Jay Duplass Quotes

I feel that one of the hardest things in acting is the way you need to switch your emotions.

I guess every actor has certain emotions they can access easier than others.

It's funny because, if you're not an actor, people always tend to say, 'How do you memorize all those lines? Is that really hard?' I'm always like, 'That's just a small part of it. I have to seek my craft and my emotions' - you know, all this gross, actor-y stuff.

Film acting is really the trick of doing moments. You rarely do a take that lasts more than 20 seconds. You really earn your spurs acting onstage. I needed to do that for myself. I would hate to say at the end of everything that I never did a stage play.

An actor matures with experiences, and the more the emotions he/she has been through, the greater the intensity of performances.

As an actor sometimes you can be a bit emotional and forceful, and that's not always the way to be.

The one thing for an actor that is complete death is if you're bored, because that boredom will show in your work.

What's beautiful about the actual acting class environment is that you can use it to push through everything: push your voice, push your inhibitions, push your fears, push your confidence, push your vulnerability, push your silences.

I think when you're acting, you usually don't have to know too much beyond how to pronounce the words you're saying.

I don't have an 'actor cry.'

As an actor, you think you know your craft, you know the conflicts in your character, but often you don't.

If you want to deliver as an actor, you need to know the language. If you don't know what you are mouthing, how will you perform? For me, it is important to know the language.

So many actors get caught up in their technique, and to be honest, I see it really getting in the way. I see them forcing things. I definitely do my best work when I'm free of that. But I think as an actor, I work really hard in preparing the roles.

Improv definitely made me a better auditioner, without a doubt. We did do an audition semester in grad school, and that was helpful for those times that you have a script and you have a few days to prepare it, to really work on sides. But the auditions I was doing in New York, if you got it the night before, you were very lucky.

Everyone brings their own particular skill set to the job, and acting training can work for a lot of actors, and it can't. I've seen a lot of really good actors go into acting schools and then come out a little bit corrupted.

What's interesting about the process of acting is how often you don't know what you're doing.

In my career, there have been three things that were challenging: playing gay; playing a Jewish woman; and playing Chekhov. The scariest part was playing Chekhov!

Like any other actor, I draw on life experience.

Any acting job that I ever got, I always treated it like I was a neophyte; I didn't know what I was doing, and I was going to work just as hard as I do on my stand-up.

I think sometimes soap acting gets an unfair label for being bad and over the top. The lessons I learned there were so valuable. Seeing yourself every day on television, you learned what worked and didn't work, what was bad acting and what wasn't. Memorizing scripts became second nature.

The best way to study to be an actor is to interact genuinely with the people around you and observe and listen.

On the whole, actors shout when they don't know what they're doing, trying to make an impact.

Most of my training at graduate school was geared towards drama, so I feel good about it, and I can do it, but it requires a lot more work from me. I feel like with drama... well, with all acting, really, you need to honor the truth of the situation.

I can't act, and so I have to live that particular character in my real life and then exhibit it on screen.

For a child actor, it's a matter of listening, reacting, and being able to put yourself in a new place without being scared.