Sam Heughan Quotes

That's what I love about acting, is playing different roles. I want to work for the character, and not make it work for me.

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

I think singing and acting go hand in hand. Take an R&B singer: one song says, 'I love you,' the next is, 'Baby, don't leave me', the next is, 'If you leave me I don't care.' You have to drop in and out of different perspectives.

Well, with each character that I play in my life as an actor, I try to figure out how to find the challenge.

Actors are such wonderful creatures and such wonderful instruments. It's always different on the page or in my head. I hear it differently. I see it differently. And then, you give it to an actor, and it comes alive in a way that you didn't expect.

In a way, making Martin Ellingham the way he is was a corrective exercise for my acting - to keep a bit still and show a little control. I do like it - it's like having an instrument that you can play and that you can pick up and enjoy playing.

The goal, when you're playing a character that's super beloved from a movie, is to honor what the actor before you has done and then really just expand, which is what you get to do in a musical because you have songs, choreography, and everything is happening in real time.

Acting is more creative and liberating than production.

I've been aware of the work I do as an actor being directorial in feel.

I love live theater. I get my rocks off by doing stand-up, and I am the only actor. But to show up eight times a week and not have that time for myself; to do someone else's lines? When I work for Wendy Wasserstein or Terrence McNally, Neil Simon or even Shakespeare, I do not have the right to change the lines.

As an actor, our very palette is one of imagination. So it is a walk onto an empty space and then imagine the world beyond it is what we do.

To play a role where you get to reveal intellectual change is wonderful.

Of course you can find something exciting and dynamic in any character you want to portray.

It's true I have a hard time with the notion of creating a character. And I feel it's a limit. I'm always really impressed by actors who are able to construct a character, like Johnny Depp.

People say that they like the characters that they believe that I am. But, I don't as much. I like the characters that I believe that I am not. Like my role on 'Law and Order.' That character unnerved people. And I loved every second of it. I want to continue growing as an actress. There are ways that I can reach quicker, or deeper, with acting.

I have a constant sort of melancholy approach to acting that fuels me. I want to do everything.

Some of the great characters that I've played had to be transformational.

I love the possibility that anything can happen in any moment with acting. That you have the opportunity to experience lives and adventures that you may not have otherwise.

An actor must interpret life, and in order to do so must be willing to accept all the experiences life has to offer. In fact, he must seek out more of life than life puts at his feet.

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

The thing about acting is you don't want to let on how enjoyable it is or then everybody would want to become an actress. But it really is. It's a pleasure to go and exchange your identity.

I love being the character actor. I get to stretch my muscles a little more.

Character acting is a much braver pursuit than a guy who runs around and intermittently clenches his jaw muscles.

One of the great pleasures of acting is surrendering to someone else's point of view of the world - living inside a character and a story that never would have come out of your mind or heart.

When you're doing characters from famous novels, you have a responsibility as an actor to make it what the writer intended. And then you add and expand from there to create a three-dimensional performance.