Gary Oldman Quotes

I tend to have a pattern of playing misunderstood characters.

I just love to be able to actually build a character.

As an actor, you're always playing different people, so you yourself are always kind of going through an identity crisis.

With film, it's all about the actor being able to feel the things that the character's feeling. It must do some strange things to your mind. Music I find much easier because you're being honest about where you are as a person.

I hope it's not all I'll ever do, but I know I've played enigmatic characters. For me, the good characters are people who get places, are devious, are cunning and tricky and hard to pin down. Obviously, if you play one and you do an okay job of it, that'll be on people's minds.

When I go from a role with heavy prosthetic makeup, which I've done quite a bit of as well, and then do a role where I'm not wearing any, I have to be conscious of toning everything down. Because when you're wearing prosthetic makeup, of course, you have to really move your face a lot more to convey things through the makeup.

Every time you play a bad girl or guy in a movie, you really come from a place of pain.

None of the actor methods ever discussed what it would be like to play a character on film for over a decade, and what it must be like to return to a character and imagine the time off-screen, which is interesting. There's something as an actor that I enjoy about evolving characters.

It'll be interesting to see if I ever have to play a typical, bland romantic interest. I'm quirky, and playing it kind of straight and bland doesn't interest me a whole lot.

You take what you know, and you put it through your own prism. If I play characters that break down or cry, it's Gary Oldman crying; it's not the character crying.

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

It's easier to play aggression and malevolence onscreen, often, than to hit softer notes.

I always work with the tempo of the energy of the character, whether he's fast or slow, or heavy or light.

I start with actors that I know personally or I know their work, and there are things about their work or their presence or their own personality that make a character, that exaggerates some qualities and suppresses other qualities. It's always a real collaboration for me.

I love the simplicity of Kevin Spacey's work. He really does a subtle interpretation of every character, and that's kind of my style of acting when it comes to dramatic roles.

I have often seen an actor laugh off the stage, but I don't remember ever having seen one weep.

That's what acting is about - for me, at least - tackling different personas and characters.

It was actually a relief for me to play an actor who was scared, who didn't know where everything was, who didn't know what buttons to push, and for me to be able to play all that.

When you're playing someone who is angry and sad all the time, you get a little down.

I have played a mentally challenged person, a quadriplegic - but blind, I realised, is the most difficult because eyes are the most involuntary muscles in our body. Like, our pupils and their dilations are involuntary.

Acting is very physical, even when it doesn't appear to be. It's about the arc of your body's language through a film.

Sometimes you can take those dramatic roles and maybe interject a little humor into them, and I think the reverse also works.

My character in 'Hollyoaks' went through absolutely everything! There's not one emotion where I'm going to go, 'I don't know how to play this.'

I think every character that I play has a certain sort of tone or an energy level to them.

I don't find the characters I've played funny. The characters are actually taking their situations very seriously.