Maria Bello Quotes

An emotional performance is usually more instinctive to an actor.

An actor definitely has to be in the past a well as the present; an actor must react to past experiences every minute, every second.

The worst acting is about imitation.

I've never been a method actress; I've never been that person that wants to imagine horrible things happening in your own life in order to exploit them for your emotional being in the movie. I'm just not good at doing that.

I'm interested in the acting and staging of specific emotions, and so I work with actors. It's a small proportion of what I do, but it's always what people seem to focus on.

I'm not one of those people who can cry on cue. If I have to cry in an audition, I'm like, 'Okay, let me see what I can do.'

There were time when I was into method acting that I did have moments of residual character emotions, because the method bases your emotional responses as a character on emotional experiences from your real life.

Bad actors try to cry, and good actors try not to. Bad actors try to laugh, and good actors try not to.

When I see an emotion being enacted by a great actor, I always feel I can never do that.

At drama school I learned the Stanislavski technique, which uses sentimental memories and bits of your past to put real emotion into the scene.

Reacting is so important to the craft of acting.

I think a lot about the editing of the films when we're making them, partly because I studied that, and partly because if you think about being in love while you're supposed to be acting in love, there's nowhere to go. You have to focus on something else and then do what's being asked, and you might get some semblance of something interesting.

When you're on set and you professionally listen to what the other actors have to say, then the emotion is naturally evoked.

I think people pick up on that. You use personal stuff and mix it all in - I definitely pull on that stuff in my acting.

When I'm creating a character, it's a little bit like what my theater teachers used to tell me about Stanislavsky, like if you're using sense memory to do a scene - if you have to cry in a scene, you try to remember something in your life that made you cry and you use that in order to get the tears.

The important thing in acting is to be able to laugh and cry. If I have to laugh, I think of my sex life. If I have to cry, I think of my sex life.

The notion that acting is simply about intuitively responding to situations the way you feel couldn't be farther away from how I ask actors to work.

I really feel our job as actors is to find a human experience in the character. So, for me, genre comes second; it's about script and the emotional journey of that character. Genre definitely has an impact, but it has more of an impact on the way the character is expressed. We all have the same core emotions of love, jealousy, rage - it's just how they're expressed.

I knew it was going to be important that if I had an audience understand who she was, then all those things had to come from a place that was grounded, as opposed to being tics and manners and twitches. I didn't think it was going to be as rich, perhaps, as if I was going to make it more emotional.

In the case of two actors connecting with each other and trusting each other, our bodies have memories without us having to consciously think about it, so rather than think, "Oh, I must think about my daughter dying," you just let that go and trust that you have all the emotions you need in there, and by losing yourself in the scene, that stuff kicks in without having to spend the day thinking about horrific things happening to your own child.

The talented actor needs craft. When you do a stage play, you do it once each night in chronological order. In a film you're going to wind up doing a scene 15-20 times, just by the nature of the process. If I tell you a joke once, it's funny. The more times I tell, the less funny it is. How do you get to the point where you can laugh again? You also may have to cry again and again.

I don't get a chance to cry that often on film, so I was hoping that talent would come my way, that day. I cheated, I guess, when I just started looking at my technology device - my iPhone - to look at pictures of my kids, before I did the scene where I had to cry. That was a good trick that I found.

So many actors get caught up in their technique, and to be honest, I see it really getting in the way. I see them forcing things. I definitely do my best work when I'm free of that. But I think as an actor, I work really hard in preparing the roles. I spend like 90 percent of my waking moments walking around thinking: "What does this character do? What is his relationship with so-and-so?" Always, really. Too much!

I'm not an actor who consciously accesses bits of my life, in order to play parts. Obviously, you don't need to have been a father to play one, otherwise everyone who's been a father would be able to act.

When you act, it's better not to fake the emotion. It's better to find the emotion within yourself and your experiences, and see if you can bring that back to the surface, so that you can then literally hand it off to the character, and then let him run with it.