Antony Sher Quotes

I can't act, and so I have to live that particular character in my real life and then exhibit it on screen.

I feel that one of the hardest things in acting is the way you need to switch your emotions.

Now that I'm acting, I've realized that I don't have a lot of barriers. Certain actors have a hard time with anger or with joy or with whatever, and, I don't know, I don't seem to have those barriers.

I have just gained a deeper and deeper respect for acting and the whole art of it because you're really trying to live a life and to do the best justification for it.

If you really do want to be an actor who can satisfy himself and his audience, you need to be vulnerable. You must reach the emotional and intellectual level of ability where you can go out stark naked, emotionally, in front of an audience.

I don't mind a little Sturm und Drang. When I was doing 'Riding in Cars With Boys,' I wouldn't smile at anybody, because my character, Bev, was angry at the world. I'm the opposite. Inside my head I'd be like, God, I'll explain to you at the end of shooting that I'm not this person.

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.

As an actor sometimes you can be a bit emotional and forceful, and that's not always the way to be.

Most of my training at graduate school was geared towards drama, so I feel good about it, and I can do it, but it requires a lot more work from me. I feel like with drama... well, with all acting, really, you need to honor the truth of the situation.

Performing, for me, has always been a very inner process.

People think memorizing lines is hard, when that's the last thing you worry about. You get that done, and then you've got to worry about the internal stuff, which is the challenging part.

The one thing for an actor that is complete death is if you're bored, because that boredom will show in your work.

I guess every actor has certain emotions they can access easier than others.

All an actor has is their blind faith that they are who they say they are today, in any scene.

Normally, I rely heavily on my director to massage me out of my actor comfort zones.

I find that a lot of the good acting comes out when you're physically being pushed: your brain turns off and just deals with the situation at hand. You get to a point where you're exhausted at the end of the day, but I quite like that.

Sometimes fake laughing is hard once you've done a scene 18 times. I don't want to brag, but I have a reputation for being very, very good at that. It's funny finding what's challenging about acting as you go.

I don't have an 'actor cry.'

It was actually a relief for me to play an actor who was scared, who didn't know where everything was, who didn't know what buttons to push, and for me to be able to play all that.

As a director, I have to feel realism from actors, and they can't be plastic.

It's funny because, if you're not an actor, people always tend to say, 'How do you memorize all those lines? Is that really hard?' I'm always like, 'That's just a small part of it. I have to seek my craft and my emotions' - you know, all this gross, actor-y stuff.

I always panic on the first day of work. You can do all the Stanislavsky-backstory homework, but when that moment arrives and you are in the clothes, hair, and makeup of somebody else, and you're saying the words created by somebody else - I never know how to do it. It's a complete mystery to me.

There's something scary about acting always, because basically you do all this work in a vacuum, and then suddenly there's a lot of money spent making a film, and there's suddenly a camera here, going, 'Right? What are you gonna do?'

As an actor, there's no faking it.

I think sometimes you can think up a story, but it's because you're comfortable doing that, but when you're an actor, one of the things that you have to do is take yourself out of your comfort zone.