Colman Domingo Quotes

That's the beauty of the acting world. You can play so many different characters who know and do so many things that you have no idea about as yourself. So I'm a big fan of workshops and classes and learning new things because you can always apply it. It's your little supply bag of creativity. Keep filling it up.

Something people say about acting is that acting is listening. But I think that writing is listening, too. That you really have to listen to what are they saying and what they're communicating to you. And so, a lot of it is just getting stuff down.

I pick up a lot of stuff from them, but I don't think there's any great trick to acting.

As an actor, the training I received was that I walk through the world as an observer of life and of people. My job is to actually be looking out all the time and watching people.

It's a funny thing. You sort of never figure it out with acting. You're always learning.

I learned one thing from De Niro: He taught me to listen. Nobody says anything strictly from the script. It's improvised. It was the best piece of advice I have ever gotten in my life. It has helped me through the past thirty years.

I think that one of the things you have to do to become a storyteller is spend a lot of time reading stories.

I don't watch anything of mine much. I haven't gone to drama school, or college, either. I just like to watch other actors in action. I learned so much from working with De Niro. I'd be in a scene with him where I was supposed to be acting, and I was just watching.

Your job as an actor is to piece together whatever you've learned in your training, or whatever you have experienced in your life, to piece together a person.

When you're an actor, you get your ideas from everywhere - even from someone on the street. We're total thieves!

I have never been to an acting school, and on the sets of 'Karwaan,' Irrfan was my acting school. By observing him, I learnt to improvise in the scenes along with focusing on the smallest of the details.

That's basically how I learned everything as an actor. I was just a kid, and I worked with these actors, and I'd ask them questions, and then something would work for me, and I'd try to move forward with it.

I was trained by Method acting teachers and we were taught that aside from whatever gift you may or may not have or the level of that gift, that you were obliged to know how to build a table. It's a craft. It's like being a ballerina or a violinist.

There's no game plan when it comes to thinking up new characters; inspiration can come from anything - from a wig I've seen to an expression I've heard someone use.

For any role, I pretty much always go to the script, first and foremost.

It's sort of the most important thing for acting, is to listen to the person you're dealing with.

I'm an actor, and I keep observing people and their reactions to figure out what they are thinking. There's only so much you can do on your own, so you have to keep learning. Art imitates life.

Part of the fun of acting is the research, finding out about other people.

And I taught acting for years, and without knowing it that was the real thing that started bending me toward directing.

I had an acting coach while I was doing the show and every week I could see my work improving. I really liked working on the show because I was learning new things every day.

Your primary tools, as an actor, are observation and imagination. You can pretty much get everything you need from that, and you do. It brings back that element of pretend.

I think all great actors - and I don't classify myself as one of them, incidentally - but I think all great actors listen well and I've learned that from a lot of the very good actors with whom I've worked - to really listen to what people say.

It's bad writing, however naturalistic it's written, that's where you have to do your best acting.

On paper, actors are the dumbest group of individuals essentially out there. Most of us have not gone to college. However, we never stop learning. Because of what we do, we're constantly researching, constantly learning.

My approach as an actor has always been the same, in that the greatest gift that you're ever going to have is your imagination because you're not going to have all life experiences. So you draw on things that are sort of close to it but you spend your time expanding on it or drawing something specific on whatever your situation is.