Kellie Martin Quotes

In films you do a scene, you play around with it and unless you're doing a lot of reshooting, which no one has the luxury to do, you deal with the problem for a day and then you move on. On some level, it never allows you to go very deep into what performing is about.

In films, I didn't crave the type of attention I had sort of stumbled into in my music career. And I do not audition well. I'm really not good at it. Early on, I did movies like 'Alpha Dog' and 'Black Snake Moan' because the directors didn't ask me to audition.

I can never forget my role in 'Baghban' because I was expected to act nasty with Amitabh Bachchan and I did not like it.

I did Shakespeare in college and the nerves I got doing Shakespeare are the same nerves I get doing 'Mad Men.'

You might have, as a character, 30 pages of dialogue a day if you're what they call a 'front-burner story.' So you go home, you learn your lines for the next day, you get up, you're there at 7 in the morning, you do a quick rehearsal, you're on camera, you might leave, you know, at 7 at night and start the whole thing over again.

I consider myself a novice film actor.

When you are an actor, you have to stay inside this world, but when you are with the crew, on the outside, you are in the dirt, working through all the issues. It's just a different way of working, and I think I preferred it.

I've had some marvelous parts, but I'm also asked to play characters who are kind of superficial people.

It's not good just to have life experience of film-making and that's all. It's hard to play a real person when you've been in jets and town cars for three years.

The frustrating part of being a movie actor is waiting in your trailer to do two takes of a scene you've prepared for two months.

When I shoot, I try to feel the body and the face and the weight of the actor, because the character until that moment is only in the pages of the script. And very often, I pull from the life of my actors. I'm always curious about what these characters and these actors are hiding about their lives.

When you do a play, or even a movie, you have weeks to finesse your character. You really understand why they do what they do. In TV, you get new material weekly about your character.

Thankfully, I have a background as an actor, and you learn how to live in that world of not knowing what's going to happen next.

I'm not looking to do 'Half Nelson' next, but to play anything that's a little more complex is really fun.

I always find filming stressful. I get very caught up thinking about my character - 'Am I doing it right? Should it be done this way?'

I never dreamed that shooting a film would be so hard. There was less regulation then of child actors' hours. Even the concept of acting confused me.

With 'Carrie,' I did, like, seven auditions. I'd never done a movie, so they wanted to make sure I wasn't going to ruin it. I don't blame them.

I've been a victim in every film I have done so far. It would be nice to play someone who doesn't get killed for once. Then again, I am getting really good at screaming and fake tears.

Over a spell of about three years, I played a series of roles that were, for me, all very different, but most of them came out within a six-month period. They all dealt with a kind of dark territory that in some cases had been mined before in movies.

What happens so often as an actor is that you retain the information about the scenes that you yourself shot and you obsess over certain scenes that you found the most challenging or interesting. The rest of the film kind of falls away in your memory or it fades a little bit.

I have never been one of those actors who say, 'Oh, my character wouldn't do this,' or 'My character never wears an orange shirt,' or any of the number of inane things I've heard on movie sets throughout my career.

As an actor, it's hard to approach any character with negatives.

Stevie Van Zandt could not walk on to a set and act. I don't know how actors do that! It's the scariest thing in the world.

We play many emotions in our careers, emotions that in real life we would perform just once. For example, my character has died in about 10 films, so you have to keep searching for different ways to do it!

That's all TV acting is. Like, let me find my mark and seem like I'm still acting. Sometimes they'll put sandbags there, but then it's even funnier because you're walking and you're, like, stepping into sandbags, so now you look like you're having a seizure.