Ajay Naidu Quotes

As an actor, our very palette is one of imagination. So it is a walk onto an empty space and then imagine the world beyond it is what we do.

I don't care what anybody says. Stick to the spirit of the play and you're doing it right. It's about embracing the spirit of the text instead of noodling some idea about things.

A lot of actors, whatever movie you're working on, you make up a back story just for your own, to work off, even if the audience doesn't have it revealed to them. I think it's important that the audience makes up their own mind.

When I first thought about wrestling, I thought about it as this foreign thing that I would have so much trouble accessing, and then, day one of researching it, I was like, 'Oh, I know what this is! This is theater. This is playing pretend.' It was really easy to connect to.

Artistic ambition is important. And it seems it would be a great time to do some theatre, like a new extreme.

Wrestling was like stand-up comedy for me.

With acting, I started very young, and I'd performed for a lot of children in boarding schools, late at night after the dormitory lights were out. I'd have a flashlight, and I'd be Count Dracula, or Shakespeare, or Yogi Bear, and leap from bunk to bunk. I loved the laughter; I liked the way it made people feel.

Characters don't belong to anyone, not even the person who plays them.

I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.

I love telling stories. I like the challenges presented to me on a daily basis. There's nothing resting about acting.

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

The whole thing about acting, the draw for me, is the opportunity to do things you don't get to do in real life.

Our job is to make manifest the story, to be it. In a sense, the theatre is such a big star itself, bigger than any Shakespearean actor I could hire, that we should take the opportunity to fill it with voice and verse and movement, not interpretation.

Acting is an imaginative leap, really, isn't it? And imaginations prosper in different circumstances.

Actors have an opportunity to use storytelling as a way to solve pain.

Theater is a space where you cross over from everyday life, because there are real people in that moment moving in front of you - you're being invited to believe in a story and cross that bridge.

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.

All the best performers bring to their role something more, something different than what the author put on paper. That's what makes theatre live. That's why it persists.

Musicals are, by nature, theatrical, meaning poetic, meaning having to move the audience's imagination and create a suspension of disbelief, by which I mean there's no fourth wall.

It's like fiction - the fact that somebody's telling you a story about people who didn't exist doesn't make the experience of the story any less real in your heart and mind. You go through heavy emotional responses to these stories, and wrestling is a similar thing - but it's happening in real space.

Doing animation is closer to pretending than anything else you get to do. It's much more like when you're a kid putting on a character.

I'm really quite bad at coming up with plot ideas. I like to create characters and just see what will happen to them when I let them loose!

I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.

It's my privilege to be able to play somebody not myself. I'm an actor who creates characters based in voice, movement, emotional quality, speech.

I love acting, especially if it's a fantasy of some kind, where it's not just realistic, it's not naturalism.