Jonah Hill Quotes

I try to play characters who are different from myself, so I feel like this character is someone who is really different. I actually think that if I did what he did in this movie, I would get a restraining order put against me.

The ideal way to approach a character is to find something in yourself that relates in some way.

As an actor, if you decide that someone is bad... you can't play bad, because even the worst person doesn't think what they're doing is bad.

The best way to learn how to work with actors is to have had experience of trying to act yourself - it will teach you humility if nothing else.

One of the great things that you should never do that I learned from John Malkovich is to never judge your characters.

It's so funny, you go to acting school thinking you're going to learn how to be other people, but really it taught me how to be myself. Because it's in understanding yourself deeply that you can lend yourself to another person's circumstances and another person's experience.

Once you really understand your role... that's why I think actors get lost in a series. Everybody wants to be the quarterback or the game-winning wide receiver. I've been around long enough and done enough stuff to where I don't feel that way. I just want to do what I do as well as possible.

You can't really judge characters, because that's when it gets really hard to play them.

It's good to have to put yourself in someone else's skin. It's all-consuming.

I like all my characters in one way or another, or at least I understand them.

Somebody said something really smart: It's like you end up being the defense attorney for your role. Your job is to defend their point of view. You're fighting for what they want. You learn that in acting school - it's Acting 1A: 'What do you want? What's in the way?'

I took a psychology class, and I think the study of the mind can help me further my acting ability. It's also taught me about getting into an environment with new people and acting like you've known them forever.

I think acting can be very frustrating, and there's no experience that doesn't make you a better actor.

When I step into a character's shoes, I don't judge them. I make a conscious effort not to look from the outside in but look from the inside out, and when you do that it allows you to feel and sense things more, and act and react from a core, you know?

Everyone is usually screwed up in some way and that is usually where the work comes in - figuring out how to make it believable and make it real to present someone's problems that you don't necessarily actually know anything about.

Anything that's different from your own realm of experience as a human being, whether it's driving a car or a boat, or using guns, anything that separates you from yourself and leads you more towards this character's existence is a big help.

People forget that the more we know about the world - about people, cultures, and about life - the stronger we are as actors because the more we can bring to our characters.

I'm a young actor and I haven't learned everything there is about acting.

I'm fortunate enough to have learned not to waste time getting frustrated with my kids, or co-workers, or friends and family for not doing everything I wish they would. If someone doesn't respond to me the way I want them to, I understand that it doesn't have anything to do with me.

I think any role you need to play not so much transforms but I like to think of it as understanding the psychology of another character.

When you are playing someone who is dealing with issues on a really personal level, if you don't bring your own issues into the equation, it's not going to feel really personal to the people watching it.

When you're playing someone who is angry and sad all the time, you get a little down.

Studying acting has been personally enriching because it has taught me to take the time to imagine what someone else's life experience might be like. To look deeply at how our pasts and the circumstances of our early childhoods mold us as people.

I try genuinely, when I'm playing a character, to not judge them and just to inhabit someone as how one sees them. That being said, you also want to make sure that you don't blur the edges of people too much because humans are naughty and complicated beings.

I do ask myself why I make people so enraged, because I only ever say what I think. And while I know it might not be everyone's point of view, that doesn't seem particularly intolerable to me.