Aaron Staton Quotes

If you start to disrespect the character you're playing, or play it too much for laughs, that can work for a sketch, it will sell some gags, but it's all technique. It's like watching a juggler - you can be impressed by it, but it's not going to touch you in any way.

I'm disappointed in acting as a craft. I want everything to go back to Orson Welles and fake noses and changing your voice. It's become so much about personality.

All I've ever tried to do is play real people.

I started out wanting to be an actor and I like to give actors as much as possible. I love writing stuff where they can really lose control.

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

'Mad Men' still lives in my life as the best job that I've ever had because I thought the character was genius. It was so well-written.

The instinct to impersonate produces the actor; the desire to provide pleasure by impersonations produces the playwright; the desire to provide this pleasure with adequate characterization and dialogue memorable in itself produces dramatic literature.

Even when I'm playing a lawyer or a doctor, I want to play a person. A human being.

In the theater, characters have to cut the umbilical cord from the writer and talk in their own voices.

I just think there's always room for humanity in acting, one can only hope, so when you bring in the whole life of a person that's playing a character, then surprises happen and are allowed to happen, and so it makes it more interesting.

I try not to think of actors as I'm writing because I think you do them a disservice by writing for things they've already done.

As an actor, what's interesting is what's hidden away beneath the surface. You want to be like a duck on a pond - very calm on the surface but paddling away like crazy underneath.

I don't know how an actress is supposed to observe and create new stuff if she hasn't been on the streets, brushing up against humanity. You have to have a life.

The best way to honor real people when you play them is to try to tell the story of their dynamics and the struggles that they're dealing with rather than lose sight of the connections and personal relationships, and do a really good job at an accent.

As an actor, you work to the script: that's our main priority. But you have to be aware and look around for things that help you bring that little bit extra, that touch of realism that rams the point home.

Whether it's a very dramatic part or a comical role, I feel I need to create the same thing: a full-fledged, three-dimensional character that the audience can identify with.

I try to have a true line in every character I play.

Acting is not just impersonating your character.

I think being in touch with your emotions is very key as an actor, and I think experiencing life is the only way to be in touch with your emotions.

I am a method actor, but I'm also a film actor as well as a method actor. Characters that don't have humility, whether they are heroes or villains, are hard to relate to. All characters in every aspect of what we do should have humility. If they don't, then they're a cartoon character.

As an actor, you can't just imitate someone. You have to get under her skin.

I just think, in every acting choice that you make, you've got to go for the least obvious choice.

Sometimes you read things that people don't even notice in a performance, that you just are moved by or understand that this actor is really living his or her life on the screen. The first time I realized that was when I watched Brando in 'On the Waterfront.'

It's easier to cast yourself in something you've written because you know your voice.

As an actor, it's important to feel for the character, as you will be watched by audience, and when you start feeling your character, you share a sense of happiness and achievement.