Jason Priestley Quotes

I want to continue to play characters that are not like me at all, and transform.

I love to act because I love trying on other people's skin.

I got into acting for the chance to be many different people and many different characters. I love hiding in a role and doing the research. If there is an opportunity to change my body, I will change my body. I'll slip in and disguise myself in a role. That is a really big treat for me.

Acting allows me to explore new worlds, to discover characters by delving into their lives, and ultimately to become someone else entirely.

The thing about being an actor is that you turn into other people. You have to hide yourself a bit in order to let that other person come out.

I think it's necessary to identify with anything - with any character you play, there's got to be something in common, so you can link up to that person, even if it's like one tiny thing. But it's equally fun to play somebody completely different, and trying to find what that thing is to make it.

I love acting and really taking on another person, another life.

With any role, you're extending yourself and acting out things that never happened to you.

Sometimes acting is really cool because it forces you to exercise certain muscles in your personality that you wouldn't normally be called upon in life.

The idea of transformation - playing something I'm not - is the bit I enjoy most about acting.

What I like about acting is that you can be a different person every day.

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.

I'm really not interested in showing me or playing me. My gift as an actor, given to me, is to be able to become other people.

Being an actor, imitating to the point of inhabiting the lives of others, may simply be a way of continuing to do what I learned to do as a boy - to travel, mentally and physically.

I've been acting my whole life. I have this huge imagination! I'm a dancer and my mom's a dance teacher, and I was always performing and entertaining people. I'd go to see live theatre or a movie, and I'd become the main character for a few days afterwards. I loved being somebody new for a temporary amount of time.

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.

I always think of the character as being me. But me wearing a 'coat', which may be a different way of speaking, moving or regarding other people. To me, acting is pretending, just like kids playing, only you pretend as if it were really, really real.

I wanted to imbue Ziggy with real flesh and blood and muscle, and it was imperative that I find Ziggy and be him.

As much as I know people love the method and what you can draw out of yourself, a lot of acting is very imaginative.

You have to be completely in the character, and that's so hard to do. That's why, when they call, 'Cut!,' you often feel yourself shift. Unless you're Daniel Day Lewis, who stays in character all the time, there's a switch that happens.

I examine other people's characteristics, so when I'm playing characters, I don't always have to make them me; I can transform into others.

I don't even draw on my life experiences when I'm acting. I just try and make it feel like I'm living through that person's skin.

What acting offered me was the chance to be many other people.

Let me put it this way. There is more to acting than just acting like somebody. I like to act in such a way that other people get some notion of what it's like to be somebody.

There's a great tradition of actors taking on parts of much less obvious sympathy.