Lily Rabe Quotes

If I'm playing a murderer, I don't go out and start murdering people.

Just to get serious about this thing, you know. One has to be compassionate. It's true that people are up against things, economically and emotionally.

It's tricky playing people that you don't like and finding a way to empathise with them. It's challenging and very exciting for an actor.

I've been playing the bad guy in the last seven or eight projects I've done. I like it. It's a lot more interesting! Being the good guy gets a little stale after a while, you know?

My biggest challenge will be to play the totally submissive woman. It takes a toll on you when you play someone who's far removed from your personality.

You have to play your characters, not like them.

Actors like to play bad guys because they're more fun. They also win more awards.

I definitely try my best not to stay in character when I'm not on set, which can be more difficult in some roles than others.

You can't play a guy who's just a snake, because what do you draw on?

Tortured characters are, I think, an actor's dream.

Acting is a psychological profession, and every character drains you emotionally, regardless of whether it is an intense art house movie or a light-hearted commercial series.

To portray a real-life character is the toughest job for an actor because one never knows which direction to flow.

I think, for every actor, the most challenging part of playing a character, specially a real-life character, is to convince yourself that you are the character.

Coming off 'House of Cards,' playing someone so straight-laced, I was getting offered a lot of F.B.I. agents.

Playing somebody who's obsessed. Playing somebody who is transgressing, and who is really crossing moral lines and ethical lines. That's always interesting.

It was new to play a woman who plays with her sincerity, and who is a seductress, a manipulator and a liar! I was able to compose a character as opposed to being very natural, so it was very interesting for me. It was great to realise that I could be this kind of real woman!

It's the challenge of trying to evoke any kind of sympathy for a role that ordinarily we would say, "Oh, this is a bad guy" and dismiss him.

Being a dramatic character was more difficult for me. It was a new thing that I explored because it was challenging. But I love to challenge myself and different things.

There are parts that you can do them all your life, and no one knows you're even acting, and there are other parts which somehow - I think they say they 'pop' - people notice that you're in and you become an actor from the movies and people take you in a whole different way. Whether or not I can keep that ball rolling is another matter.

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 played a father a few times. You don't have to shoot heroin to play a heroin addict ... I'm not running for president but I could play a candidate. Most of the time, you don't really have to have those things in your life to understand what they're like.

I have always wanted to play different kinds of stuff, but it's hard, first to find good material, and then to change people's perception of you so they'll let you do it. I mean, I would really like to play a poet, but once they get this notion of you as a street guy, it's hard to change that.

I seem to have been cast several several times to do it. I think in this one, Phoenix is not purely evil. She was in the comic books at some point but the way the writers created her or we always talked about her, was that she was torn with her powers taking over and trying to control them at the same time. It was challenging to play which made it interesting for me to play this character.

As actors, we want to challenges ourselves and put ourselves in different situations to see how we react and deliver a performance.

I think I've grown up in an era where character acting on film has become less desirable for the producers and directors and therefore the audience. They have got used to the people that those actors really are.