

Playing Arnie was fun because everything I did was spontaneous.

I regard singing pretty much like acting. Each song is like playing a different role. I get very involved with my material. I feel a responsibility for the emotion it brings out in the listener.

I love comedy. I suppose comedy is my first love, in a way. I did a lot of acting, funnily enough, unprofessionally, as a kid. From when I was 10 years old until I was about 19, I was always doing little sketches with my friends, and doing different accents and voices. Probably about 3/4 of those were comedic, in some way, and the other 1/4 was more serious stuff or more action or more dramatic little pieces that I would make. But, I tend to lean towards comedy.

I write and rewrite and memorize, and then inject my performance with improvising and spontaneity, because if something feels too rehearsed, it's not going to be fun.