Michael Caine Quotes

All I have to do is be me on stage. But acting, I have to be someone else, and walk how they would walk and blink how they would blink. I used to talk about it bad like, 'Aw man, that person made $10 million a movie?' But now I understand why they do. I get it now.

The thing about being an actor is that you turn into other people. You have to hide yourself a bit in order to let that other person come out.

Costume is a huge part of getting into character. Your body soaks in what you're wearing, and you turn into someone else.

My ambition is to become one of those actresses that is like a chameleon that you don't recognize.

Great actors are people who just meld into the part without calling attention to the fact that they are so-and-so doing this part. They may never become huge stars, but will always, in memory, stay respected actors.

A lot of acting, as I grew up wanting to do, is kind of like magic... I'm not comparing myself to him in the least bit, but if you knew what Daniel Day-Lewis was doing every step of the way and what he was eating, I don't think when he popped up as Lincoln we would quite believe it.

As far as 'Jane Pittman,' I don't know that I could verbalize, to this day, what I felt once I got into that role. I did a tremendous amount of research. I need to feel as though I am in the person's skin.

When you play a character, you commit yourself to their beliefs.

I want to do more roles that require a large level of preparation and that are completely different from who I am.

I started acting when I was 13 years old and I feel like I really admire actors who are these kind of amazing shape-changing people, that they almost can turn themselves into other people.

I'm very fortunate that I get asked to do very different kinds of roles and I realize how much I enjoy that. I enjoy the challenge of transformation. There are actors who play one character, or a certain kind of character, the whole of their lives. I really relish the opportunity to have the challenge to totally transform.

My goal as an actor is to grow and try different things.

I was always amazed the way people would come in looking one way and transform completely to the point where I couldn't recognize their language, their accent, the way they looked, their hair, their face even changed becoming so inside of the character.

Even when you think you can detach yourself from the characters, you don't. Because you're spending so much time trying to realize this person and make them real that they do infect you, in a way. And you do take them home and live with them, even if you think you're turning the character off. But in order to pull off a role convincingly, you wind up thinking about that person all the time, and it does sort of creep into you. And then there are things that you'll respond to, or react to in a very different way than you would normally.

When you read a script, you don't want to be the same guy all the time, you want to change, you're a different person. That's why acting is a wonderful career. You're not the same guy all the time.

When you take on different roles and become a different person, that's called acting ... It's a challenge.

I don't think there's a certain part of a character I take with me. There's a certain part of me I leave with each character, though.

Most of the characters I'd played were so different from me, so far from me that I had to transform.

The characters I have the least in common with are the ones I have the greatest success with. The further a role is from my own experience, the more I try to deepen it.

My fun as an actor and my task as an actor is to transform myself to become other people. I enjoy becoming characters but I don't enjoy becoming caricatures. The research I do is only necessary in so far as we move into other dimensions.

In the movie, you have to decide as an actor how you are going to give a character presence. You can't really move, walk, and talk like yourself. This creates something so you have to find something "other".

After Blood Simple, everybody thought I was from Texas. After Mississippi Burning, everybody thought I was from Mississippi and uneducated. After Fargo, everybody's going to think I'm from Minnesota, pregnant, and have blonde hair. I don't think you can ever completely transform yourself on film, but if you do your job well, you can make people believe that you're the character you're trying to be.

You have a certain objectivity, as a member of the audience, and you can come away maybe being provoked into a certain discourse or a certain arena of questioning, regarding how you would deal with things that your character has to deal with. Whereas when you're doing a film, once you start asking, "What would I do?," you're getting the distance greater between yourself and the character, or you're bringing the character to you, which I think is self-serving, in the wrong way. The idea is to bring yourself to the character.

I love trying to play the not-confident guy, the guy against my normal character, because that's when real acting comes into play.

As an actor, you're supposed to be able to form yourself into different characters and different roles. It's a transformation, and it is awesome.