Ellen Page Quotes

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

I think with the best actors, emotion is something that has no kind of check in them.

Most of the actors that do play apes have told me that it's been one of the most profound things they've done, because you have to be so honest with yourself.

Sometimes you have to think about what you're going to say, in real life, so when you see that thought process going on in a movie, it feels real and looks real.

I like playing really super-intense, live-in-the-moment characters. It asks me to not phone it in. It's impossible to phone it in. Every American boy has spent his childhood pretending to get shot.

She'd never imagined it like this-when she thought of someone (a woman like herself)losing her mind, she'd imagined shrieks and wails, hallucinations; but at that moment it had seemed clear that there was another way, far quieter; a way that was numb and hopeless, flat, so much so that an emotion as strong as sorrow would have been a relief.

Great acting is being able to create a character. Great character is being able to be yourself.

In my acting, I have to identify with something in the character. The big tough boy on the side of right - that's me. Simple themes. Same me from the nuances. All I do is sell sincerity and I've been selling the hell out of that ever since I started.

And if my mind breaks up In all so many ways I know the meaning of The words, "I love you

Theresa Rebeck's writing is so scarily funny. I just love how unapologetic she is with her writing: she doesn't try to make her characters likeable or heroic, she just really makes them human. Hopefully, the audience is able to love them in the end - or have whatever feelings that they want to have about all of them - but I love that she doesn't have that agenda. That is something that, as an actress, was really appealing to me; to just get to be in this group of people who are complicated and very human.

The hardest thing for me to do, and the best thing I've done and learned as an actor is to sacrifice being funny in certain circumstances in order to do something that makes sense for the story or the character, or emotionally.

What's the trick to writing a great female character? Make her human.

I went through this difficult time [in the 1984] when we were making our third record where I kind of lost my mind. That's when the bulimia kicked in. And that's when I got really freaky.

I like characters where there's something going on and something to make him real. If you find out what somebody cares about, all of a sudden, the whole world opens up.

Filming is physically and emotionally hard, especially acting in something like this, where we go into the honest feelings of these people. But it's also very exciting because there's an adrenaline that's pumping (through you) when you're doing these scenes.

As an actor, you can really play the intensity and gravity and seriousness of the moment, and just rely on the circumstances being funny. The joke is kind of the situation you're in, or the way you're reacting to something, as opposed to the characters just saying something witty.

There's an inherent responsibility actors feel when portraying something that actually exists in the world. It's arguably something that not all actors would agree on because this is a craft, but for me, it's the emotion of what a character is going through that makes the performance what it is. We have a responsibility to bring those emotions to light.

Anyone who is considered funny will tell you, sometimes without your even asking, that deep inside they are very serious, neurotic, introspective people.

The danger of course is always is caricature. The biggest challenge was to sound like Nelson Mandela. Everything else is easy to do, walk like him. He has a few ticks and things I noticed that I picked up. I didn't have any agenda, as it were, in playing the role other than to bring it as close to reality as I possibly could.

I frequently gravitate toward characters that have some urgency or soul.

As actors, emotion is the sand in the sandbox for us. Without emotion, there's nothing to play - and we are playing. We know that. Whether you think we do or not, we know that.

I'd like to be taken in charge of as an actor, not to be abandoned with asinine dialogue and meaningless actions or stereotyped characters. I'd like to feel like I'm in a character driven story.

I am not one of those actors who dwells on the histrionics and the subtext and future text of the character. I deal with the scenes that I'm doing at that specific time, because if I do that, they play in more of a real way.

She still felt shell-shocked by all of it, numb. Beneath the numbness, though, was a raw and terrible anger that was unlike anything she'd felt before. She had so little experience with genuine anger that it scared her. She actually worried that if she started screaming, she'd never stop.

Strength of character is already written. What we bring, as an actor, is an almost 3D-ness to it.