Stephen Sondheim Quotes

An actor's job is to embrace emotions and situations that in real life we spend all of our time running away from.

I would like to say something deeper, but for me, I saw a production of "Fences" in Rhode Island and a fabulous actress played Rose, but when she first came on the stage she was mad. You could just see it. She was all, "Troy stop!" So by the time you get to the revelation scene, I didn't think she loved him, so there was no loss. I think that the real tragedy and the real drama or the thing that makes you lean in is to see the love, to see the commitment. To see the fact that Rose is invested in this marriage no matter what.

For me, making a lot of dramas on one side it's a different sort of challenge, and on the other, it's not a challenge at all, meaning that my goal is to try and bring the realism and acting you might find in a straight drama with the intentions and conflict, where it doesn't feel tongue-in-cheek, but rather committed and real.

Wrestling and acting couldn't be anymore different in terms of what it takes to entertain. Wrestling is explosion, acting is implosion. One really screws up the other.

There's a certain secret every actor must have in his work. If you reveal it, you're letting the audience in on the wrinkles and convolutions of your brain. All I want them to do is to see the effect.

I would like to work in both comedy and drama. I'd love to do a really juicy drama that's just really real.

I can do glamour, but I can also play something like I did in the play 'Wild Justice,' where I was demented with grief and anger, and there was snot coming out of my nose, and my clothes were all over the place.

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

I really think I tried to capture the essence of the comics: what I thought would be the essence of Elektra. And then, as any character that I play, I really tried to dig inside me and try to reach real emotions and transpose that in her world, in who she is.

There is a very thin line dividing characterisation from impersonation. I've to make sure I don't cross over into mimicry.

An actor's job is to find variations of the same emotion in his being so that every time he expresses grief or joy, it doesn't look the same.

I'm always in the elements, it seems like it's pouring rain on me a lot and there's crowds of people pushing me around, and it feels very real. Which is great as a actor, you don't have to come up with too much of it. I'm always amazed.

The actors make the film. They're the ones that take this theoretical movie that's in your head and make it real. The success of a film is entirely on their shoulders. I admire them, because acting is such a difficult thing to do, and I personally can't understand it.

I don't feel the pressure to deliver an unrealistically great man to the screen; I just want to be honest to who my character is on the page. If I can reflect that and put some heart into him and make him real, then I think I've done my job, and I think that people will like who he is.

I'll never approach a part in the same way again. Piaf taught me so much. In terms of my work, I think I'll enjoy it even more than before, because now I know that characters truly exist in their own right. I'll have a way to bring them even more intensely to life.

When you first fall in love, it's supposed to be awful. Awful, uncertain, scary, wonderful, confusing, all at once. That's how you know it's real. You have to care deeply. Passionately. That hurts.

You've always got to have an imagination in the game we're in but it explodes on this. You get to try the costumes on before you start and feel the weight of them, which is great. But then you're opposite some of the greatest actors in the world and away you go. You find your imagination takes over without you really even thinking about it.

As far as being an actor is concerned, you have to have passion. If you're not bringing the passion of the character into the room with you, you might as well not come into the room at all.

It's like they talk about how American actors have the method and English actors just kind of switch views faster. And John [Hurt] is telling me the story as he's sitting in that witness chair, and they're putting the final touches of makeup on. And he goes, "Hold on a second," to stop his story so he can do the take. And he does this incredible take. They go, "Cut." And then immediately John goes, "Anyways, so Alec, he's playing the chess." And I'm just going, "Holy crap." You get whiplash from those kinds of quick turns!

As an actor, I feel like youre asked to live life as vibrantly as possible.

I'm in awe of how grounded Ms. Tyson is and how her performances can be different but the same. She can switch up the delivery, but it's still with the right intention. Her words are effortless in terms of their meaning and how she inhabits them. She's been doing Trip to Bountiful for four months, and it still feels real. She's pretty amazing.

You have more of a feeling of personal resentment than I have. Perhaps, I have too little of it, but I never thought it paid.

Plot and melodrama were in every life; in some so briefly as hardly to be recognized, in others-in that of certain men and women in the public eye, for instance-they were almost in the nature of a continuous performance.

Film, television, and working with a camera is such an intimate art form that if a camera is right on you, and I've got your face filling the screen, you have to be real. If you do anything that is fake, you're not going to get away with it, because the camera is right there, and the story is being told in a very real way.

(Guy) Pearce, as the hero, makes the mistake of trying to give a good and realistic performance. (Jeremy) Irons at least knows what kind of movie he's in, and hams it up accordingly.