Aidan Gillen Quotes

I spend a lot of my time trying to draw the attention of actors to the minute and subtle details of human behavior, which was the sort of thing I was looking at when I was a neurologist.

I try to steal from the best. Suck it all in. 'Taxi Driver' is really a bible for film actors, a master class. A lot of emotional power, a lot of emotional depth but it's contained and you just see the tip of the iceberg.

As an actor, you are in a unique position because you're not only memorizing dialogue but really embodying it. You naturally feel the rhythm of good writing.

First of all, the actor needs to get out of the character's way. You follow the character without judgment or prejudice or preconceived ideas.

For me, acting is a series of impressions rather than trying to find one line through to the end, which risks becoming more of a presentation.

I was a student of Stella Adler and then later Lee Strasberg, and they were into sensory work. At its best, acting is not about words - even when the words are important.

You have more creative freedom with writing, in certain ways, because you can create everything that happens. But, as an actor you also have creative freedom because you don't so much focus on what has to move the story along, and only on how your character is reacting to situations.

Acting has always been something I've wanted to get into. I think the best models are actors; you're taking on a character. In that sense, I have been acting for a long time. It didn't seem like a crazy transition.

As a filmmaker I find it much more rewarding to work with actors who are classically trained. It's about the work and only the work.

I do not use any set methods, not even The Method. The character after all is in the lines.

It's your job as an actor to fill out the blanks. I love doing that. To fill in the bones.

I think you can really tell a good actor if you can put a camera on them and they can just talk and emote and react and you don't have to keep cutting away from them, because they are the language and the behavior. It's all a tour-de-force performance.

You know, I've never been much of a method actor. I feel like, with every project I go in extremely prepared and I like to have a good time.

My mentor Jon Simmons introduced me to the Stanislavski system, which is so heavy on back-story. So you write and write and write these back stories about a character and then you throw it away. So then on set, if it doesn't come, then you didn't do your work.

Acting is something different to everybody. I just know that if you watch an actor or actress getting better and better, I think that's them just understanding themselves better and better.

I like to try to change things up a bit in the way that actors such as Philip Seymour Hoffman or Michael Fassbender did and do.

Acting is kind of difficult to intellectualize - it's a far more visceral experience. It's really hard to be able to think about and then employ these kind of esoteric notions of this person's backstory and try to weave it in somehow. It's just kind of impossible.

Literature is an easier way to study acting, because then you can take any kind of spin.

In acting, you have to pull from real-life situations, from people, to help develop a character.

I've learned by watching films that inspired me and people who inspired me like Robert Redford and Paul Newman. I love old school acting. I love subtlety, and I also love being spontaneous, and that's really what works for me.

I go to acting class, and in acting class, I'm not the girl that brings in romantic comedies; I'm the girl that wants to do 'Girl Interrupted' all the time.

All actors bring something unexpected to the role because they have to translate what's on the page and make a real character out of the black-and-white text that's there in the script.

There's so much to learn about acting and performance in general... I mean, acting is a very complex art, and there are a lot more theories and methods and techniques to it than I think anybody would think.

To be an actress and act crazy is really fun for me, to be able to be acting like you'd never be able to act in your real life and scream and freak out. It's an interesting test for an actor.

I'm a task-oriented actor. A pretender. And I try to invent my process anew each time I make a new project. So I frown on any method.